well, *some* of us knew about this years ago...like almost 30 years ago...

[acroyear]

Appearantly, someone has (finally) managed to leak a work-print of the Luke & Biggs sequences cut from the first reel of Star Wars.  There's a lot of "oh my god"'ing around it on the blogosphere, but to those of us who were supreme geeks at the time, we knew about these scenes 'cause they were 1) in the novel, 2) in the storybooks, 3) in the comic books, and 4) all over the Topps Star Wars Cards (I still have mine).

not all the audio is available, and some of the prints are black-n-white, but its still interesting.

I wonder if they'll put it as an extra on the upcoming dvds now that its been leaked?

Comments

Re: The Bad News...

[rennfoole.livejournal.com]

Now, the real question comes as why didn't they have a copy of the master digitally when they scanned in the frames to make the 1997 special editions in the first place?

The way I understand it is that when Lucas is quoted as saying that the original films no longer exist, he means it. Supposedly, after completing work on the 1997 SE versions he set about destroying everything from the previous versions that he owned or could get his hands on. Prints, negatives, deleted footage...everything! So, what he has left is the 1993 widescreen (letterbox not anamorphic) Laser Disc transfers. These were also used for the simultaneous widescreen & pan-and-scan VHS releases. Without the elements to restore in his possession, he is just having the previous masters transferred to DVD for this release. Pity, too. Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits is fairly sure (in his writings) that there are elements out there that could be used for this purpose but apparently no one is going to do it.

He had a very interesting quote on the website today - "Hhmmmm. This all reminds us of a line from a little art flick we liked back in the day. Lesseeee... we think it went something like...

"Buy more. Buy more now. Buy more and be happy." - THX-1138

Yessss...very interesting!!!