Star Wars - The Original Trilogy (DVD)

The Characters of Star Wars looks at all the main characters within the trilogy, what they originally began as in their concepts, how they evolved and how the actors brought them to life on the big screen.

The Birth of the Lightsaber takes a look at the evolving technology used to create the lightsaber effects across the three movies from using a stick with reflective screen material in Star Wars, to sticks in Empire to just a handle in Jedi when the rotoscoping techniques had matured immensely.

The Force is with Them: The Legacy of Star Wars brings in a lot of big name movie directors discussing how Star Wars singled handedly changed their way of making movies in the space of a couple of hours.

The biggest extra on this disc though is a two and a half hour documentary titled Empire of Dreams which begins by summing up what the original Star Wars movie did for the culture of America and the world at the time and how movies forever changed with this low budget idea from an independent director. But what was seen on screen did not reflect all that had gone on beforehand to get to that point.

It took Lucas over two years to get the film ready for release, beginning with the process of finding a distributor who was willing to support this absurd idea of a movie then the search for actors to play the parts, start up an off-shoot company to develop the out-of-this-world special effects and finally produce a soundtrack to polish off the first episode.

With all the pressure that was ever present throughout the ordeal, the day of the release was one that many cast and crew dreaded but Star Wars opened up on 37 screens around the country. Yes 37. But the audiences loved it and the rest was history.

Following on from the documentaries are the still photo sections. The collection of Exclusive Production Photos comprises an innumerable amount of photos from the Lucasfilm archives.

As with any good DVD release, there always has to be a trailer or a teaser for the movie. On this release we have Teasers, Trailers and Re-Release trailers for each of the three movies as well as the 1997 Special Edition Trailer. To add to all this all 12 TV Spots are also included. This is truly an ultimate collection of extras !!!

Finally, there is a special Episode III Preview: The Return Of Darth Vader. This nine minute long precursor to Episode 3 focuses on the return of Darth Vader to the big screen.

Rounding out the features is the DVD-ROM content that links your PC to a special access area of starwars.com.

One worthy mention is the animated menus across all four DVDs. The creators of the DVDs have taken snippets from the movies themselves and given them a three-dimensional skinning to them adding that extra Star Wars dimension as you navigate through the screens.

There is not much that a true fan of the Star Wars trilogy can fault with this collection. This is truly a Fetting amazing DVD BOXSET !!!.

Browsing through ebay just before christmas I saw some Star Wars dvds on offer. I remembered how much I enjoyed these when they first came out, and how they had changed cinema history with their imagery, visuals, epic futuristic storyline. Nothing like it had been done before. I just had to buy this trilogy for my kids - 10 and 8. I now have 2 converted Star Wars fans and have gone on and bought prequels too. The series would appeal to all ages, containing humour, action, space travel, space ships, lasers, romance, spectacular visuals, great musical score and the good vs evil battles. Even the "baddies" in these films are (in a way)likeable, a mixture of human and alien life forms, George Lucas excelled himself in his production of these first 3 movies - at a time before the great computer technology which makes these type of sequences and effects commonplace. The making of the series dvd was very enlightening, describing in detail the battles the studies and production team had to go through to put the films together and how they created the models and action sequences. I'd recommend this either as a nostalgic trip back to childhood or to introduce a new generation to the story which is Star Wars.