The Bad: One of the deleted scenes from Empire is a (gross) romantic moment between Luke and (HIS SISTER) Leia (WHO IS HIS SISTER). The deleted scenes also add a lot to the package, especially with Episode IV. Also intriguing is a circa-1980 interview with Empire Strikes Back director Irving Kerschner in which he compares the acting styles of the three main actors. Most of the prequel interviews are “Well, we had to blue screen this and then spend a lot of time on the computer,” whereas the original trilogy interviews are more like “the Yoda puppet took eight people to operate and Mark Hamill and Frank Oz couldn’t hear each other, so all the dialogue had to be ‘timed’ in order to match later.” It gives you a greater appreciation for just what an accomplishment these movies were. The same holds true for the visual effects. Watching Ben Burtt in 1976 or 1979 and seeing the kind of equipment he was using to create the sound effects for Star Wars is fascinating. Rather, the interviews are superior because the first three films were so much more difficult to make. The Good: The interviews are more compelling than on the prequel disc, and it’s not even because the films themselves were better. Were I an artist, I suppose they might appeal to me more. A few (like the explanation of the “Lost Twenty” from Attack of the Clones, or Yoda’s communication with Qui-Gon in Revenge of the Sith) are useful, but most are merely longer versions of scenes that weren’t that great to begin with. The Meh: Most of the deleted scenes were deleted for a reason. Using that option gives the viewer no way of knowing, for example, with whom the next interview is. There is a “Play All” option at the top menu, but using that means jumping in blind to the entire set of a given feature. There was no real reason to do this except as a stylistic choice to make the menus somehow look better. The same holds true for the other features. So, instead of getting a linear presentation of a dozen deleted scenes, we might get four from one planet, two on another, and one on the others. However, each episode is further subdivided into the planets on which it takes place, never mind the fact that the movies jump around from setting to setting.
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As you might imagine, the main menu divides the disc into three sections by episode. The Bad: The way the disc is organized is cumbersome and frustrating. It includes different Star Wars “artifacts” with a 360-degree rotation, close-ups, video commentary on each, and more. The “Collection” feature is a keeper for the mega-nerds. Some of their takes were quite telling (Spoiler: Ewan MacGregor is not a fan). Another good one is the “Blue Screen Acting” clip that includes many of the actors discussing the experience of acting without the benefit of seeing an actual set or, in many cases, characters. The interview is interspersed with clips from the films as they actually turned out. One that caught my attention was an interview with George Lucas from 1994 in which he discusses writing the prequels. The Good: Some of the individual interviews are interesting, and all of them are relatively short. Rather than assign each disc a grade as I did with the movies, I’ll instead point out the pros and cons.
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Disc seven includes extras from Episodes I-III, disc eight covers the original trilogy, and disc nine has “documentaries and spoofs” spanning the entire series. The final three discs of the Star Wars blu-ray set consist entirely of extras.