There has already been a great disturbance in the Force, with word coming earlier this year thatthe six Star Wars movies would be hitting shelves in the Blu-Ray format sometime next year. Now George Lucas has revealed some details about what we can expect.
Speaking during an interview with The Daily Show’s John Stewart at the convention event** Star Wars** Celebration V, Lucas announced that the new releases would aim to include something fresh, despite the movies having been released on a bazillion formats with a variety of extras in the past.
"There'll be different kinds of additional material," he said. "I think you've seen enough behind the scenes material for a lifetime. There's some really good material that will be included in there, including more deleted scenes that you haven't seen yet."
Surprise guest Mark Hamill then introduced one such scene, a deleted nugget from the start of Return of the Jedi that would have served as Luke’s original introduction. Oh, and Carrie Fisher turned up to bring the funny, quipping that, “There was a huge me-and-Jabba porn scene. That's what got me into drugs.”
But there’s bad news if you were hoping the new discs would find room for the original, completely unaltered versions of the first trilogy: looks like it’s digital tinkering all the way! Sorry: according to Lucas, it would simply cost too much to get the original prints into shape for the new format. “You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” he told the New York Times. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.”
According to the press release, we can expect the discs in “fall 2011, featuring documentaries, vintage behind-the-scenes moments, interviews, retrospectives and never-before-seen footage from the Lucasfilm archives.” Not to mention a specially-created audio track that is just fans of the original releases weeping and rending their clothes.