Harmy Releases Return Of The Jedi Despecialized V2.5

Most movies will see two, maybe three different releases in their lifetime. You'll have the original theatrical, then perhaps an "extended edition" and maybe even a "director's cut." Then you have the three original Star Wars movies, each of which has seen at least 38 slightly different releases.

Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's safe to say that there have been more alterations to these three movies than any other in the history of cinema. But which is the definitive version of the films? If you're a purist, then you probably want to watch the original theatrical version. The hard part about doing that is finding a version of it that you can play, and that looks good. Thankfully, there's one guy that has been working hard on getting all three movies to look their absolute best.

If you've never heard of Harmy or his Despecialized Editions, then you're missing out. This guy has been working hard for years to get all three of the original movies looking perfect, in their original theatrical glory. When I watched the movies in the Machete Order before The Force Awakens came out, I used his versions of the films to do so. (I own 4 different releases of the films, so I don't really feel bad about downloading and watching his versions.)

Well, Harmy has been working hard to update Return of the Jedi to its purest form. There's already a version of it in the wild that he released some time ago. However, he's just finished what he is calling V2.5. So what's different about the new release? I'd say that they are "less special," but here's the official description:

This is a reconstruction of the 1983 theatrical version of Return of the Jedi. The original shots were painstakingly restored using various sources and the film received an extensive shot by shot colour correction based on a fade free 1983 LPP Print. ROTJ v2.5 is pretty much completely despecialized, apart from a couple of wipes, which were recomposited optically in 1997 and look nearly identical to the originals, so for all intents and purposes this is the original version.

The remastered version (v2.5) represents a significant improvement in picture quality over the earlier 1.0 version due to the use of better encoding and higher quality sources and replacing many of the despecialized shots with higher quality ones.

So where do you find this particular version of the film? Well, unfortunately for legal reasons (or so I'm told) I can't actually tell you that. But I'm sure that you're clever enough to work that out on your own.

Source: Harmy's Facebook