Echo Station - Review of Holy Trilogy video re-release

Here's a quote from my review of the video release of The Phantom Menace which still expresses my feelings: "Every once in a while, I like to to feel I am not being ripped off by Lucas and his companies. This usually happens when I am asleep. During my waking hours, however, I am painfully aware of how my chain is being jerked, and I don't like it."

George Lucas, self-admitted techno-geek, advocate and driving force behind the state of the art in digital filmmaking and quality sound, has given us a re-release of the Star Wars Trilogy that equates in my mind to Santa putting a lump of reindeer poodoo in my stocking. Gee, thanks for the Christmas present, George!

Not only is this re-release still not on DVD [insert primal scream here], but both the VHS and VCD copies I watched are seriously flawed. It is hard for a fan to cultivate Jedi serenity in the face of such a blatant insult to our collective intelligence. My recommendation to everyone is that you not purchase this re-release. It has absolutely nothing to recommend it, and it is a total waste of your time and money.

I'll talk about 1) the VHS version, 2) the VCD (video disk) version, and finally 3) the Episode II "behind the scenes" feature.

The re-release on VHS comes in two versions, full screen (pan & scan) or letterbox (widescreen). However, I have searched the fourth largest city in the United States for weeks and have not yet found a store which carries the widescreen version. In fact, most stores only seem to have ordered one or two copies of the pan & scan version. (Here in Alaska, the opposite is true; no pan and scan, plenty of widescreen everywhere - Editor) That's probably a good indication that this turkey is not going to make Lucas any money, and I sincerely hope it does not. We need to send a message to Lucas that we won't buy any old piece of excrement just because it has Star Wars plastered on it. (We won't, will we?) Anyway, if you want the letterbox version you'll probably have to order it online -- if you can find it. Check out our blatant merchandising at the bottom of this page for suggestions.

The packaging is stylish, if not very functional. A plastic sleeve fits down over the box with artwork that lets part of the underlying image peek through a window. The individual video boxes are designed to match The Phantom Menace box, so your videos can sit together on the shelf and look pretty.

As for the movies themselves, this is just a plain-Jane copy of each film, nothing new, nothing extra. The quality's not even that good. The copy I have has serious tracking problems and the sound seems almost imperceptibly out of synch. These are the Special Editions, again. At least if they had given us a re-release of the original versions, it might have been worth having. My old copies of "Star Wars Classic" are practically worn out. The only thing I really liked about this VHS release was the little trailer at the beginning advertising www.starwars.com.

Oh, yeah. I guess y'all are wanting to know about the "sneak peek" at Episode II. That's covered in its own section down below.

The very nice folks at CoolVCD sent me a copy of the Star Wars Trilogy re-release on VCD for me to review. (Just in case you don't know what a VCD is, it's a video disk that looks just like a CD and can play in most DVD players as well as on the CD-ROM drive of your computer. It is roughly equivalent to VHS in quality, though that varies.) I recommended CoolVCD in my review of The Phantom Menace because they had a good deal on shipping and they are friendly. Well, they are still friendly, but sad to say, I can't recommend the product, and I can't really recommend them because they apparently don't know how to package stuff. My boxed set arrived from FedEx in a Tyvek envelope with only a layer of bubble wrap to protect it. Because of the lack of protection, the product box was crushed, although not bad enough to break the plastic cases holding the disks. Still, I imagine a lot of folks want to buy these as collector's items, and a crushed box simply will not do. If you are going to buy these VCDs, make sure your vendor is willing to pack the box properly.

The packaging itself is pretty nifty, though. The outside of the box has the same artwork as the VHS re-release. The inside has a photo of some TIE fighters and contains three cases (each with two disks) arranged in a stair-step fashion. Pretty cool. Here are some scans in case you're interested:

This is what you see when the camera / viewpoint changes. [click image to see entire screencap]

This is what you see a moment later when the image is changing rapidly during an explosion. [click image to see entire screencap]

As for the quality of the VCDs themselves, you'd be better off with VHS. The VCD probably has slightly better sound; these are recorded with Dolby Surround. I am not much of an audiophile, so I can't give you more info than that the sound was acceptable. I did hear a slight hiss at the beginning of the ANH disk which I didn't notice on the others.

Unless you are totally desperate to have a copy for your computer or DVD player, the VCDs are not worth getting, even though CoolVCD and the other online dealers are charging less than $30 for the set. When my friend and I tried to watch it, we had to stop after 20 minutes because the jerkiness was giving me a headache -- and it made HER want to puke. Each time the viewpoint changes, the image takes a second to resolve itself, much like an interlaced GIF file. I thought the earlier VCD release of The Phantom Menace was almost as good as the VHS copy, but this trilogy re-release is a hack job.

The main problem with VCDs is the MPEG-1 compression. To fit each movie onto two disks, they have to get rid of a lot of data. One of the results is artifacting, where the image breaks up into pixels or squares that are apparent to the naked eye. This is especially bad when the image is changing rapidly -- characters running, blaster bolts, explosions. In the worst cases, the whole movie looks jerky and out of focus, as is the case here. These VCDs suffer from some mighty bad artifacting. I am talking about squares more than an inch wide on a 32" television.

This VCD is only available, as far as I know, in pan & scan. It even lacks that nifty trailer I liked on the VHS version. The quality is sub-par. Also, each set of disks has a blaring, obnoxious promo trailer for Fox Studios at the beginning. The only good thing I can say about these VCDs is that they don't have subtitles. Their main advantage is that they won't wear out like VHS tapes. But will you actually want to watch them?

Bottom line: it's not worth 30 bucks to get a glimpse of this. In fact, if you just want to satisfy your curiosity and don't want to have to buy yet another copy of the movies, you can go to TheForce.net and check out their really good screencaps from it here.

[NOTE: Don't read the next paragraph if you are avoiding ALL information about Episode II. I don't consider this spoiler material because it is being released by Lucasfilm, but it does give away a bit about the movie.]

The feature on Episode II lasts about ten minutes. It has George Lucas sitting on the sound-stage set of the Lars Homestead garage talking in vague terms about the prequel storyline (nothing we didn't already know). It has Bonnie Piesse (who plays the young [Aunt] Beru) in somebody's office talking about herself (boring). It has Joel Edgerton (who plays the young [Uncle] Owen Lars) giving us his take on Owen's motivations and talking about how his mum loves Star Wars (also boring but at least he's in costume part of the time). It has a very long section with Gavin Bocquet on how they recreated the Lars Homestead and kitchen from a few photographs left in the archives. It has a very long section with Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) nattering on about Threepio's new coverings made of junk and the difficulty in operating the "naked" Threepio puppet. Now, I love Anthony Daniels, I really do. And he is entertaining. And you do get to see him in his costume. However, if you are going to give me ten minutes about Episode II, why waste a good chunk of it on something so familiar?