• Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Lucas won’t even let you see the original Star Wars without his CGI additions. Lucas has lied to deflect from being criticized for his decisions.

    Harmy and the 4k77 project have illegally done what Lucas refuses to do.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I thought he manually edited the masters, so the original Star Wars without CGI additions no longer exists.

      I do love the Harmy Despecialized editions. Also check out the Anti-Cheese edits of the prequels.

      • seriousconsideration@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        The cheese is why the prequels are fun to watch though! We’ve all worked through our collective trauma about how trashy the prequels are, now we’re ready for good ol fashioned hate watching.

        • DeathbringerThoctar@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I’m not sure “we’ve all worked though” it, but I’m glad I’m not the only one with this perspective. I tried to explain “rage watching” the prequels to a non Star Wars fan not long ago and they looked at me like I had 3 heads.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        You can destroy the negatives with extra processing but you can’t destroy the prints. Lucas has original prints and if he didn’t he had the millions to acquire them. If fans did it, Lucas could have.

        • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          The rumor I heard decades ago (so a mountain-sized grain of salt) was that he didn’t want to admit he fucked up the originals when making the specialized editions, and just acted like he didn’t want to release remastered theatrical versions. He was also fiercely defensive of the specialized versions, saying that they were closer to his “vision” than the originals.

          Master negatives can create higher resolutions than what you get from the prints. The fan-made versions did a ton of upscaling from the best quality digital versions they could find.

          • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            The negative is 35mm like the print. There is technically a generational loss between negative and print but that’s far far below the resolution of a 480p DVD when Lucas claimed he couldn’t release the original. 35mm film print is higher resolution than 4k. The 4k77 version does not use upscaling.

            • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Lucas had just re-released the Specialized editions in the theaters, and they did very well. There’s no way they go through the effort of remastering the originals without releasing them to theaters.

            • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              There is the negative that was in the cameras when it was originally filmed. Prints are made from those original negatives of which there are many.

      • Gabu@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Also check out the Anti-Cheese edits of the prequels.

        Why would you want that? People nowadays have no appreciation for theatre…

    • ki77erb@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I’ve always loved the Harmy version but recently I watched 4K77 without noise reduction. My god… so much grain!

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I loooved the grain. It made me feel like I was a kid again watching it for the first time in the theatre.

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        In hindsight, all of media used to have this “meh, close enough” attitude about it: Vinyl LPs, audiotape, broadcast TV, film, iffy projectors at the local theater, AM radio, it all had limitations well within the range of human perception. Plus, everything the consumer got was a lossy copy of something else. Everything had noise, and everything cost some amount of fidelity no matter what you did. In light of this, “authenticity” is really a No True Scotsman argument, where we argue forever about intent, the optimal fidelity for the time, and what one would have experienced.

        Come to think of it, an easy approximation for a time machine is to buy some aviator frames, smear some Vasaline on the lenses, and stuff your ears with some cotton.

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          In light of this, “authenticity” is really a No True Scotsman argument,

          4k77 isn’t a no true Scotsman because it is a scan of a print that was played in theaters. If you digitally scanned a photo of the Mona Lisa, it would be a more authentic copy than a Photoshopped version that removed the brush strokes and replaced the blurred background with new high detailed images.

          smear some Vasaline on the lenses, and stuff your ears with some cotton.

          Had you watched movies in theaters before 2013? Film projectors were fine. The sound quality was fine. A movie filmed and projected in 35mm film was higher quality than the 1080p digital version of Phantom that was in theaters in 1999.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        It likely was. That and the ego of someone who wanted to be Steve Wozniak but was really a Steve Jobs.

        • ours@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Steve Jobs which coincidentally owned Pixar for a while after it spun off/kicked out of ILM which was owned by Lucas.

          It’s a weird Small World.

  • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    If the original trilogy is anything to go by, George Lucas desperately needs a good editor. I can’t imagine a longer cut will be anything but worse than what we got…

    • Railing5132@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The “special director’s anniversary editions” or whatever the hell they were called were the worst bullshit insult to those of us that grew up with the original trilogy. Fuck you, George Lucas.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      George Lucas desperately needs a good editor

      Literally his first wife. One reason why New Hope and Empire Strikes Back were so good. Once Lucas got divorced, his screenwriting fell off a cliff.

      Also, incidentally, Carrie Fisher became an acclaimed script doctor towards the end of her career. She was rewriting a bunch of her own dialog in Return of the Jedi. She fixed up the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s “Hook”. Sister Act, Lethal Weapon 3, Scream 3, Coyote Ugly, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith are also on her resume. She patched up the first Austin Powers movie and saved Mike Myers from himself.

      https://www.slashfilm.com/548436/carrie-fisher-script-doctor/

    • Gabu@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      And that’s where you’d be wrong. Quite a bit of the stuff that was cut from RotS is really good.

  • JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    George Lucas? Release an old cut of a movie he made that his fans want to see? Where have I heard that one before?

  • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    We need a wrath of vader movie.

    For it to work, he needs to keep his mystery. Like, I don’t want to see him collect his laundry. But basically just him going round the galaxy mercilessly hunting down and murdering the crap out of Jedis.

    • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      I’ve been saying for years that the market exists for an R-rated movie about Vader hunting Jedi, but Disney doesn’t have the balls for it.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    3 months ago

    At no point watching any of the prequels did I think “man, I wish this was longer”

  • Sc2Pirate@kbin.social
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    3 months ago

    At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within your kitchen?

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    George Lucas should screen this cut of the film at Sodankylä Film Festival in Finland.

    That way, he could be feted by the most dedicated of the film buffs. AND experience the Aurora Borealis. Localised entirely on the geographic region he is in.