ok so i watched return of the jedi last night and it was fantastic. i thought the PQ on jedi was the best of the OT with a new hope a very close 2nd. maybe the visuals in the movie were just a little better. the emperor looked down right wicked.

i havent seen jedi for a very long time. so long in fact that when the song and dance sequence started in jabbas palace i burst out laughing. i couldnt believe how terrible that was. im not one to get offended by the changes lucas makes to the star wars films but that was an offense to my eye balls. it did kind of fall into the so bad it was good category for me though.

i did get the prequel trilogy yesterday and i watched about 20 minutes of it before i fell asleep and i have to say the PQ was kind of a let down compared to the OT.

everyone says revenge of the sith is supposed to be fantastic so i will work my way there but it would have been nice to have a decent copy of episode one considering its my favorite of the PT.

The prequel trilogy was a bit of a let down in terms of PQ with The Phantom Menace. It could and should have looked better, over DNR, I believe. Attack of the Clones fares better, and as others have said, ROTS is absolutely fantastic.

I would be all over that Carbonite Refrigerator

You find me a human being who wouldn't want a carbonite fridge and an R2D2 wet bar in their man cave.

PETA would throw a fit over those Bantha slippers. :rotfl:

Actually the sun shield is a product you can have, I have seen it just liek it's show, the gang in the falcon

AND, although there are no popsicle molds for Han in carbonite, there ARE ice cube molds!

Just got to get used to the fast-forward button when watching the special editions.

Did you notice the horrible matte boxes around the TIE fighters, when Han & Luke are fighting them after the Death Star escape? They're glaringly obvious, at least for me.

Yeah, but overall, its still "impressive...most impressive". :)

Well, the bonus discs are exclusive to the 9-disc set, so you'll miss them by purchasing each trilogy separately.

They've always been overly noticeable to me on TV, DVD, VHS, and BD. They are in all of A New Hope, the asteroid chase in V, and the entire end battle of VI. I always look at it as deflector shields moving with the ship in question.:p

I've noticed a select few shots in both "Empire" and Jedi", but that sequence in "A New Hope" is inexcusable. There's even one around the second Death Star in a few places, too.

They're called garbage mattes and they're there because those shots were not digitally recomposited. They show up due to the higher contrast of video, they're usually invisible when projected. A relic of an earlier time of visual effects. To get rid of them entirely they'd have to locate the original footage and recomposite it digitally or replace the shot with CG versions. To hide them they'd have to darken the shots quite a bit, and people were already complaining about the black crush on the DVDs.

I haven't been in this thread since the blu's were released, so I don't know if it's normal. But...I was watching ROTS awhile back and noticed some grain in shots. The weird thing about it, was that it was localized - like a building in the background. When it does surface, it is always on the inside of an object on screen. Everything else in the entire frame was absolutely flawless and crystal clear. Is this normal? I don't know if it's always been that way. I really hadn't noticed until this last viewing.

i didnt notice the matte boxes. ill have to go back and take another look.

yeah i know i missed out on the bonus discs when i bought the trilogys separately. bonus content usally isnt that important to me. of all the extras there might have been two or three things that would really interest me. everyone raved about the extras on the alien anthology but they got boring for me after a while. i bought the OT for $40 new and found a decent used copy of the PT for $25. i thought $65 for the movies was good considering the best price i found for the whole saga was $80 used.

one thing that i havent checked yet was if the seprate trilogys have the archive commentaries or not? if its not on the copys i have then it will be the only bonus that i will feel like i lost out on that matters and even that i can live without

Well, at least they used the right term for them, because they're not suitable for much else by today's standards. I was just really surprised by them, after all the news from Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood about rebuilding "A New Hope" from scratch. The rest of the movie is great, but those mattes are a sore sight. :(

With all the other things that were done, I thought Lucas would've addressed those, especially in the first film. They don't show up near as often in "Empire" or "Jedi". Funny thing is, I don't recall seeing them on the DVDs.

They're on the DVDs and the VHS tapes. They're more noticeable though on the theatrical cuts (Laserdisc transfers).

Why would Lucas spend the time or money to clean up matte lines or get the lightsabers the correct colors when he can add a stupid CGI dance routine or Jawas farting?

Because it's George. :D

I don't remember that being in any of the films; just the one gag with Jar Jar in Episode I.

Funnily enough, I didn't notice any problems with garbage mattes in Star Wars, but Jedi's end battle is full of 'em. IIRC the rumour is that the 1997 restoration ran out of money and they never got around to recompositing the bulk of those shots. If Lucas ever gets as far as converting Jedi into 3D, he'll surely HAVE to do something about them, instead of doing moronic things like making the Ewoks blink or changing Artoo's bunker freak-out.

The 3D versions of the OT would be the perfect time to start the proper restoration of those movies. The existing 1080p masters with their nasty Lowry artefacts just won't cut it, so why not take the opportunity to rebuild the movie from scratch to give the highest possible quality, creating new masters of the key versions and revisions, then hand it over to the 3D process?

Won't happen though. :(