There are several films that people have been desperately wanting to come to Blu-ray and 4K UHD home video formats that have yet to make the jump.
Whilst James Cameron’s “The Abyss” and “True Lies” are amongst the most sought-after on this front, a more pie-in-the-sky prospect is that Lucasfilm will one day allow an HD release of the original theatrical cuts of George Lucas’ “Star Wars” trilogy.
Those cuts don’t contain any of the changes made for the 1997 special editions with the non-anamorphic widescreen 1993 LaserDisc release still containing essentially the best quality version of the original unaltered films that have been released.
This week “The Mandalorian” creator and longtime “Star Wars” fan Jon Favreau was asked in a Moovy TV interview about the potential for the first three “Star Wars” films to have their original theatrical cuts released in the present day. Favreau says he doubts that there would be enough demand:
“Do you think anybody but us, like, the people who grew up with it … would care? Because … what I figured out [is] that the younger people have a whole different perception of what Star Wars is.”
Favreau then goes on to explain how “Star Wars” means different things to different generations with millennials all about the prequel trilogy whilst Generation Z were largely inducted into the franchise via the animated series “The Clone Wars”. That mindset influenced his own work on “The Mandalorian” saying:
“We were trying to say, ‘Hey, let’s do something that’s good for us — the people who have been around, watching these movies since they were 10 years old, but also, let’s make it for people who have never seen Star Wars.”
In the past decade or so fans have come up with their own ‘Despecialized Edition’ recuts of the original “Star Wars” films, whilst various official disc and streaming releases have seen further tweaks since the 1997 special editions.
The original “Star Wars” trilogy, with all its various changes and alterations over the years, is available to watch at any time on the Disney+ service in 4K.
