Star Wars De-specialized

Headline:

This is the Jabba you should never have seen.

A "despecialized edition" of the original Star Wars is now available for (quasi-legal) download.

Backstory:
I've been longing to see the original 1977 theatrical release ever since George Lucas slapped Part IV: A New Hope before the crawl for the 1981re-release. Part IV, what was that, we wondered around the junior high school lunch table. We felt a little cheated that four years earlier, we'd walked in on the middle of the story. We didn't know this was just the first of George Lucas's tinkerings. By the mid 2000's, he'd made edits so that Han doesn't shoot first, thrown in a bunch of new aliens, added digital Jabbas to unused footage, and re-shot battle sequences.

Countless touch-ups later, the movie is now more the lynchpin of Lucasfilm mind games and pawn of Lucas's megalomania than it is a piece of filmed entertainment. Consider that Lucas refuses to let the original releases of the trilogy be viewed or released. He recalls 35mm prints of the original whenever they come up, and says the originals are but 'drafts' of the movies now available and 'enhanced' through his digital re-editing. All well and good, except...

The original Star Wars is a monumental achievement. It's probably the most sophisticated piece of pre-digital special effects work ever put to film. With 1970's technology - basically plastic and rubber - Lucas created an entire world of spaceships and aliens, and with each sequel he upped the bar. I have no idea why Lucas is ashamed of these movies. You, sir, kicked ass. These are seminal works of American history.

But he refuses to let anyone see these movies - his best work - in their original, un-tampered versions. It's baffling. Lucas should be proud of these masterpieces. He should be hosting retrospectives and receiving awards, not hiding them away from some churlish sense of shame.

Enter the 'De-specialized' version, created by a team of dedicated graphic wizards around the world. These are some serious restorationists and digital ninjas themselves, cobbling together a 1977 'original' from what Disney/Lucasfilm has dumped on the world - a travesty of poor color correction and technical flaws - and those few original prints not yet under his control.

Here: this video gives a great sense of the amount of work involved, and the variety of source materials used:



Pretty cool? Pretty cool.

Okay, yeah, I know. The past is gone. The Har Mar Cinema, where I watched the original, was gutted in a renovation in the 90's, then turned into a Cub Foods fifteen years later. I no longer fit into my Superman underoos. You can't go back to Tatooine. The restoration will never be the original.

But I could indulge my inner ten-year old and watch a grey-market release of Lucas's masterpiece. If only it were legal, I'd do it... right... now...

For more information on the legacy of Lucas's tinkerings, visit SaveStarWars.com

A grebmaR Christmas special: the Miser Brothers

When I was a kid, the holidays meant Christmas programming. There were the obvious solid, heartwarming classics like The Grinch, Charlie Brown, and Frosty the Snowman. But no one could match the Rankin/Bass studios for sheer madcap discombobulatory dissonance. Their specials were often pretty good, like the charmingly awkward "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or the maudlin but effective "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." But they were equally capable of churning out bottom feeding dreck such as "The First Easter Rabbit" or "Frosty and Rudolph Save the 4th of July."*

Somewhere in between, there was "The Year Without a Santa Claus," a syrupy tale of Jingle and Jangle, two elves who set out to save Christmas when Santa gets the sniffles. (Why Santa gets sick on Christmas so often is an unexplored mystery.) You actually forget that part, though, once the Miser Brothers show up. These two narcissistic avatars of nature steal the show like Samuel L. Jackson dreams he could.

In the mythopoetics of Christmas Special Land, Heat Miser and Snow Miser lord over the realms of Snow and Heat. Twin children of Mother Nature, they couldn't have been more different, except for their theme song, which was eerily similar, and spectacularly AWESOME! Listen:



It's a beautiful tune, isn't it? A rollicking good-time number, with straw hats and chorus lines clearly influenced by Bob Fosse. And I don't think it's a stretch to consider Michael Jackson watching Snow Miser's spin-move showmanship and filing it away for future use.** In the years following their introduction, the Miser Brothers have inspired literally thousands of stoners, slackers, and blog posts. It was only natural that they would appear in sequels.

In the 00's, someone did a live action special remake starring Michael McKean (from Spinal Tap) and Harvey Fierstein, which turns the two part song into a duet complete with bikini-clad minions, slingshots and crossbows. It starts off as a total train wreck, then kind of grows on you, and then goes back to train wreck... here, see what I mean:



I understand their intention here, uniting both versions into one complete number - it always seemed sort of a time-filler and union-cost-cutting move to use the same song twice - but the execution seems spotty. Why are the two heat misers' domains separated by such a thin chasm? In what realm of physics can this exist? By taking the metaphorical division of heat and cold and placing them in such proximity, the dialectic of hot and cold turns into an in-house squabble between pouty brothers, rather than an epic, meta-conflict between points of view that the original suggested.

On the other hand, I do love Harvey Fierstein's Louisiana gutter accent, and the gusto with which he's determined to sell this turd as fertilizer. The icicle up the butt at the end also seems the work of a good sport. But McKean seems to be phoning it in here, like his agent had come to him with either this or a Lenny and the Squigtones reunion tour, and he chose poorly.

But, you know, it makes me wonder where Mr. Temperate is in all this? Mr. Heat, Mr. Snow, and no one in that sweet spot in between, where we live most of our lives. That boring zone of mud and flowers and sweet spring rain. The Temperate Miser. It's always the middle child that gets forgotten. Maybe it's the lost Miser Sister, Lady Temperate. She should have her own song:

I'm Lady Brown Christmas
I'm sorta 'meh'
I'm 'Bring a light jacket,'
I'm 'Watch out for that mud!'

Friends call me Temperate Miser
Whatever I touch
gets soon enough to room temp-utch-(ure)
I'm not that much!

I never want to know a day that's outside a particular range
From fifty to seventy, say! Hey, let's wear sensible shoes!

I'm not that much!

(spoken): Yeah, thanks a lot mom, my brothers got all the attention and why? Because they're all Hot and Cold and people think I'm just a law of thermodynamics or entropy well fuck you mom it's more than that, not that you care... (fades away, mumbling)

Well, you know, it's an idea.

Merry Christmas! And hey, Santa - take some vitamins this year. No more colds!

Addendum: For completeness sake, there's also a 2008 version of the song, from The Miser Brother's Christmas, which despite its techincal advances adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.


* This special is actually called Frosty and Rudolph's Christmas in July

** The question of whether the Miser Brothers influenced the Jackson 5 or vice versa I will leave for the comments section to determine.