May the Fourth be with You!

Happy Star Wars Day everybody (not to be confused with Life Day)! This and every May the Fourth we Star Wars fans celebrate the movies and stories which mean so much to us. For most of us that only included the original trilogy (4,5,6) but if you choose to include the prequel trilogy that's your call.

I choose to think of Star Wars as much as possible as just the original trilogy and I very rarely if ever watch or even acknowledge the prequel trilogy. Even the original trilogy however is not without a black mark. That black mark is of course the 1997 special edition's. Now when I was a kid I thought they were fantastic but that's because I was young and couldn't imagine that I was actually seeing Star Wars in theaters. Since then I have seen the light and have begun to disdain the specialized editions. The final hammer in the special editions coffin for me however was the DVD release in which Lucasfilm digitally replaced the original actor to play Anakin Skywalker with Hayden Christiensen.

Now as we all know George Lucas (who I don't hate nearly as much as other people on the internet) and Lucasfilm have never released the original theatrical editions in high definition, There is a way to view them (or pretty close to the originals) that I have recently discovered. If you search the internet (don't ask me where) for Harmy's Descpecialized Editions you will find the absolute closest thing to the original theatrical editions in high definition, They were painstakingly assembled from multiple sources including television broadcasts and laserdisc transfers. They look amazing and If you want to watch Star Wars this is the way to do it...that is until (hopefully) Disney releases them on Blu-Ray.

May the force be with you and usual I hope you find your time on this site to be time (and bandwidth) well wasted.