ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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The gentleman on the video presented some fascinating info abut the degradation of film negatives and the prints stuck from them.

I didn't realize there were shots in the original version of Star Wars that were so degraded they were removed from the film!

I first saw Star Wars during its initial release in New York City when my wife and I flew up there on my employee passes while I was baggage handler for Eastern.

We arranged for an old friend who lived in New York to take us to the best theater that was showing it — one that had stadium seating in a large auditorium, with stereo sound which included speakers in the front and rear.

Few theaters in Atlanta had stereo sound back in 1977. But the popularity of Star Wars caused several theaters to have new sound systems installed,

The first one to do this was a run-down theater which frequently showed soft core porno. But they shut down for several days and installed a Dolby sound system, then they placed a full-page ad in the Journal-Constitution which boasted about how Star Wars was now playing in stereo!

Their strategy was so successful they were able to restore the run-down theater and start showing newly released features after a long run of Star Wars!
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[orzel-w]

Some things that were changed by "upgrading" to CGI effects in the re-released editions of the series didn't really help IMHO.

One such was at the Mos Eisley spaceport as Luke and Ben were on their way to the cantina. As the camera follows the twosome walking along, some alien creature passes across the screen in the foreground. But this creature, whatever it was, is so tall that all we can see of it are its knees and a little of its legs above and below the knees. Genius! The audience is focused on the main characters, so the creature is essentially a throwaway. In the "upgraded" edition the aliens are dumped in our faces en masse, an overkill eliminating the delight of that original discovery.

Another instance was the scene in the desert where the storm troopers were searching for R2D2 and C3PO after their escape from the star destroyer. In the background, just beyond the top of a sand dune, sits a storm trooper atop some huge lizard-like beast. Not moving; just sitting there, serving backdrop duty, waiting to be noticed. In the "upgrade" we have to go up to the top of the dune and get full exposure of the beast-and-trooper ambling about. No subtlety wasted there!

How did Orson Welles put it? "The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."

I was disappointed that the YouTube videos linked earlier under All Changes Made to Star Wars: A New Hope had been taken down. They would likely have included the shots I'm speaking of.
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...or not...

WayneO
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[tmlindsey]

There was a single screen theater in St Louis that showed nothing but Star Wars for well over a year. They had a huge billboard over the building with the SW logo on a black background. The place was always packed with teens. Bored in the summer? Get a group (and a ride) and see Star Wars! Those were the days.

I hated the (not-so-) special editions when they came out. Too much dancing baloney. Lucas ruined his own films.
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"Have you never wondered what it would be like to walk between the ticks and tocks of Time?"

[Krel]

A group of us went to see "The Car", and before the movie was the first SW's trailer, the one with no music.

When the movie came out, we went to see it at a packed theater. AND I LOVED IT! At the time there was a digest magazine that I can't remember the name of. It reprinted old SF stories from the 30"s & 40's, along with the original illustrations. I wish I still had them, but I ran out of room and donated them, and my Analogs to a school library.

"Star Wars" reminded me of those stories and illustrations. To this day "STAR WARS" is my favorite Star Wars movie. The New Hope? Not so much.

I guy I used to know went to the World Con in Kansas the year before the movie came out. He told us about the props and models that were on display for this movie. He couldn't remember the name of.

He said there were unusual looking guns. Some weapons that look like flashlights. A gold robot that reminded him of the robot from "Metropolis", and a robot that looked like a trash can!

David.

[Gord Green]

[tmlindsey]

That sense of wonder when you watched a movie is gone now and has been since the CGI explosion. No one wonders "how'd they do that?" anymore because it (almost) always is done with CGI. Everything is such a spectacle now that it's just mind-numbing overload.

For better or worse, Star Wars brought SFX behind-the-scenes to the mainstream, but also ushered in the era of CGI overload.

The special editions were mostly done so Lucas could jam in more potential toys.

I would have been perfectly happy if Star Wars had been a one-off instead of turning into the sickening monster it is now.
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"Have you never wondered what it would be like to walk between the ticks and tocks of Time?"

[orzel-w]

[Bud Brewster]

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Gentlemen, at the risk of offending some of the most intelligent people on the planet (namely All Sci-Fi's members), allow me to offer an alternative viewpoint.

In 1977, when we wandered into our local theaters (or in my case, a colossal movie palace in New York), we were dazzled by what we saw. It was a remarkable new experience, perfect in every way, jam-packed with more incredible moments than we'd ever scene before.

It was a banguet of eye-candle, ear-candy, and idea-candy — the likes of which mesmerized audiences around the world. That's what made it a global phenomenon!

Unfortunately, by the time Return of the Jedi came out, several movie critics wrote reviews that said absurd things, like the review I remember in an Atlanta newspaper.

This is a movie that everybody wanted to see . . . but nobody wanted to make.

The insinuation was that Return of the Jedi was little more than a desperate attempt to recreate the phenomenon caused by Star Wars, long after the world-wide mania had peaked.

That was not true. of course. For me, Return of the Jedi jazzed up my Star Wars enthusiasm when I attended it's Atlanta premiere after standing in line at the renowned Phipps Plaza theater for two hours with a mob of excited fans who had Han Solo action figures frozen inside Tupperware containers since they first saw The Empire Strikes Back, years earlier.

And during the movie they were hooting and howling and clapping their hands 'till they blistered. I remember that experience well, because I snuck my Panasonic stereo tape player into the theater and preserved the whole wonderful experience — movie, audience, and all.


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Gentlemen, what I'm saying is that, in my opinion, much of the negative reactions to the special edition of the original Star Wars is not caused by a dislike of the new scenes which were added. It's caused by the fact that they were viewed thrugh the eyes of people who simply didn't want see variations of their fondly remember movie.

Consider this; watching the original version gives us a chance experience nostalgic memories from when we first saw it, two decades earlier, when we were dazzled by this "Space Fantasy" — as Lucas repeatedly called it in 1977.

To those folks, it's little like being an adult who walks into a detailed recreation of his family's living room at Christmas when he was twelve years old — but he finds presents under the tree like the ones kids get today, instead of the toys he remembers getting when he was young.

Even though these modern gifts from the 21st Century would have delighted him when he was twelve (back in the 50s, 60s, or 70s), the fact that this recreation of his family's living room was far from accurate, spoiling the experience.

Gentleman, I won't defend all the changes Lucas made, but I will defend his attempt to make 1977's Star Wars look less dated to younger audience, twenty years after it was first released.

For the record, I do think the new Tatooine scenes are a giant improvement, a science fiction fan's dream-come-true, with more aliens than you shake a light sabre at — and a land speeder that wasn't obviously just a wheeled prop with a crudely done blur beneath it to hide its tires.











But (also for the record), the scenes in the cantina look better in their original form — great "practical effects"aliens, and Han Solo shooting first, by God!

However, we all know it's sad fact of life that as people get older they become jaded and less enthusiast about the experiences they went gaw-gaw over in their youth.

Gentlemen, that's just as true for exciting new experiences we enjoyed when we were 20 . . . and then repeated later when we were 40.

As for me (the never-aging Bud Brewster — a 75-year old child-at-heart) I really enjoyed the special edition of Star Wars, which I went to see 1997 with my 14-year-old son Jason David Cook. He loved it too. It was the first Star Wars movie he saw in a theater, after becoming a huge fan of the original trilogy, despite the fact that he had watching it on . . . VHS tapes and our old 25" CRT television.

I stood in line with him in 1999 to see The Phantom Menace, his first new Star War experience in a theater.

My point is that Jason's life-long love for the Star Wars movies was largely generated by the same dreaded "special editions" which you gentlemen severely criticize, followed by the much rivaled second trilogy — the third one of which I think stinks like day-old diapers.

Even Jason didn't like that one . . .
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

[Gord Green]

Thomas Hardy was right..."You can't go home again."

We view the past with selective goggles. We don't remember what was, we remember how we thought it was.
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There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[Bud Brewster]

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"Thanks for the heart-to-heart talk, Andrew. Now, go see if you can 'get lucky' with that hot chick next door, Polly What's-her name."
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[tmlindsey]