During this years Star Wars Celebration (V), the official convention organized by Lucasfilm, good ole' George Lucas announced that all six episodes of the Star Wars saga will be available on Blu-ray in 2011. According to IGN, a press release for the announcement mentioned that the set will feature documentaries, vintage behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, retrospectives, and never before seen footage from the Lucasfilm archives.
During the announcement, Lucas touched on the special features he has planned for the Blu-ray releases. "I wish I could say it's coming out this year, but it's coming out next year. There'll be different kinds of additional material. I think you've seen enough behind the scenes material for a lifetime. There's some really good material that will be included in there, including more deleted scenes that you haven't seen yet."
Once such example is the newly discovered footage of Vader and Luke from the beginning of the film. Mark Hamill surprised fans when he took the stage alongside Lucas to reveal the scene, stating that this clip was intended to be Luke's initial appearance in Jedi, right after Vader boards the second Death Star. Check out the footage below for roughly a minute of unseen video straight from the convention floor.
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It has been nearly six years since the release of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD, and surprisingly, the availability of Blu-ray on the consumer market. When asked about the delayed release of Star Wars on Blu-ray, Lucas lamented the amount of effort and money that goes into restoring the films for HD, even citing Blu-ray adoption rates as a factor. "We've been wanting to do it as soon as we possibly could, but we just wanted to do it when enough people would be able to buy it and see it. You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally. It's a very, very expensive process to do it."
There was no mention of which cut of the original trilogy will be released, but considering the vast amount of storage on a BD disc, and the separate disc for special features, it is likely that we will see the original and special edition versions for each film. That, of course, is just speculation, but what isn't, is the Fall 2011 release date.
[ IGN ]
