pudge's Journal: George Lucas is a Total Wanker

I swung by Blockbuster today. The new "original theatrical releases" of Star Wars episodes four, five, and six were there. I planned on renting, but they have it only for sale. But I peeked at the package. Indeed, the original versions are not anamorphic. They are letterbox. They are, therefore, if you have a nice TV, complete crap.

Why?

[RevMike]

I'm honestly not up on my home theatre knowledge. Why is this bad? What should one look for?

Re:Why?

[ncc74656]

I'm honestly not up on my home theatre knowledge. Why is this bad?

The DVD-Video format calls for MPEG-2 video to be encoded at a resolution of 720x480 (assuming NTSC for the moment here) or 352x480 (rarely used), and allows the aspect ratio to be flagged as 4:3 or 16:9. There are two ways to encode 16:9 content: scale it horizontally to fill the entire frame, encode it with the 16:9 flag, and stretch it out on playback (anamorphic widescreen), or scale it on both axes, put black bars on top and bottom and encode it with the 4:3 flag (letterbox).

On an old-school 4:3 standard-definition TV, either option works. On any kind of HD monitor (especially a widescreen monitor), letterbox video is going to display at lower resolution than anamorphic video. Anamorphic video on a widescreen display will be scaled from 720x480 to fill the whole screen, while letterbox video will be scaled from an effective area of 720x360 (or less, if the source is even wider than 16:9).

Yeah.. don't know what happened to him..

[Miguelito]

I used to have respect for him. When he told the DGA to take a flying leap when they tried to make him change the credits on his movies (basically telling a director what to do with their film).. I thought that was cool.

But he seems to intent on squeezing every dime he can out of his franchise now. Constant delays on DVD releases, the whole "improved" versions of the original trilogy... just dumb.

Kinda like Disney under Eisner. I HATE how they market movies on DVD with that whole "Bettery buy it now for

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[pudge]

Finally, two years after the "last version" was made final, with the screaming from fans reaching a climax, he throws up his hands and says "Ok, ok, here they (OTv1) are" and he still can't get a break.

That's because it is a shitty product.

"It's letterboxed" cries Pudge. Well, of course it is! As he's said before, getting hold of quality prints of the original is almost impossible.

So don't release it, or release it for a much lower price.

Even assuming Lucas's motives were pure, right now if I were him, I'd

Re:

[Miguelito]

save for Han standing on Greedo's tail.

Heh.. I'm not even close to a rabid fan[*], and I knew immediately that was wrong. It was Jabba's tail.. which he could be forgiven for in the sense the original scenes were shot with a human. The Greedo bit was Han firing first.. in fact, I don't remember Greedo getting off a shot at all. That change I never understood.. it helped show up front that Han was really a criminal, who later had somewhat of a change of heart. Adding the new shot and digitally moving hi

laser disk rips

[John Harrison]

I've got the LD rips, which are ok. They look fine on a standard def TV and pretty crap on high def. According to Amazon.com the theatrical versions come in a two-disc set which feature the 2004 version in full screen and the theatrical version on a second disk in widescreen, but the language on the Amazon site is anything but clear so it is hard to know what you'd actually be getting. I figure that if I wait long enough there will be a high def version of the theatrical releases. For now I'm keeping my

Re:

[pudge]

There are two versions of these DVD releases: full screen enhanced version + letterbox theatrical version, and widescreen enhanced version + letterbox theatrical version.

I wanted a DVD rip of the LD version. We planned on doing it with a friend who has the LDs. But that was doing the best we could with what is available. If this is the best Lucas can do, he won't get my money.

Re:

[John Harrison]

I got them off BT. I can send burned copies to you if you would like.

Re:

[pudge]

But that would be illegal!

Besides, I'll just Netflix them and um maybe magically I'll have copies of them after that.

Re:

[John Harrison]

very good