Did someone check to see if George Lucas died? I genuinely thought we’d never get an official release of the original version. I’m sure it won’t be the unaltered, true theatrical version à la the...
On February 19, 2027, we’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of Star Wars with a re-release of the 1977 original back for a limited time, in theaters everywhere.
Part of Lucasfilm’s yearlong 50th anniversary celebration, a newly restored version of the classic Star Wars (1977) theatrical release — later renamed Star Wars: A New Hope — will play in theaters for a limited time.
Did someone check to see if George Lucas died?
I genuinely thought we’d never get an official release of the original version.
I’m sure it won’t be the unaltered, true theatrical version à la the 4K77 restoration. I imagine they’ll fix all the minor things like the tons of visible matte lines and color issues.
If I was a Disney exec I’d probably figure that just paying for 4K77 is cheaper than reproducing all that hard work in-house, for an outcome that (as far as 99.9% of audiences would be able to...
If I was a Disney exec I’d probably figure that just paying for 4K77 is cheaper than reproducing all that hard work in-house, for an outcome that (as far as 99.9% of audiences would be able to tell) is identical.
If I was the creator of 4K77 I’d be happy to see my labor of love officially recognized and receive a nice payday for it as well. Though I’m sure there’s an egalitarian “it belongs to the people!” angle in this story too, so who knows how it would actually play out.
4K77 was sourced from an original 35mm release print, I believe. Disney would have access to one step beyond that, with the original master negative that all the 35mm prints would have been struck...
4K77 was sourced from an original 35mm release print, I believe. Disney would have access to one step beyond that, with the original master negative that all the 35mm prints would have been struck from. If I remember correctly, Lucasfilm has confirmed before that they still have those.
I’m sure there is also a legal grey area of who “owns” the 4K77 release since it wasn’t done by a single person. It would be cool though.
More importantly, I still think it won’t be the exact version that was released in 1977. They use the phrase “newly restored”, which makes me think they’ll do some cleanup. Like I said, the original release has tons of matte lines where you can see the squares around the tie fighters and X wings where the original individual effects shots combined into one frame. The outlines and imperfections on the land speeder also come to mind. ILM was on the bleeding edge and hadn’t perfected things quite yet. Modern audiences won’t like that. Or even understand why they are there. (“Optical effects what the hell are those?!”)
Interestingly, matte lines are something that drastically reduced in the two subsequent films, because they're essentially a distortion from the compositing process. ILM built a cutting edge...
Interestingly, matte lines are something that drastically reduced in the two subsequent films, because they're essentially a distortion from the compositing process. ILM built a cutting edge optical printer that was designed to minimize that distortion, while also enabling more layers to be composited simultaneously. (This was covered in the Light and Magic documentary series, but I don't have a convenient online reference.)
Pretty much all of Star Wars was built with optical chroma keying...which is hilariously simple when you think about it. You just shoot the models on a blue or green screen, and when compositing the negatives in the optical printer, you just add a blue or green filter, so that background ends up being transparent when rephotographed.
By 1989, with Raiders of the Lost Ark, they had a digital compositing pipeline. Which is identical in concept, but without the risk of distortion or degradation from the photography process, and the ability to have even more layers. The scanned negatives become a matrix of (R, G, B) triplet values, you iterate over them and replace anything blue with a placeholder transparent value. Then you have the values on the upper layer overwrite the ones on the lower one, and print it all back to film.
I mean you’re probably right but I used to love watching for clues like that to figure out how old effects were done. One really subtle but technically sophisticated effects shot that sticks out...
I mean you’re probably right but I used to love watching for clues like that to figure out how old effects were done. One really subtle but technically sophisticated effects shot that sticks out in my memory even after all these years is this one from Back to the Future: Part II. It was like a revelation when teenage me realized that innocuous-looking lamppost was actually the secret to the whole thing. Once that clicked I suddenly realized just how much preparation and attention to detail goes into making these otherwise uninteresting shots look natural.
Nowadays the answer is just (digital) “VFX,” it’s all VFX. There’s not a pixel in any modern movie that hasn’t been run through that pipeline. I miss seeing the edges of movie magic. It feels like digitally erasing them is like an erasure of history in some way, it’s the erasure of the hard work and incredible talent of a previous generation of craftspeople. Feels like a slap in the face, on some level.
I believe the original masters were used when making the Special Editions. They exposed all of the edits and CGI directly onto the film. I don't quite remember if there are versions in-between the...
I believe the original masters were used when making the Special Editions. They exposed all of the edits and CGI directly onto the film. I don't quite remember if there are versions in-between the master reels and the 35mm print that Lucas/Disney would be likely to have.
I believe a good chunk of the matte line issues you mention are visible with HDR because the poor quality of projectors back then would have effectively hidden them.
I'm old enough to have been there for the original release. It was back when parents felt safe letting even groups of preteen kids loose at the mall--we'd wait in line for an hour or something,...
I'm old enough to have been there for the original release. It was back when parents felt safe letting even groups of preteen kids loose at the mall--we'd wait in line for an hour or something, then sneak back in to see it twice. I saw it fourteen times that summer. We all had it memorized and play-acted it at home. At the time it seemed like the best thing ever (probably our parents thought so, too...)
Lucas has been pretty vehement in his dislike of the first release. It definitely was more low budget and from a modern view sometimes laughably hokey but it deserves to be preserved and available. At the time it was earth-shattering.
I understand this is a big deal for people who not just casual Star Wars fans like I am and who are happy with either version. Glad they are doing restoration work. I remember seeing Star Wars for...
I understand this is a big deal for people who not just casual Star Wars fans like I am and who are happy with either version. Glad they are doing restoration work. I remember seeing Star Wars for free in my campus theater during finals week and being impressed with how "old" the video quality looked. The entertainment industry spends so much money producing entertainment and not much on preserving what they made. There has been a big market for a while for "reruns", there is money to be made.
I’m not a huge Star Wars fan, but having the original version preserved in as high a quality as possible is important from a film preservation standpoint. That’s what drives a lot of the strong...
I’m not a huge Star Wars fan, but having the original version preserved in as high a quality as possible is important from a film preservation standpoint.
That’s what drives a lot of the strong reactions from people. That’s the original isn’t available in any official capacity.
I think it's also just "cool." I feel like I get more from seeing the original in theaters the way it was seen in 1977, certainly from an understanding what the theater-goer was experiencing. As...
I think it's also just "cool." I feel like I get more from seeing the original in theaters the way it was seen in 1977, certainly from an understanding what the theater-goer was experiencing.
As others have noted, it's also just surprising that we would ever get an official rerelease of the original!
I didn't watch Star Wars until I was about 14 in 2014, and I downloaded the despecialized editions of them. Idk who made them but they did a great job especially when you load up the Disney+ ones...
I didn't watch Star Wars until I was about 14 in 2014, and I downloaded the despecialized editions of them. Idk who made them but they did a great job especially when you load up the Disney+ ones and realize how much the digital schlock ruins the films.
I don't really care about Star Wars but I always found Lucas's philosophy to be strange. I understand the original version didn't look great, and that as the years went on and the prints became worn out, that it looked even worse. But to change them so drastically, like why place Hayden Christensen in Return of the Jedi instead of leaving the original actor in it. I'm surprised it took Disney 15 years to do this. There were rumors a few months ago from leaked work chats of people working on this, so it's been a years long process.
Did someone check to see if George Lucas died?
I genuinely thought we’d never get an official release of the original version.
I’m sure it won’t be the unaltered, true theatrical version à la the 4K77 restoration. I imagine they’ll fix all the minor things like the tons of visible matte lines and color issues.
If I was a Disney exec I’d probably figure that just paying for 4K77 is cheaper than reproducing all that hard work in-house, for an outcome that (as far as 99.9% of audiences would be able to tell) is identical.
If I was the creator of 4K77 I’d be happy to see my labor of love officially recognized and receive a nice payday for it as well. Though I’m sure there’s an egalitarian “it belongs to the people!” angle in this story too, so who knows how it would actually play out.
4K77 was sourced from an original 35mm release print, I believe. Disney would have access to one step beyond that, with the original master negative that all the 35mm prints would have been struck from. If I remember correctly, Lucasfilm has confirmed before that they still have those.
I’m sure there is also a legal grey area of who “owns” the 4K77 release since it wasn’t done by a single person. It would be cool though.
More importantly, I still think it won’t be the exact version that was released in 1977. They use the phrase “newly restored”, which makes me think they’ll do some cleanup. Like I said, the original release has tons of matte lines where you can see the squares around the tie fighters and X wings where the original individual effects shots combined into one frame. The outlines and imperfections on the land speeder also come to mind. ILM was on the bleeding edge and hadn’t perfected things quite yet. Modern audiences won’t like that. Or even understand why they are there. (“Optical effects what the hell are those?!”)
Interestingly, matte lines are something that drastically reduced in the two subsequent films, because they're essentially a distortion from the compositing process. ILM built a cutting edge optical printer that was designed to minimize that distortion, while also enabling more layers to be composited simultaneously. (This was covered in the Light and Magic documentary series, but I don't have a convenient online reference.)
Pretty much all of Star Wars was built with optical chroma keying...which is hilariously simple when you think about it. You just shoot the models on a blue or green screen, and when compositing the negatives in the optical printer, you just add a blue or green filter, so that background ends up being transparent when rephotographed.
By 1989, with Raiders of the Lost Ark, they had a digital compositing pipeline. Which is identical in concept, but without the risk of distortion or degradation from the photography process, and the ability to have even more layers. The scanned negatives become a matrix of (R, G, B) triplet values, you iterate over them and replace anything blue with a placeholder transparent value. Then you have the values on the upper layer overwrite the ones on the lower one, and print it all back to film.
I mean you’re probably right but I used to love watching for clues like that to figure out how old effects were done. One really subtle but technically sophisticated effects shot that sticks out in my memory even after all these years is this one from Back to the Future: Part II. It was like a revelation when teenage me realized that innocuous-looking lamppost was actually the secret to the whole thing. Once that clicked I suddenly realized just how much preparation and attention to detail goes into making these otherwise uninteresting shots look natural.
Nowadays the answer is just (digital) “VFX,” it’s all VFX. There’s not a pixel in any modern movie that hasn’t been run through that pipeline. I miss seeing the edges of movie magic. It feels like digitally erasing them is like an erasure of history in some way, it’s the erasure of the hard work and incredible talent of a previous generation of craftspeople. Feels like a slap in the face, on some level.
I believe the original masters were used when making the Special Editions. They exposed all of the edits and CGI directly onto the film. I don't quite remember if there are versions in-between the master reels and the 35mm print that Lucas/Disney would be likely to have.
I believe a good chunk of the matte line issues you mention are visible with HDR because the poor quality of projectors back then would have effectively hidden them.
I'm old enough to have been there for the original release. It was back when parents felt safe letting even groups of preteen kids loose at the mall--we'd wait in line for an hour or something, then sneak back in to see it twice. I saw it fourteen times that summer. We all had it memorized and play-acted it at home. At the time it seemed like the best thing ever (probably our parents thought so, too...)
Lucas has been pretty vehement in his dislike of the first release. It definitely was more low budget and from a modern view sometimes laughably hokey but it deserves to be preserved and available. At the time it was earth-shattering.
I understand this is a big deal for people who not just casual Star Wars fans like I am and who are happy with either version. Glad they are doing restoration work. I remember seeing Star Wars for free in my campus theater during finals week and being impressed with how "old" the video quality looked. The entertainment industry spends so much money producing entertainment and not much on preserving what they made. There has been a big market for a while for "reruns", there is money to be made.
I’m not a huge Star Wars fan, but having the original version preserved in as high a quality as possible is important from a film preservation standpoint.
That’s what drives a lot of the strong reactions from people. That’s the original isn’t available in any official capacity.
I think it's also just "cool." I feel like I get more from seeing the original in theaters the way it was seen in 1977, certainly from an understanding what the theater-goer was experiencing.
As others have noted, it's also just surprising that we would ever get an official rerelease of the original!
4K77 gave me goosebumps when I watched it at home earlier this year. Properly good those practical effects and models were.
I didn't watch Star Wars until I was about 14 in 2014, and I downloaded the despecialized editions of them. Idk who made them but they did a great job especially when you load up the Disney+ ones and realize how much the digital schlock ruins the films.
I don't really care about Star Wars but I always found Lucas's philosophy to be strange. I understand the original version didn't look great, and that as the years went on and the prints became worn out, that it looked even worse. But to change them so drastically, like why place Hayden Christensen in Return of the Jedi instead of leaving the original actor in it. I'm surprised it took Disney 15 years to do this. There were rumors a few months ago from leaked work chats of people working on this, so it's been a years long process.
don’t forget to get 4K77, 4K80, and 4K83 to archive for the end times :)