George Lucas has finally announced the arrival of all 6 Star Wars films on Blu-ray, to be available as a box set and set for a fall 2011 release. The good news is that there will be “extensive special features,” including deleted scenes and documentary featurettes. The bad news is that Episodes IV, V, and VI will not be the original versions. Han shoots first? Not in high def he won’t.
Speaking to the New York Times, Lucas explained his reasoning for not including the originals in the high-def set:
Mr. Lucas said that to release the original versions of these films on Blu-ray was “kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good.”
“You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” he added. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.”
Too expensive? Yeah, cause Lucas is really hurting for cash these days.
Lucas made the announcement at the Star Wars Celebration V festival, where he showed off a legendary cut scene showing Luke building a lightsaber and stowing it in R2D2:
We know what will be on a lot of Christmas lists in 2011.
