regularjoe

I also did a chronological order version of this.  My source was the old laser disks and I did it a loooooong time ago before folks were doing stuff on computers with professional editing tools and TB hard drives.

Sat down with the movies first and made a list of disk/side/time for each cut and then tweaked it from there.  Spent hours with a VCR and the LD player going from disk to disk etc.  I had no problems with transitions from movie # 2 -3.  

My take was film 1 opens, pretty much as you see it.  When the car goes to the future I cut to when Marty comes back at the end of the show, taking it through his changed family.  When Doc comes back with the car we go to the future.  When they come back to the changed 1985 and head back to the past, that's where the fun began.  It took hours but I managed to get together all the 1950's stuff from 1 & 2.  BttF 2 ends and segues nicely into 3 which you have to watch to get the full deal.  

I still have it, a probably 15 year old videotape, recorded on EP setting to get all three movies on one tape.  Watched a bunch of times with my friends.  I have no intention of even trying it on a computer, got a baby on the way and real life will not allow me the indulgence of a project like this.

After BttF I did the same integration with Krystof Kieslowski's Three Colours Trilogy, probably the most obscure fanedit you'll ever see on these forums. Cut together Blue, White and Red the same way using LD and VHS and I loved it.  Loaned it to a friend and it didn't track well on his VCR so he thought the tape was junk and threw it away....without asking if I minded.  

You know, if a hard drive crashes there is some hope of recovering something but when this happens, you're just SOL.

It's been years since I watched the reels and when I penned my last post I was even doubting my own memory.   You know, back in the late 70's I bought some of those reels multiple times based on ability to afford, what my local K-Mart had to sell or I could find through LA Films and the various iterations of it released by Ken Films.  At one point I had a b&w silent reel because that was all that I could get my hands on.  Eventually we had a sound reel available but I didn't have a sound projector.  I was an ignorant kid and I thought if I ran the sound film through a silent projector that I would somehow damage the film, so I waited until I received a sound projector as a gift before setting my goals on the sound reels.

I recently found this site...

http://8mmforum.film-tech.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi

and in a thread about movie reviews other folks mention what I did here

http://8mmforum.film-tech.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=000045

specifically

The real gem to find here is the Ken 200ft version. It opens with this scene, but has Ben giving Luke his father's light sabre and Luke waving it around! It also has more at the end of the scene with Luke protesting about going to Alderaan with Ben!

There were some real blasts from the past for me in this forum, I had totally forgotten about the early TESB reel that I bought that was silent but came with a cassette tape that you had to try to sync with the projector.  

Couple weeks now and no luck with "live' torrents of this.

Quick question for you - are the transfers that you did just the 2 x 400' reels for Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back or did you use any film from the original 200' reel that came out for Star Wars?  If I recall correctly, the scenes in Ben's hut on the first reel that came out were mostly complete and then were reprised in truncated form on the first 400' reel that came out that had scene digests beyond Ben's hut and the escape from the Death Star.

Hey Pugo -

I am fairly new to the forums and just figured out via this forum your work on converting over the old Ken films super-8 condensed versions.  I would love to see these, haven't seen them since I did a mashup/fanedit of everything I had (including film I busted out of those Kenner toy cranked film viewers) back around '84.

Are they being actively shared on the torrents, do you know?  I'm fairly new to this fanedit thing and it seems to me that when these things first come out folks are trading them hot and heavy and then the interest seems to fade away in seeding them.

Longshot here.....you wouldn't happen to have a scan of an old mailer from LA Films, would you?  The old photocopied catalog they used to mail every now and then to 'regular' customers?  It was a legal sized sheet of paper, printed both sides that broke down the new releases and what scenes made the 8-17 minute digests.  I tell people about this stuff and they look at me like I am crazy.

I used to have a lot of Super-8 digests of movies (Ken Films, Castle Films, etc) and I have a few items of memorabilia left.

One of the items that I have is a catalog for public institutions to rent movies to show; it is very interesting, especially the section that breaks down licensing fees and collecting entry fees.  This specific catalog was printed in 1975 so you have to bear in mind that it is from before Star Wars and it is also before the ubiquity of home video product (Beta/VHS > LD > DVD/BLR).

However, despite its age, just about everything is in this catalog.  Classics, new movies, foreign, there's no porn in it but they make it clear that some of the foreign films may have content not for kids.  I suspect the 16mm print was struck for some entity like this.

When I was college in the mid-1980's our union had a film society and they showed movies in the union.  Sometimes they procured older movies and sometimes we had films that were fairly contemporary.  I saw a lot of movies this way because admission was often free or just a buck which is hard to beat when you are in college.  Being a bit of a film geek/retarded development AV geek I can say that I would check out the projection equipment and I can say that sometimes we were watching pan and scan cuts of theatrical movies on 16 mm and sometimes it was 35 mm.  I have no idea what was used for inflight movies on airlines in the 70's but I think that you may also have a candidate for your source there.

ray_afraid said:

Also, I've seen several posts about Luke and Leia's kiss in ESB and how it should be cut, or cut the revelation that she's his sister in ROTJ to avoid some kind of incestuous overtones. If anybody really thinks there was some kinda "love triangle" between Luke Leia and Han, then I doubt they've ever had much luck with the ladies. The moment Luke meets Leia it is clear that she has no romantic interest in him yet the moment she meets Han, the sparks fly- lot's of sarcasm and bickering (which is usually flirting) but it also leads to some off hand compliments ("you're braver than i thought."). I mean, sure, Luke was attracted to her and all, but there was never a moment where it seemed that they would end up together.

 

The love triangle was played up very, very much in a lot of the popular press in the late 70's - the 'who would Leia end up with?' question was there in a lot of the magazines I saw back then and Lucasfilm didn't seem to do a whole lot to discourage this kind of speculation.  Watching these movies as they came out I can say all of my contemporaries were wondering what happened with that storyline when TESB came out and we saw it in the theatres.  I saw TESB in Milwaukee on the inital release (opening weekend), it was the only city in Wisconsin that had a 70mm setup and it played in other cities a bit later.  When I came back to school the following Monday there were three questions asked about the movie:

 

Do they really have a scene where Darth Vader tells Luke he is his dad, and do they clear it up before the movie ends?

 

Who does the Princess end up with?

 

Is Yoda any good...a puppet in Star Wars?  Ewww..

 

A lot of people go on about the whole brother sister thing with kind of an ICK overtone but I've always thought that the Star Wars universe is crawling with all sorts of sentient species. Look at all the different races presented in the first movie.  In a galaxy like that where humans are just one of a thousand species competing for resources you may not have an incest taboo that is as strongly defined as it is our society.   You don't even need competition for resources to relax that taboo - look at the intermarriage between the ruling families of Europe in the 1800's and early 1900's.  A lot of these people were more closely related than we may find acceptable today.

 

Than again, it's just a movie.

Bingowings said:

It's a classic case of the lady and the laddie protesting too much (and the counter opposite of the rubbish romance in the PT)

"You annoy the hell out of me"

"No you annoy the hell out of me more"

"Screw you, you, you delicious she devil"

"You start first and I'll join in later"

I don't know how many people here watch movies that were made before 1977 but a LOT of the Han/Leia interplay in TESB is taken from Gone With The Wind.  Watch it if you think I'm talking out of my hat.  Heck, the poster for TESB pretty much duplicates Gable/Leigh in the GWTW poster.

Lucas didn't make all this stuff up, he took from all sorts of things:

Flash Gordon (couldn't buy the rights to re-make it)

Hidden Fortress

Dune

Wizard of Oz

Metropolis

and a lot else: himself even.  Anyone watch the end of THX1138 and compare it to the chase at the end of Star Wars?  Then there's recent events, nods to Vietnam in the CT and GWB in the PT.  Don't make this more than it is. George Lucas WAS the OG of sampling.  

*** sarcasm mode ON *** You wanna know why SW was a hit in '77?  Han Solo = Elvis, Chewie = Bigfoot.  The man knows his pop culture stuff and was really good at making movie mashups of it all.  that's all.  George Lucas is the Phil Retrospector of SF movie mashups, that's it.  *** sarcasm mode OFF***  Oh, and adywan deserves an Oscar for his work on E4.

Long time reader first time poster signing off.