I think it’s safe to say that we all understood that there would be some improvements made to the Star Wars trilogies when they finally got a Blu-ray release this year. Color correction, gaffes edited out, widescreen widened, sound clarified, you know, actual remastering, not the stuff that George Lucas seems to consider “remastering.” And, in fact, The Digital Bits has an extensive list of improvements that Lucasfilm has made to each trilogy for the Blu-ray release, gathered by taking an actual look at the disks that will be going into the set. Which just so happens to include one significant change to Episode I, and possibly other things.
Now, don’t get too excited, it’s not like George cut out Jar Jar. He put in a CGI Yoda.
Once again, George has apparently added a few new “surprises” into these films. I don’t know what they are and didn’t get to see any of them on Friday, but I was assured that there will be “new things to notice” when we watch the films. I think we can safely assume that one of them will be the new all-digital Yoda in Episode I. Way back when Episode III was released on DVD, ILM digital effects supervisor Pablo Helman confirmed to me that the puppet Yoda in Episode I was replaced with a digital version to better match his appearance in Episodes II and III. In fact, the Episode III DVD extras includes a clip of the Episode I digital Yoda. However, this Blu-ray set is really the first opportunity we’ll have to see it in full. What the other changes to these films may be, I have no idea, but I suspect there will be no lack of blog posts on this very subject within hours of the first discs becoming available to fans.
Bleeding Cool, on the other hand, was told almost two weeks ago that there had been no alterations of significance in the versions of the films etched onto the Blu-ray set, so there’s some confusion as to who’s got ahold of the right information.
But who could believe that George Lucas would take the opportunity of Star Wars being released on a new format to re-re-re-re-master even the content of his films? Pfft.
(Story via Topless Robot pic via Penny Arcade.)
