Geek News: Star Wars Blu-Ray Release Announced
Star Wars fanatics from all over the globe descended on Orlando this past weekend for Star Wars Celebration V, and George Lucas was there to give them the announcement many have been waiting years for, albeit with a few important caveats. Lucasfilm has finally released plans to bring all six live-action Star Wars films to High-Def TVs in the BluRay format some time in 2011. However, the original trilogy of films will only be available in their “Special Edition” versions, which means if you want A New Hope in high definition, Greedo’s gonna shoot first and Han Solo will step on Jabba’s tail.
Lucas explained the decision to only release the newer versions to the New York Times, saying that to release the originals on Blu-Ray “kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good. You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally. It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.” He also noted that he had learned from his experience in the early 80s as an early adopter of VHS, saying that he wanted to wait until it became clear that Blu-Ray was a widely-popular format before putting out his films in it.
Also worth noticing about the press release is that it mentions a boxed set, but no individual releases. So there remains a very real and frightening possibility that if I want to get The Empire Strikes Back in Blu-Ray, I’m also going to be forced to pay for The Phantom Menace in Blu-Ray. If that’s the case, I’m probably not putting up the money for either.
By this time the tumultuous relationship between George Lucas and the fans of his classic films has been well documented. Few franchises have taken so much good will and run it so hard into the ground. For people about ten or fifteen years older than me, The Phantom Menace may always be the biggest cinematic disappointment of all time. Lucas is right that it would be a lot of work to bring the originals into the high-def world. And I’m sure that work will eventually be done, since there’s plenty of money to be made from it and we know that’s how Lucas makes many of his creative decisions.
Still, it’s easy to forget that there’s a generation of little kids out there who actually like the prequels. So maybe it’s time to look at things from that perspective. Phantom Menace wasn’t made for the people who were ten years old when the original came out in 1977. It was made for the kids who were ten years old in 1999. And most of them liked it and now watch The Clone Wars on a weekly basis. These days that’s the target audience for Star Wars.
If you’re not ten right now, there still may be a few goodies for you in the box set. We’ve been promised many new special features, as well as a never-before-seen deleted scene from The Return of the Jedi. It involves Luke putting together his new green light-saber in a cave and stashing it in R2D2, and has been the subject of much discussion in hardcore fan circles over the years. There is no date yet announced for the set, but it won’t be until next year. We’ll keep you posted.
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Kevin
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