“looks more like fancy dress than grand sci-fi epic.”
That just sounds like Star Wars.
Wow! Have these people never seen the originals?
The years have not been kind to the oft-romanticized original print of the sci-fi classic, which lacks all of George Lucas' post-release tweaks and polishes and looks "like a completely different film."
Literally, the first paragraph. They tweaked it after the original release. Very few people saw this original print. You haven’t seen this print.
Apart from different sounds mixes and adding the title "A New Hope" for it's re-release in 1980 (I think), there were no significant changes until the Special Editions in 1997.
Maybe I’m wrong, then. The article left the impression that this was a limited release but your explanation makes more sense. Mea culpa.
It's really hard to tell from the article just how different it is. You've got Kathy Kennedy saying "I’m not even sure there’s another one quite like it.... It’s that rare." But then you've got them talking like it's exactly what anyone who watched the film from 1977-1980 would have seen. Maybe it's just that the print quality was rare in light of George's occasional purges?
The headline also oversells how "bad" it was. This from the article (with adequate context) felt more on point:
“I felt like I was watching a completely different film,” wrote Robbie Collin, who called the print a “joyously craggy, grubby, stolidly carpentered spectacle” that “looks more like fancy dress than grand sci-fi epic.” “Every scene had the visceral sense of watching actual people photographed doing actual things with sets and props that had been physically sawn and glued into place. The slapstick between C-3PO and R2-D2 looked clunkier, and therefore funnier; the Death Star panels were less like supercomputers than wooden boards with lights stuck on, and so better attuned to the frequency of make-believe. It felt less like watching a blockbuster in the modern sense than the greatest game of dressing up in the desert anyone ever played.”
To the extent it's relevant, Mr. Collin is also juuust young enough (born 82 or 83) to have missed all three OT films in their original run. For the record, I saw ROTJ first-run as a little kid and it remains the one for which I am the most irrationally protective. This would be as opposed to The Last Jedi, which is the one for which I am the most defensibly and objectively protective. Pardon me while I retrieve my asbestos suit.
There's a lovely ten minute video on the BFI YouTube channel talking about this lovely Technicolour print of the film.
I'm pretty sure the only reason everyone is calling this rare is because it doesn't have the "episode 4" title which was added later.
This is the same film, for people of a certain age, grew up with on TV and VHS. I don't understand why it's being sold as a version barely anyone has seen.
If you want a version no one has seen, in the Lucasfilm archives is a copy of Star Wars where the travelling shots in the Falcon and land speeder were achieved with rear projection. Just like the TV shows of the 70s and 80s when characters were talking in cars.
Thanks. Yeah, I don’t know what all the hullabaloo about “a different movie” would be then. Maybe a pristine print hits a little different and reveals details that make it feel more like what it is, but I tend to agree this is just people with unrealistic expectations of the movie that basically started modern VFX.
Since you seem to be informed, I have a potential Mandela effect to discuss. I have a distinct recollection of seeing multiple pre-SE versions on TV and/or VHS, but the only difference I remember is that one of them included a few seconds of Threepio explaining the contents of the plans/maps Artoo was downloading in the initial guard room they take over. The dialogue sounded distinctly and sloppily ADR’d. Have you ever heard of anything like that?
I don't know about that instance in particular but that's not to say it didn't happen. As new sound mixes were created over the first few years, I think different sounds and lines were tinkered with.
The only one that I definitely know of is during Han and Chewie's escape from the Death Star.
You can hear a Trooper shouting "close the blast doors". Then once they're closed, a Trooper hurriedly shouts, "open the blast doors, open the blast doors!" I can't remember which, but one of those two lines was added at a later date, I'm sure.
Sure seems like these people haven't seen star wars yupp
btw thanks to the herculean effort by a whole load of amazing star wars fans - anyone can watch Hope, Empire and Return as fantastic 4K scans of the original 35mm reels - which is as close to what the article is describing as you can get for now (tho they're working on a 70mm 6K scan as we speak..) - downloading it is unsurprisingly a pain but nothing a few minutes of web search can't solve
on the actual content - I'm not really sure what people are so upset about? I've only seen 4K77 but honestly I was quite amazed at how good it looked for one of the earliest sci-fi films (still think space odyssey takes the cake but that's a very high bar) - sure some of the effects were a bit comical (the death star explosion in particular) but after having seen the tweaked and overly polished releases so many times - it was really refreshing to see the film looking gritty and raw? don't know exactly how to describe it but it just felt more grounded and believable (also the ingenuity of practical effects (like the mirror hovercraft) and the painstaking effort of manually rotoscoping the lightsabers frame by frame 🥹))
anyways I'd totally recommend anyone see them (if you have the ~100GB of disk space per film to spare...)
Probably not.
If there’s demand for the aesthetic of the original, Disney can always commission Michel Gondry to do a Star Wars title.
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