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Those were all redone for the 1997 Special Editions, heretofore known as 97SE. First, there were the original theatrical versions. (There have been so many versions over the years, it seems necessary to give a quick breakdown.
STAR WARS 4 MOVIE
Here are the major changes to the movies in the Special Editions, what research/assets they provided for the prequels (if made for the 1997 Special Edition release), and how they hurt the movie by being there today.
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So yes, the special editions were a means of researching and testing what I was going to try to do on. These are the challenges." I picked certain issues and certain things I wanted to develop, and I was able to put them in categories and say, "OK, we’re going to try these." I wanted to see how much they would cost and what the processes would be, because to do the new films I had to take those and times them by a hundred. So part of it was, "Here’s a small version of what we’re going to do. " I was fairly confident that we could pull off what I was envisioning in the new films, but I really felt that I needed to do some concrete experimentation and tests to make sure that I could pull off this vision that I had. George Lucas talks about this in the July 1999 issue of Cinefex: They built models and concepts that could be reused and expanded on in the prequels. ILM designers tested the “virtual studio” so shots could be approved remotely. If ILM could insert a dinosaur in a shot filmed 20 years before, it could add Jar Jar Binks to a shot filmed six months before. Most of the changes made to the movies didn’t just develop techniques for future use, they also provided guidance for how much (or how little) planning Lucas would have to do for the prequels.
STAR WARS 4 FULL
They're full of half-finished effects from the 1990s that were clearly practice for future movies. If you go out and buy the 4K UHD Blu-ray box set of the Skywalker Saga that’s being released this week, that collection won’t have those films either. They’re not the movies that changed the world more than 40 years ago.
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Watching the versions of the original trilogy that live on Disney+ isn’t the same as watching the original trilogy that hit theaters. Having those films all in one place, a place where the new films will also one day live, is a huge selling point for the streaming service-but it could be so much more massive. In those intervening years, the Mouse House also launched its own streaming service, Disney+, which now offers fans new 4K restorations of the original Star Wars trilogy and its prequels. Since then, Disney has released an additional five Star Wars films, raking in almost $6 billion worldwide at the box office. Nearly eight years ago, Disney gave George Lucas $4 billion for what is arguably the biggest film franchise in the world.