Star Wars

[ciphergoth]

lovelybug has never seen Star Wars! And last weekend we were supposed to watch The Empire Strikes Back on TV, only I managed to screw it up. I should fix it. But I need your help. Original, as remastered from a Laserdisc, or special edition with whizzy digital special effects and Greedo shooting first?

[Poll #1306123]

Comments

[simont]

The limited-edition DVDs containing the original theatre versions: they're OK except that they're in letterbox rather than anamorphic widescreen. So on a 4:3 TV you wouldn't know the difference, but on a widescreen TV you'll see a tiny image in the middle of the large display. If your TV (like mine) has a zoom feature to correct precisely this problem, you can use that, but in Ep4 and Ep6 this will have the undesirable side effect of pushing Greedo's and Jabba's subtitles off the bottom of the screen.

I corrected this at one point by reading the original movies off the DVDs, mucking about with mencoder, and burning myself new DVDs in which the picture has been expanded into anamorphic widescreen. So one can watch those DVDs on a widescreen TV with the subtitles in the right place, or they work fine on a 4:3 TV too. Also, it turned out the result looks noticeably superior to using my TV's zoom function on the original DVDs, because mencoder's picture-scaling algorithm is much better than the real-time one running in my TV.

So, those are the DVDs I'd recommend to anyone wanting to watch Star Wars. I could in principle lend them, except that I expect the logistics would be horrendous.