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Star Wars

Watch the Star Wars Trilogy movies in their original form

As a child of the 1970s, the original Star Wars trilogy1Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi was—and remains—one of my favorite movie series of all time.

Unfortunately, George Lucas has made it virtually impossible to watch the original unedited versions of the films.2Unedited versions exist on LaserDisc and DVD, but they are low quality transfers. From 1997 onwards, only modified versions have been available—with newly-added CGI effects, deleted scenes that add nothing to the story, changes to sound effects, and even replacement of characters, such as some of those in the cantina in the original Star Wars. He called these releases Special Editions…but to fans of the originals, they weren't so special.

Enter one Petr Harmy and an army of volunteers. Using multiple sources, Harmy and the others pieced together all three original films, doing away with the edits, correcting colors, upscaling imagery, and replacing sound effects. This 20-minute video explains the process, and contains a number of before-and-after comparison shots.

The end result is something called Harmy’s Star Wars Trilogy Despecialized3Because these versions remove the Special Editions' changes—get it? Editions: Amazingly high quality versions of the theatrical releases of all three original movies. As a very brief example, here's one still (click for a much larger version) from Star Wars:

The movies are not at Blu-Ray (1920x1080) resolution, but they're very well done 720p (1280x720) versions which look amazingly nice even when scaled to fill the screen of my 27" iMac. And most importantly, all the cruft added on through the years is gone. No bogus CGI. No replaced characters. No weird sound effects. Oh, and (spoiler alert!) Han shoots first.

So how can you get these Despecialized versions for yourself? That's a bit tricky…

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A neat detail in Star Wars: The Last Jedi [Coded Spoiler]

We saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi for a second time a while back, mainly because a large group of friends was going and we had most of the theater to ourselves, so it was sort of like a private screening. During my re-watching, I spotted a number of things that I'd missed the first time, but one in particular stood out…

Note: The remainder of this post is hidden behind a spoiler-hiding plug-in, as the subject being discussed is a major—really major—plot spoiler. This should keep it disguised both here on the site, and in the RSS feed. However, commenters may not disguise their comments, which means you may not want to scroll down at all if you haven't seen the movie yet.

If you don't want a major plot element revealed, don't expand the hidden spoiler!

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Force Awakens Day, based on the greatest movie speech ever given*

* No, not really. Not even close. But the President's speech in Independence Day is perhaps corniest, most over-the-top movie speech ever given. And as such, it's a good basis for this bit of Star Wars: The Force Awakens corny, over-the-top speechmaking…

Good morning. In less than four hours, people from this household will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest opening weekend for a movie in the history of cinema. You, Star Wars Fans, will be doing it.

Star Wars Fans—those words should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our dislike of Episodes One through Three. We will be united in our love of the one Original Trilogy.

Perhaps it's fate that today is a Saturday, and you will once again be having an amazing weekend, not being subject to the tyranny of one man's horribly wrong vision of the prequels. You will have freedom from the annihilation of the Original Trilogy through misguided editing.

We're watching for our right to be entertained, to believe in The Force.

And should we all enjoy the movie, this Saturday will no longer be known as a simple weekend day, but as the day when the world declared in one voice:

"We will not be forced to watch the prequels! We will not endure any more Jar Jar Binks! We're going to live on; we're going to survive the prequel era!"

Today, we celebrate our Force Awakens day!

And with that, I'm off to see a little movie this morning.