she may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts
Given my age, it’s little surprise that Star Wars is beyond a movie (or trilogy of movies) to me, but something that’s an inextricable part of my existence. I grew up with it all around me, I expected it all around me, I needed it all around me.
And like so many others who grew up with Star Wars, I’m so intimately familiar with the original versions of the movie that I have a hard time watching the ever-changing Special Editions, the latest iteration of which can be seen in the officially released DVD boxed set. Sure, the films are good enough that I can look past the changes and still have a great time, and man is the transfer good on my HD set, but I would much rather see the Star Wars I remember rather than one which has the fingerprints of an increasingly out-of-touch director who can’t let something go all over it.
Enter the Fan Edits™.
For those of you who don’t know about this wonderful world, basically what’s happened is that there are tons of others out there who love Star Wars but maybe don’t love Lucas’s tinkering and tweaking. So, instead of bitching about it (well, maybe after bitching about it) they went off and found laserdiscs and other archive material and put together their own DVD versions of the original trilogy, the original original trilogy, the original one they originally remember watching originally.
Let’s be honest. Even the best enhanced DVD made off a laserdisc is going to look, well, like an enhanced DVD made off a laserdisc. But one of my favorites of the Fan Edits is ocpmovie’s “Classic Edition” of the original trilogy, where he used a hell of a lot of digital trickery to basically take the 2004 DVD release of the trilogy and then insert, paint, or wrangle in any material off other non-Special Edition source material wherever necessary, in essence brushing out the tamperings done by George and Co. in 1997 and 2004.
The effects are, by and large, fabulous. Because ocpmovie is relying primarily on sleight of hand, most of the time you can’t actually tell that you’re watching anything but the 2004 DVDs, only you never have to wince when Han is so amazingly stupid that he would allow someone sitting opposite him to fire at him before he shoots. At point blank range. Or when computer-generated puppets of stormtroopers clambering up these computer-generated puppets of their mounts (which look like they’ve been sprayed with shiny latex) look so fake and awkward that you have to turn away. Or that embarrassing “expanded” musical number in Return of the Jedi which induces uncontrollable vomiting because you know that the Ewoks weren’t enough, George just hadda go back and put more cutesy funny misery into the thing, so we could watch a reject from Fraggle Rock doing a blues routine like David Coverdale.
You don’t have to wince because all that shit has been flushed down the toilet, where it belongs.
Ocpmovie has gone a step farther with A New Hope and even done all these insanely obscure tweaks to things like the soundtrack, mixing back in the first, first bits from the Summer 1977 mix (like the original Aunt Beru), and other madness.
It’s not perfect, of course. Sometimes the poor source material stands out (though that never bothers me). He did miss one computer-generated 1997 edition shot in the final battle, but it’s quick. And a number of the altered scenes suffer from a stutter that can happen when, say, video is transcoded awkwardly from 25 fps PAL to 29.97 fps NTSC. It’s possible that he had to take the 23.97 fps rate of the 2004 DVD material and knock it up to 29.97 fps to mix in the other material, I don’t know. I haven’t heard others complain about this but it’s certainly noticeable on my system.
And Empire and Jedi, being as they are much less tampered with, are much finer jobs, more professional, more confident. There’s very little of the stuttering issue mentioned above.
It’s funny, I never bought the 2004 official boxset. I guess I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Maybe I was waiting for George to wake up and listen to his own comments about the preservation of films the way we remember them.
But if any of you out there don’t care for the tweaks and changes of recent years, and want the Star Wars trilogy as you remember them, stop by originaltrilogy.com, read up on the discussion, then torrent the Classic Editions or get them off alt.binaries.starwars.
I sure as hell am glad I did.