the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

despecialized versions are really great. It feels like you're watching star wars, an effect the bds cunningly avoid.

They're showing TESB on ITV1 right now.

We got pulled into this last night (and it was a pleasure), but some really really horribly placed breaks, more and more towards the end.

despecialized versions are what you are looking for, if you are looking for them. stuff in there a 90s kid like me only dimly remembered from extreme childhood: the puppety emperor-face in darth vader's holographic conferwnce room (it's lawrence kasdan's wife, or leigh brackett, or someone, i forget); the elusive budget wampa; jabba's throne room without that fucking fucking fucking song. download these and ignore the blu-rays; it is morally unjustifiable to pay for star wars in 2014.

the orange vaseline "force field" underneath the landspeeder (obscuring the wheels)

getting rid of the weird fusion number in favour of that fucking fucking fucking song may have been the worst aesthetic misstep among lucas' million aesthetic missteps

sounds poll-worthy

the part where the rudimentary 90s-cgi alien vamp shoves her stalked lips in the camera lens: surprised they didn't re-release this bullshit in 3D

http://www.vfxhq.com/1997/stills/sw/jedi/joh1.gif

http://www.vfxhq.com/1997/stills/sw/jedi/sy1.gif

TS

good christ i'd never seen that newer jabba song until now bc i avoided that version of the movie like the plague. wow...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiDRgDmXGi4

so glad i never saw this on the big screen, there is no way it would have ended without thrown popcorn or worse

lol, this is news to me too; this was actually in the rereleased version?
what horrors they have put upon sy snootles
for reference for you youngs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_Kj98hIb58

See I can dig the space clavinet and that bass synth fill at 0:38 in

Also, looking back, I think it's kinda neat and really weird that they made action figures for a crime boss' band:

http://theswca.com/images-toys/figuretoys/rebo-front.jpg

as a child, i bought that. i think my action figure collection on the star wars end was first luke, boba fett, darth vader (without his head, due to a venetian blinds cord hanging episode), these guys, greedo, squidface... and that mighta been it.

Googling around for info on the instrumentation of the original track, I found this:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/The-Surprisingly-Strange-Story-of-Lapti-Nek/topic/14770/

Reprinting two stories from Crawdaddy about the original song, which involves a Meco remix, a dude from Toto trying to issue the single as a 12", and multiple vocal tracks recorded by both an inhouse sound engineer and also a professional musician who Lucas may or may not have been hooking up with around the time of his divorce.

the Cantina music is obviously much better known but listening to it with fresh ears it's charmingly weird, I wonder if there was a Sun Ra fan on the team who decided that big band IN SPACE was a good idea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaPf-MRKITg

wow at this:

One thing led to another, and Arbogast was given the chore of creating "Lapti Nek" for Sy Snootles. She made up the "Huttese" lyrics by spilling pieces of Scrabble and Perquacky on her kitchen table in East Oakland, and picking them up at random.

"They wanted a sound that was a cross between Captain Crunch and Olive Oyl and a parrot stuck in an elephant's trunk. I figured I could handle that," Annie told me.

"Now the song's very big. They made a video of it for MTV," she said. What she's earned has enabled her to buy a new Toyota.

Arbogast's steam-engine singing voice is one thing. When she talks she's shy like a farm girl, blushing and self-conscious. At our meeting in a cold backroom at Berkeley Square she was wearing her rock and roll costume - a metal junkyard over a mini-dress that would raise eyebrows even in the Tenderloin.

"I'm not really a punker," she said, a little blush in her painted eyes. She tore the filter off a Winston and lit it like a sailor in the wind.

"I been with this band Smear for seven months now. I don't know what you call our music, exactly. Somebody said it was modern rock, or acid power pop. I don't really want to be a computer tech all my life. I think my future's in music.

The liner notes of the OT soundtrack box set go into that, about how they wanted a cosmic Benny Goodman song.

Also, found this, which had an insane amount of detail, including the original and translated lyrics:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lapti_Nek

http://let-the-wookie-win.com/images/20120906211506_annie%20arbogast.jpg

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jizz

it's such a shame that Bollux didn't produce jizz

Gender

Masculine programming[3]

i swear we've had this entire conversation before

I think I bring up Bollux every couple of months so probably yeah

naw, i meant the sy snootles / lapti nek / star wiki / jizz progression
the saddest of progressions

The ROTJ toy line was definitely the coolest of the original set of movie figures (not counting the Power of the Force toys). First film's were way too flimsy and cheap-feeling, which really hobbled Vader, Luke and Obi-Wan particularly. Empire had the badass Imperial Walkers but how many kids actually had those? But by Jedi the basic figures had gotten fuller and heavier, and there were all these great ones - Bib Fortuna, the Gamorrean troll guy, the Emperor and his red guard, Leia with bounty-hunter mask, so cool. Shame about all the Ewoks though.

I love how you would seriously need a whole display case just to handle all variants of Luke Skywalker: http://www.jedibusiness.com/star-wars-figures.aspx?type=name&typeName=Luke%20Skywalker

holy grail for nine year old me was a basement-sized super star destroyer, which tbqf i never actually saw, i just invented it in my head. i wanted it to come with a spaceship dock below it large enough to hold a star destroyer, which in itself would have a dock large enough to hold a senator's escape shuttle.

The story goes that when the Kenner toy designers were making the prototype figures, the only visual resource they had for the character Snaggletooth was a grainy, black-and-white photograph of the character's head. With so little to go on, the Kenner employees did their best and just made up the rest, making a figure of a blue suited, average human height creature from a character that actually wore red and was about 3 feet tall. The figure was quickly scrapped and never seen again, making it possibly the rarest Star Wars action figure on the market.

http://actionfigures.about.com/od/historyofactionfigures/tp/top_5_starwars.htm

gotta love the haphazardness of that early merchandising.

from the soundtrack album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqeGtCtDVqs

holy grail for nine year old me was a basement-sized super star destroyer, which tbqf i never actually saw, i just invented it in my head. i wanted it to come with a spaceship dock below it large enough to hold a star destroyer, which in itself would have a dock large enough to hold a senator's escape shuttle.

― LIKE If you are against racism (omar little), Sunday, August 17, 2014 4:50 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

closest cousin, the awesome GI JOE Defiant, with a space shuttle base that launches a shuttle that can fold out to become a sort of building-like playset, and which is host to...another shuttle:

http://www.planetdiecast.com/hwdphotos/originals/12130/1173/defiant.jpg

My buddy named his stoner rock band Blue Snaggletooth:

https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=105410702837250

Also, I always thought the USS Flagg was the end-all/be-all of 80s action figure toys, as that thing was like 7.5 feet long

http://www.timidfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/gijoe-uss-flagg-aircraft-carrier.jpg

Fun/dumb fact: the set was based on the aircraft carrier used in _The Final Countdown_

Also, on a related note, I scored an original FX-7 in great condition for $3 from a local consignment store:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/s640x640/1621788_10152257103346596_8544268108627425152_n.jpg?oh=bf1dc3da1f95d0766e90a8e228b54ac0&oe=545FE731&__gda__=1417510900_7a83575bdfaca484daa6cc30f48f2fac

They have a USS Flagg at this place near my house: http://bigfunbigfun.com/

Ha; my ex-gf strongly recommended I visit there last time I got sent to Cleveland. Didn't get the chance to make it down, tho.

I had one of the cardboard UK death stars as a kid! It was so rad - it had a tunnel you could throw your figures down, into the trash compactor...

Switching gears a little but, I had one of these things. Cool because it had nothing to do with the movie.

http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/5361/8439313_2.jpg?v=8CB24FA57116B70

little bit. Anyway, there were a few other similar one-man ships called mini-rigs.

should just re-name this thread "arrested development"

Shakey turned into Dr. Morbius so gradually, we hardly even noticed.

would he prefer it if we just sat around wishing Lucas were dead?

I wonder if previous generations got all "man when I was a kid I had this one stick I used to play with, it was the coolest thing" as they aged

George Washington wouldn't shut up about his favorite ax from childhood

Some people reminisced about the stick, some people prefered to walk around with the stick firmly planted up their wizened asses.

oh HELLO

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=41928

xxp yeah no baby boomers definitely were never a target market for having their own childhoods sold back to them, that is a thing that never happened.

As io9.com pointed out the other day, all this talk of unaltered Original Trilogy Blu-Rays is just talk, since Fox owns the worldwide distribution rights to Star Wars in perpetuity, and to the other five movies through 2020.

Yeah, but as also pointed out elsewhere, Fox could stand to strike a deal that would make them bucketloads of money. I think it'll still happen sooner rather than later, there is way too much money to be made for it not to.

yeah with Lucas' petty ego out of the way the $$$ will win out

i really hope osmeone writes a good article or oral history or wahtever about g-luc's decision to sell off star wars