I liked Skeleton Crew, and I like a lot of the Mandalorian.  I think my problem with a lot of the Filoni stuff is that the sequels make it feel pointless since I know what's coming.  Maybe the Younglings had a really great field trip right before Order 66, but they still get massacred by Anakin so it's hard to care too much about their story.

SQ21, have to be honest, I really never think too far into canon when it comes to Star Wars.  It's not like Star Trek, where "history" has played such a crucial role.  I just want to watch something that is well acted, edited, directed, with cool effects, action, and a script full of humor and intrigue.  Skeleton Crew had that and more.  Get's an A+ from me.  Andor returns for it's second and sadly last season.  That's been a show for adults, incredibly well written and acted.  Terrific writing on those series.

But it's like setting a fun show in the World Trade Center in the late 90s.  It's a morbid thought but the entire New Republic is destroyed in the Force Awakens.  By the end of the Last Jedi, the entire Resistance can fit on one ship.  There's just an ominous feel to this whole era.  Even when things are good, you know it eventually turns very bad.

I know I harp on this a lot, but it's just such a dark cloud on any new Star Wars.

1. I like that the people on At Attin refer to "The Great Work" - I'm confident that phase wasn't even original to Sliders when they did it two decades ago, but it definitely made me think of Sliders.

S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S

2. So...Wim is definitely dead in canon?  Skeleton Crew takes place in 9 ABY and the Force Awakens is 25-30 years later.  The ending seems to imply that Wim's destiny is to work with the New Republic, possibly flying an X-Wing.  But if that's the case, Wim is going to put himself right into the middle of what we know is a losing fight.

Now obviously some people working for the New Republic survived and either went into hiding or joined the Resistance.  And I'm sure fan theories will pick a specific background actor who must be Wim to prove that he survived through Rise of Skywalker.  But that's the issue with dealing with this stuff at this time when we know how bad things get.

To me, if Star Wars starts again, they need to leave this era.  Either go 1000 years ahead or 1000 years behind.  I think this era is too bogged down.  Let's say that Rey and her friends finally defeated the evil and restarted a more modern Jedi and they thrived for 1000 years.  Now let's do something new.

The theme park rides sound like a lot of fun! Did you get to interact with any of the performers playing the characters?

I remember riding the Star Tours ride at Universal Studios a lot when I was a child. I'm sure the experiences today are even more advanced, immersive and compelling.

I didn't interact much with the performers because I was by myself (my kids don't know what Star Wars is so I went in by myself to save on costs of the trip).  I was held prisoner with a family and they tried to use me as a scapegoat as the Resistance spy.  I did move quickly when we were asked (by the First Order or the Resistance) but I was mostly silent.  It didn't impact my enjoyment

And they still have Star Tours!  I had heard that they updated the ride with references to the Mandalorian-era TV shows.  And maybe they did - the only characters I recognized were Chewbacca and C-3PO, and the ride could've taken place in any era, really.  But it was fun, still.  Probably as fun as Smuggler's run but obviously less interactive.

The theme park rides sound like a lot of fun! Did you get to interact with any of the performers playing the characters?

I remember riding the Star Tours ride at Universal Studios a lot when I was a child. I'm sure the experiences today are even more advanced, immersive and compelling.

1. As I mentioned, I went to Disney World which means I got to go to Galaxy's Edge.  It was a pretty cool experience.  I got to ride Smuggler's Run a couple of times (as a pilot and an engineer), and I rode Rise of the Resistance.  As I've said, I'm not a huge fan of the sequels (and how I feel they sorta mess with the legacy of the original movies) but that's a really cool ride.  Of all the rides I did (including the new Guardians roller coaster), that one was easily the best.  Very immersive.  I would really like for Disney to someday retheme Galaxy's Edge to take place during the original movies (which would take very little effort) or at least move them to a trilogy I like (maybe episodes 10-12 when those happen) but I really liked that.

2. I started Skeleton Crew, and the Disney+ shows are so bittersweet to me.  I'm so interested in this era of Star Wars and how things are going with the Original Trilogy era heroes running things.  But it bothers me so much that essentially everything that is happening is meaningless.  It's really fun to see how the New Republic is trying to work through things, and they're wiped out so quickly and easily.  Maybe Rise of Skywalker fixed everything and now the galaxy can have a minute to breathe, but narratively, that whole thing is super frustrating.

The only reason to locate and scan a print of this nature is to restore the 1980 theatrical cut. But unlike STAR WARS and RETURN OF THE JEDI, the blu-ray version of EMPIRE is very easily returned to its original version. EMPIRE had very few changes made.

The very few non-HD shots and effects that need to be reinstated to the blu-ray version, even if sourced from low-resolution DVD, are easily matched to the blu-ray footage because those effects were mostly in motion, looked more painterly than photorealistic, and the upscaling blur isn't going to make them seem out of place.

The changes made to STAR WARS and RETURN OF THE JEDI were harder to undo: restoring the original versions of Tatooine, Mos Eisley, the Death Star and the final battle required a lot of cross-sourcing to rebuild it. RETURN, while having more isolated changes, had so many key shots altered or replaced in Jabba's palace and the Ewok celebration that a DESPECIALIZED version has to use a lot of mismatched SD and HD material and fade back and forth between them, sometimes in the same shot.

But EMPIRE doesn't have that mismatch problem. Most of the missing HD material is meant to be blurred by motion or due to being a matte painting. A high quality theatrical print of EMPIRE would not look very different from the DESPECIALIZED version.

The only real issue with the DESPECIALIZED version of EMPIRE is that it was made in 720p, largely because the upscaled DVD footage didn't scale well to 1080p, and even modern AI upscaling has addressed that gap; a 1080p upscale of EMPIRE looks as good as the denoised theatrical print scan of STAR WARS.

I don't think EMPIRE will benefit from finding any more prints to scan.

The 4K project was very fortunate in finding some solid theatrical prints of STAR WARS and a fantastic one of RETURN. What they found for EMPIRE, however, is really dirty, flickery and grainy and has an uncomfortably faded, slightly fuzzy quality even under the graininess and even after all the cleanup.

DESPECIALIZED, being based on the blu-ray, doesn't have that issue. The DEPSECIALIZED EMPIRE, as reconstructions go, doesn't really have that much to DESPECIALIZE. The majority of the new special effects were in the new shots of the Hoth monster (which the fan editor simply cut) and the new effects in Cloud City which the editor restored. That and other small restorations (getting the lightsabers to be the right colour, adding back matte lines) were all that was really needed since the SPECIAL EDITION added so little to EMPIRE.

I would probably stick with DESPECIALIZED for EMPIRE. Since it was a 720p file upscaled to 1080p for consistency with me, it doesn't even look that different from the soft but clear versions of 4K77 STAR WARS and 4K83 RETURN OF THE JEDI, as the AI upscale softened the DESPECIALIZED EMPIRE.

I personally am not a DESPECIALIZED person, but I think I'm in the minority.

Grizzlor wrote:

What I am getting at is that even this rotoscoping you're mentioning, I don't want that either.

If you don't want DESPECIALIZED to use rotoscoping, I'm not sure how you expect DESPECIALIZED to even exist.

Digital scans of film prints, while a little softer, are consistent throughout. Of course, a lot of people may prefer DESPECIALIZED because they find the hyper grainy look of the digital scans more distracting than DESPECIALIZED being a bit schizophrenic in sharpness. I personally decided to run the digital scans through an AI grain normalization process -- not to remove the grain, just to make it the same in one scene as it is in all others.

Yes, that's entirely my point!  Despecialized was fine when there was nothing else.  Now that actual prints can be made presentable, there's no need for it.  Star Wars had to be one of the few if only films which were rebuilt in that way, as a result of Lucas's hacking up the originals.  With other films, you find an original and just restore it.