Han shot first

Despite George Lucas’ attempts to rewrite history, Han did in fact shoot first. I now have the DVD to prove it!

That’s right. I’m now the proud owner of the limited edition original Star Wars trilogy. Each movie comes with both the original theatrical version and the revisionist, butchered version.

So what’s the first thing I thought to do? Compare them of course.

The original theatrical version is supposedly taken from the Laserdisc edition. It’s encoded in 4:3 letterbox format which means around half the vertical resolution is wasted. There hasn’t been any attempts to clean up the presentation so you can see things like film grain and occasional visual jitters. Nevertheless, both my computer and my widescreen TV are able to present the disc zoomed appropriately. One of my biggest concerns when I heard about this edition was getting a 4:3 cut but that’s not what I’ve got so I’m happy. Of note is that the few subtitles that are shown (eg. when Greedo talk) are presented outside the movie area so if you zoom the presentation for a wide screen, you can miss out on them. I didn’t try turning on subtitles but I’d guess that they also display outside the movie area.

So what’s different in the revisionist edition? To start with, they’ve cleaned up the source material. The film grain is almost completely gone and the occasional jitters have been removed. The encoding is 16:9 letterbox format so there’s move vertical resolution. Combined with the cleaning it makes for a much better picture. However, there was one very important downside to the presentation. The contrast has been increased, making the video appear darker in most places and the colour has been boosted quite significantly. The thing that really highlights this is when you see the droids walking away from the escape pod. The pod’s shadow was showing up as blue! I’m not sure why they’ve screwed with the contrast and colour but I’m guessing it has to do with how modern LCD and plasma TVs display stuff. The Greedo subtitles were actually shown inside the movie area for this edition. While it obscures the picture a bit, it does mean that you can crop the sides of the movie to fit your screen without missing out on the subtitles. I’d guess that the regular subtitles do the same things but I haven’t tested that.

Of course by far the biggest problem with the revisionist edition is what was replaced and what was added in. The scenes in Mos Eisley are the worst. I think the point was to turn the city from a bare desert town into something that would more closely resemble the depiction in The Phantom Menace. The rally cry from the fans of the original is “han shot first” and well, I really don’t know what George was thinking when he changed that part of the story.

Something odd I noticed was from the scene where they’re leaving the deathstar in the millennium falcon. There’s a particular shot of a tie fighter flying along. If you look really closely and turn up the brightness a bit, you’ll see that the fighter has been inserted, along with a lighter square of star field, onto the real background. I didn’t notice this watching the original version but because I had to play with the contrast and colour settings for the revisionist edition, that lighter square became quite visible. It’s still there in the original edition and if you crank up the brightness a bit you’ll see it. What’s really puzzling to me, and I guess what gets me the most about the revisionist edition, is that square is something that could have been trivially fixed.

I think the thing that has always annoyed me the most about the revisionist edition is that it’s not consistent. Some things have been left in, even though they could easily have been fixed while other things were replaced for no particularly good reason. Everything from the Jawa transport to lots of space ships got replaced with CG abominations. This would not have been cheap to add and did absolutely nothing for the movie, other than showing just how crap CG looks compared to the model tech that the rest of the movie uses.

Ironically, if the original versions hadn’t been bundled with the revisionist versions, I would never have done this kind of comparison.