Pith and Vinegar

My latest obsession which I’ll forget about in six months is Star Wars: A New Hope – Revisited by faneditor adywan.

Adywan’s goal here was to complete the half-assed work that Lucasfilm did on the Special Edition, while culling the worst of George Lucas’ excesses. The idea was to better ensure that each movie flows better with the rest. Not everyone’s happy with his changes, of course, but as with most fanedits, this is the one that adywan wanted, so it’s the one he made.

So we’ve got continuity fixes: troopers that fall over now get shot before they do. Guns that fire lasers now have corresponding muzzle flashes, and guns with muzzle flashes now have lasers. Luke’s light saber is now a consistent width, and blue, instead of cycling between white, pale green, and blue. Vader’s light saber is red instead of pink. R2D2′s lights cycle between red and blue, like they do in the rest of the saga. Vader’s chest-plate lights blink. The furry hand that Obi-Wan chops off in the Cantina scene is now the hand of one of the characters actually present.

We’ve got the trimming of Lucasisms: no more superfluous Mos Eisley droids acting funny for the camera. No more rontos running through the middle of every take. The scene with Jabba which Lucas added back in has been taken back out. Solo stepping on Jabba’s tail makes Jabba look non-threatening, and all of the pertinent information from that scene is already covered with Greedo in the Cantina. Oh yeah, and HAN SHOOTS FIRST.

Then he added a bunch more stuff. The Death Star II in Return of the Jedi was orbiting the forest moon of Endor. Why is the Death Star I floating in empty space? Well, now it’s got its own planet up until the time they announce the station is fully-operational.

New graphics were added everywhere, including some places which really bugged me even in the SE. The countdown timer on the Death Star readout (“20 minutes until we’re in range”) now correctly matches the dialogue. I’m sure dot-cloud technology was top-of-the-line in 1977, but with the rest of the saga it’s unbelievably archaic. It’s also highly inaccurate – the Death Star laser array is about twice as big as it’s supposed to be, and it’s on the equator rather than squarely in the northern hemisphere. Now it looks much more like the holograms in ROTJ and Attack of the Clones.

There were a few pleasant surprises too, like this hologram display:

The entire final battle’s been altered and re-edited. Stars can now be seen behind X-wing pilots’ heads. Yavin is visible through a lot of the angles. More background combat. A line’s taken from the radio play so that Luke actually reacts to the death of his best friend.

This thing took two years for him to finish, and it’s worth it. This is now my definitive version of Star Wars.

He’s nearing completion on Empire Strikes Back Revisited. Only a few teaser shots and a trailer have been released, but already the difference is striking. Primarily, he fixed the horrible colour coding of the DVDs (the whole movie was tinted blue to varying degrees).

(GOUT below is “George’s Original Unaltered Trilogy”)

Colour correction, new background

Colour correction

New Emperor taken from a ROTJ still, lips taken from DVD, dialogue returned to as close as possible to the GOUT version

It’ll be out in early 2011. I’m really looking forward to it. He’s been buying up ship models, making location models, and he’s got a bunch of people with costumes to act as extras for insertion. Then comes ROTJ, where apparently the ending will be quite different. He’s crazy, but I love it.

Finally he’ll be ripping apart the prequel trilogy, which will be very different. The major change will be in Ep III. You know how “Vader is Luke’s father” is the huge spoiler for ESB? If you watch the series in order, that’s not really a spoiler at all. It’s painfully obvious in Ep III. That will be changing.

Anyhow, ramble ramble ramble. It’s very good, and you should check it out.