I saw the original as a 7 year old kid in 1977 - like all things back then - e.g. 1978 Doctor who - the special effects awed me but looking at it now - there is only cringe. When you get that shiny edition of the original movie you wont know what the fuss was all about...
I've seen some restorations of the OOT, and to be honest, I think the F/X hold up decently well. I mean, yeah, it's dated in the sense that it's an older style (e.g., no CGI to speak of, stop-motion animation, that sort of thing), but a lot of it still works well. The thing is, the folks fussin' aren't fussin' about getting some razzle-dazzle super-high-tech updated version. They
want the old-school F/X, just in a "clean" presentation at modern resolutions.
I really think the OOT needs to be preserved. Period.
I DO want to own 4k versions of the unaltered OT.
But I think they should also take the original in full resolution... after being restored... Actually make a new definitive "special edition".
Meaning color tweak, cleaned up land speeder, tie fighter etc. effects. Sound mastering etc etc. all with the best Disney has. (NO original SE footage)
You can hate my opinion. But I think it's a possible future for the OT. And I would personally love to see what they could do.
We can debate which version of the OOT we'd like to see (e.g., corrected "hover field" on the sandspeeder or not?), but the film actually has been preserved. If I remember rightly, it's in the Library of Congress in its original form. So, in that sense, it's "preserved." It's just not widely available commercially. But that's not the same as "not preserved." Aristotle's second volume of Poetics is "not preserved" as in "lost to the ages." The OOT just can't be bought at Wal-Mart.
This thread began as a repost of an old story the JD linked. This OOT stuff is so far in the weeds as far as Disney is concerned. Dan and I (mostly Dan) have outlined the most likely road map in regards to the license issue and that really doesn't touch the OOT. That is so far off Disneys radar right now and yet these threads keep popping up with the tedious consistency of an unloved season...
Right -- it's worth noting that the issue with the rights to the OT is a separate-but-intimately-related issue from the willingness to produce an archival version of the OOT. Disney needs the rights to the OT before it can do anything with the OOT, so it's a threshold matter, but once you cross that threshold -- around
2020, let's not forget (so, we can chill for the next, oh, 5 years) -- you still have to answer the question of whether it's worthwhile, and there's just a bunch of unknowns in that scenario.
What will the video standards of the day be even 5 years from now? There are a LOT of different factors that could affect the media marketplace in the next 5-10 years, such as tensions between streaming capacity across the US, issues like net neutrality (which, in spite of the FCC's recent ruling is probably not gonna just go away completely), the pace of development for display panels, the economy in general, and the desire of the average consumer to switch media formats yet again.
ALL of that could impact Disney's calculations of whether it's worth it to even do some kind of updating or remastering of the SEs and PT, let alone release the OOT. Could it happen? Yes. There is a higher-than-zero possibility that it will. But it's definitely lower than 100%, and the likelihood plummets if what we see is a stagnation in the progress of screen resolutions and video standards. We can speculate, but we really don't know and you can't just assume that there will absolutely be something like a 4K or 8K physical media used by the general public a la VHS/DVD/BR.
I may be wrong... but, I'm pretty sure you can't take someone else's work and give it away. I don't think the money part of it means anything in a case like this. Even if the person distributing it is altering it, the work still belongs to the owner and even giving it away without taking money for it is still illegal.
You can argue he's making changes to the work, but the simple truth is this isn't the case at all - and even then, I think Lucasfilm can still dictate who uses their work in many (if not most) instances. (ie, you might see a clip of Star Wars on the news, but you're not likely to see it in porn).
Legally speaking, you're absolutely right. Distribution is one of the exclusive rights of a copyright holder. Altering the work is relevant if you're trying to argue that what you're putting out actually isn't a copy of the old thing, but is something so changed as to be new, but that can be difficult to prove. That, however, is all the legal side of things.
Practically speaking,Disney and LucasFilm before it have -- so far -- turned a blind eye to this sort of thing, since it hasn't really cut into their existing profits in a meaningful way. It'd cost them more to hunt down and shut down people making and distributing fan edits than it costs them to ignore it. Especially since, from a practical perspective, the fan edits haven't cut into Disney's share. Disney (and Fox) is selling the SEs only. I wouldn't be surprised if much of the market for fan edits like Adywan's or Harmy's is made up of people who've already bought a legitimate version of the films anyway (in multiple media formats over the years, no less). So,
for the time being, it appears that nobody really cares enough to want to spend the money to stop this sort of thing. Now, it's a different story for
sold versions of this. That they won't countenance. But the freely-traded fan edits...they don't seem to be trying to hard to suppress, so they must just not think it's worth it. I'm sure they know it all exists. They just...don't really care.
So far.