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More buzz on saga box set

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Featuring new footage for the saga. This from the buzz at Sundance, snipped from USA TODAY:

Archiving seminar reveals ‘Star Wars’ tidbit?

An otherwise dry Sundance panel led to a potentially big revelation about the original Star Wars trilogy on Tuesday.

While discussing archiving and preserving film negatives, Phil Feiner, president of the company Pacific Title, was discussing work he did on the re-release of the Star Wars movies in the late 1990s. He believes Star Wars creator George Lucas has continued to tinker with the movies, adding as-yet-unseen new footage.

“There is new footage edited into them that no one’s seen yet,” Feiner said. “I don’t know what he’s going to do with it, but let me guess: six-disc boxed set.”

There has long been suspicion that Lucas might try to further integrate elements of his prequel trilogy with the original tale of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. If true, it is likely to stir debate among Star Wars fans around the globe. Many were unhappy he altered the original versions, while others were pleased to see cleaner special effects and new scenes.

Pacific Title has a stellar reputation in Hollywood, previously restoring such movies as Vertigo, The Wizard of Oz and Sleeping Beauty.

Feiner says he worked for three years cleaning up the Star Wars movies for release in 1998. “We were then contacted by Lucas to go into another 100 shots that we hadn’t done before. I basically said, ‘Why are we doing this? You released the picture.’ He said, ‘Well, we want to go in and clean up stuff we hadn’t done before.'”

That’s when he picked up on a bombshell: “I heard through another source, some friends of mine up at ILM (Lucas’ special-effects company), they were doing additional shots to get cut into a new version. I’ve never seen it, and I don’t know anybody outside of George and his small cadre that have seen it. I’m just making an assumption that they’re going to use this for some future release.”

There has long been suspicion that Lucas might try to further integrate elements of his prequel trilogy with the original tale of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. LucasFilm spokesman John Singh said late Tuesday: “There are always a wide range of rumors flying around about Star Wars. There have been a lot of tests done over the years to help ILM explore new technology, but we don’t have any plans for another Star Wars release.”

1 Response

  1. Cybergosh says:

    I wonder when we will hear anything about the 3D releases…i’m sure if this footage exists it will be included in those releases before the dvd saga set.  Also, the SE’s were in ‘97..not in ‘98 as this article claims.  Slurrpsh.