Star Wars: The Complete Saga (1977-2005)

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Kryptonic

Looks about as good as the DVD which is very cheap anyway used on amazon or ebay anyway.

[Show spoiler]Star Wars Original Trilogy Documentary - YouTube

Yeah, I just can't stand the extra compression on YouTube.

[Thomas Guycott]

Originally Posted by klauswhereareyou

I'm guessing that actually Lucas hired Jones for the voice, because correct me if I'm wrong, was he even credited when the original Star Wars came out in '77???

James Earl Jones wasn't credited as the voice of Darth Vader until Return of the Jedi. He declined credit on the first two because he felt his participation wasn't significant enough.

[JJ]

Boy, am I sold on that Machete order. I had a long discussion about it a few months ago with a couple folks, and reading that article today - that I didn't even know existed - backed up a couple points I had about the 4,5,2,3,6 viewing order.

My woman has never seen any of these, and is dying for me to introduce them to her, so I will do it in that order.

[Gamma_Winstead]

Holy crap, the bonus features disks for the actual films is so poorly done. I about fell asleep trying to watch the Phantom Menace features.

[blergedandlawyered]

Finally decided to give the bonus discs a spin....

Why oh WHY did they think it was a wise idea to set up the discs the way they did? Absolutely the worst set up I've ever seen. I appreciate the attempt at originality, but this is ridiculous.

[blonde_devil]

Originally Posted by Thomas Guycott

James Earl Jones wasn't credited as the voice of Darth Vader until Return of the Jedi. He declined credit on the first two because he felt his participation wasn't significant enough.

Plus they mention wanting to use Orson Welles but thought the voice would be too familiar. Last time I checked, Welles wasn't black so again which story are you supposed to believe.

I think Lucas had a very, very basic idea of what he wanted to do outside of the original film but I am talking 1 sheet with ideas for everything else - i.e. "explain how the emperor comes to power, have a war, introduce annoying characters named something crazy like Jar-Jar". Empire and Jedi may have had more because he had to cut things out of Star Wars but even there, I doubt he had the while thing figured out. Why hire someone to write a cheap sequel then that is nothing like the later films? I think it all makes for a good story but that is all it is.

[mrr1]

Originally Posted by blergedandlawyered

Why oh WHY did they think it was a wise idea to set up the discs the way they did? Absolutely the worst set up I've ever seen.

Yeah, when I frist watched them I thought my blu ray player was broken.

[Geoff D]

I know this is flogging a deceased member of the equine species, but I LOVED the themed menus on the DVDs. They had so much character and were no/more less awkward to navigate than other DVDs, unlike the soulless presentation and shitty layout of the Blu-rays.

[BillieCassin]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

So speculation passes as fact here?




Published speculation.

Published speculation with an almost ridiculous amount of documentation (so much that it actually detracts from the book it's so well documented), including many interview quotes from Lucas himself.

In fact, the documentation on the point made in the portion you quoted from me was directly taken from quotes from Lucas. I don't have the book on me at the moment to dredge it up for you - if you doubt it, you can take the time to look it up yourself - but Lucas outright stated that all he needed to do in the first film was get Anakin off Tatooine and to the Jedi Council. So everything else - the contrived part failure that forced them to land there, the Pod Race, Darth Maul after them, even Qui Gon himself (who wasn't originally intended to even exist), etc. - was all just him "playing around" in the Universe because he had a whole movie to fill up.

Like I said, it's a tough book to trudge through - extremely repetitive, but with more extensive documentation than I have ever seen in a book about a film, much less anything else. You may be surprised to learn you may well just not know everything you think you do.

I thought I knew a lot, but watching the prequels - specifically TPM - after reading the book - wow - it completely changed how I looked at them. They way they were constructed becomes ridiculously obvious, and it all actually makes a ton more sense why they turned out the way they did.

[JamesKurtovich]

Odds are we're getting a new release in '15 or '16 with the opening of Episode VII. That gives them a chance to include the original versions of the films in a true set. Here's hoping!

[Kryptonic]

All of this speculation is hilarious. Of course Lucas didn't have all six films planned out in great detail. How could he? The basic points were all there from the beginning though - the rise and fall of Anakin, Palpatine taking control of the senate, the rise of the Empire, and Luke redeeming his father. If he really wanted to, he could have boiled both trilogies down to a single film each, but then you would miss out on the details of both trilogies that make Star Wars so wonderful. Episode 4-6 are incredibly simplistic and tell a very straightforward story and could probably be much more easily boiled down into a single film. By comparison, Episodes 1-3 have much more to accomplish over the course of their runtime. I don't see a lot of padding to be honest. The Podrace is the only good example I can think of, but by the same token isn't the Speeder Bike chase in ROTJ the same - it's just a cool sequence. At least in Menace, it serves an important story function and managed to be an exhilarating sequence.

Reduction is an easy thing to do, but expanding a cinematic universe is much more complicated and in the end more rewarding.

[svenge]

Originally Posted by Kryptonic

By comparison, Episodes 1-3 have much more to accomplish over the course of their runtime. I don't see a lot of padding to be honest.

[Scarface32]

Originally Posted by JamesKurtovich

Odds are we're getting a new release in '15 or '16 with the opening of Episode VII. That gives them a chance to include the original versions of the films in a true set. Here's hoping!

Did they change to a more tentative date? I thought Disney was firm on wanting it done by Winter of 2015?

[JamesKurtovich]

Originally Posted by Scarface32

Did they change to a more tentative date? I thought Disney was firm on wanting it done by Winter of 2015?

I guess it's confirmed for December next year. I wasn't aware of that.

[iamsometal]

Originally Posted by JamesKurtovich

Odds are we're getting a new release in '15 or '16 with the opening of Episode VII. That gives them a chance to include the original versions of the films in a true set. Here's hoping!

I so wish that was true. Sadly 20th Century Fox still has the home video rights to the OT and PT. So that would mean Disney would need to work out some kind of cross promotion with Fox and provide them a remastered unaltered original trilogy. I still hope for that, but I'm also fully prepared to be continually disappointed.

[Kryptonic]

I'm sure Lucas put a clause in the deal that they could only release the updated versions of the films anyway.

[Gold Ranger]

Originally Posted by iamsometal

I so wish that was true. Sadly 20th Century Fox still has the home video rights to the OT and PT. So that would mean Disney would need to work out some kind of cross promotion with Fox and provide them a remastered unaltered original trilogy. I still hope for that, but I'm also fully prepared to be continually disappointed.

No they don't.
That was established earlier in this ginormous thread somewhere.

[HeavyHitter]

Originally Posted by Kryptonic

I'm sure Lucas put a clause in the deal that they could only release the updated versions of the films anyway.

Unfortunately, that could be true.

[GuruAskew]

Disney undoubtedly has some right of approval over what Fox does with the films on video. LucasFilm always did, and Disney now owns LucasFilm.

But a situation where Disney just plays hardball and refuses to approve anything Fox wants to do? That's an entertainment lawyer's wet dream and is a potential lawsuit that Disney would likely lose if it was apparent they were just manipulating their contract to prevent Fox from releasing something they rightfully own.

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by BillieCassin

In Episode II and III Anakin was just obnoxious and a man-child, he did very little to make you actually like him and care about him enough to make his transformation anything one would be emotionally invested in.

People always criticize the "brat" Anakin, but that's exactly the kind of personality who would become a Vader. You weren't supposed to like him. Showing a nice guy would have been like doing a movie about Hitler as a kid and showing him to be "nice boy". It was also about how parents view their kids as they go through puberty and become completely different people. I thought that Anakin's immaturity was exactly the point - that it opened him to the dark side of the Force. The more subtle point was the question of how much the Jedi were responsible for what Anakin eventually became by taking him away from his mother at such a young age and for essentially forcing him to join a highly restrictive religious order that prevented him from leading a normal life.

I'm fine with Anakin's obnoxiousness. In some ways, he behaved similarly to Tom Hulce's Mozart in Amadeus. I think that fits - they both were geniuses with tremendous egos (like some computer executives). The problem were the young actors' performances, which I believe was largely caused by poor direction. Natalie Portman is terrible in every scene with Hayden Christensen, yet we know from her other films that she can be a wonderful actress. And even Christensen was pretty good in "Shattered Glass", playing a similar character with an inflated sense of entitlement.

Everything the Jedi "religious order" did in the prequel trilogy turned out to be wrong - they were a complete failure. In retrospect, Yoda was a complete fool. I've often wondered whether Lucas intended that view of the Jedi.

IMO, the biggest problem with the PT was the absurdly convoluted plot (and I say that as someone who likes detailed plotting) as part of Lucas' desire for the movie to appeal to multiple audiences and by doing so, they appealed to almost none. So you have a whole film about the little boy Anakin and Jar Jar Binks (for kids) tied into a story about sophisticated political maneuvering and the trade federation (for adults) that just didn't work together. The PT would have been far stronger as two films with no more than 20 minutes spent on Anakin's boyhood. We didn't need the pod race, that was just there so they could make a video game out of it. It violated the first rule of scriptwriting: it didn't move the plot forward.