Today's comic at Penny Arcade is amusing, but really the internet rumour behind it makes me very sad. I had been very excited some time ago to hear that Lucasfilm was going to release the original, really original untouched-up Star Wars movies on DVD, probably in time for Christmas this year. I remember those unremade movies fondly (Greedo does not shoot first!) and would love to see them on DVD.

Sadly, it seems the movies will not be very good quality releases, because Lucas (or Lucasfilm) allegedly "taped over" the original negatives when he made his new versions of the film. Because of this, the DVD releases are being made from laserdisc copies instead of from the original negatives -- resulting in video that is at best comparable to VHS.

I don't know a lot about how image quality works, but I do notice a difference between the DVDs I watch and my old VHS tapes, and yes, I would like to have DVD versions. (I mean, I have VHS versions of the movies already -- and while I'll still buy the DVD versions in the hopes they'll last quite a bit longer, I'd also like to have better quality than what I already have...) Apparently Lucasfilm has claimed various reasons why this isn't possible, and people who know more than I do have written below about why that doesn't make sense.

I've rewritten this post so many times to try to put in the relevant links that I'm just going to give up on integrating them into my post and try to post them in some sort of order:

The original post at The Digital Bits, which really is covered in the other posts, but I wanted to post it for the sake of completeness.

A follow-up post at The Digital Bits, that explains more fully why there should certainly be better source material than the laser-disc transfers for those of us who wouldn't know that otherwise (like me).

A link at Ain't It Cool discussing what we'd like the movies to be.

A discussion at starwarz.com about what it means that the movies are going to be transferred from the laserdisc masters, and why that is bad.

A link to another post at Ain't It Cool News that suggests that Lucas intends for us to give up on watching the horrible old version and watch the crisp clean new version instead. It is true that each one is being packaged as an extra to its remake, as you can see on the Amazon pre-order pages for the movies, and can't be ordered on its own:

Star Wars Episode IV
Star Wars Episode V
Star Wars Episode VI

Really it's all moot, as I have every intention of purchasing the movies in DVD format regardless, it just saddens me to think a company may be using that to its economic advantage, instead of making something I'd be truly impressed to own...