Star Wars: Episode II in November

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment confirmed the news that everyone has been clamoring for the last couple of weeks. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones will come to DVD this November. For the first time, a Star Wars film will hit DVD day and date with its VHS counterpart.

Ten years have past since Palpatine took control of the Republic Senate, but corruption and deceit have become commonplace. Seperatists movements have begun to disintegrate the Republic and the Jedi know that they would be powerless to prevent a civil war. A failed assassination attempt on Senator Amidala reunites her with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, who has grown both as a man and as a Jedi. As the investigation leads deeper, Kenobi discovers the horrible truth behind the attempt and how a bounty hunter named Jango Fett may hold the key to keeping the Republic together, or tearing it apart.

The upcoming release will be packaged very similarly to Episode I, as a two disc special edition with a tremendous amount of behind the scenes work thanks to the tireless efforts of documentation done during the film’s production. The exception to this similarity will be that both a fullscreen and anamorphic widescreen version of the film will be made available separately, both transferred directly from the original digital sources. All other features will remain the same, including audio in both Dolby Surround 2.0 and Dolby 5.1 Surround EX. Extras on disc one will include a running audio commentary with writer-director George Lucas, producer Rick McCallum, editor and sound designer Ben Burtt visual effects supervisors Pablo Helman, John Knoll and Ben Snow and animation supervisor Rob Coleman. Disc two contains the meat of the extras including eight deleted scenes created for the DVD release, with introductions by George Lucas, Rick McCallum and Ben Burtt, “From Puppets to Pixels,” an all-new, full-length documentary that tracks the revolution in digital character animation, featuring the creation of the digital Yoda, Dexter Jettster and more, “State of the Art: The Previsualization of Episode II,” an all-new documentary featuring never-before-seen Animatics of Episode II, “Films Are Not Released; They Escape,”a new documentary explaining the process of creating the sound for Episode II, three behind-the-scenes featurettes exploring Episode II’s storyline, action scenes and love story, all 12 parts of “Making Episode II,” the web documentaries that first appeared at starwars.com, the “Across the Stars” music video featuring John Williams, the original theatrical teaser and launch trailers, plus 12 TV spots, galleries of theatrical posters, print campaign from around the world, and never-before-seen production photos, an Episode II visual effects breakdown montage from Industrial Light & Magic, and DVD-ROM content inclucing the HoloNet News website and a weblink to exclusive Star Wars content.

A couple of interesting sidenotes are that unlike Episode I, Episode II will apparently be released as the theatrical cut, not as a retooled director’s cut or some such nonsense. Oddly missing from the features are the six short discussions of the film from the recent Fox television premieres of the previous Star Wars films which will be present on the VHS tape.

November 12th is the official release date, making November a busy month for DVD buyers. Both the fullscreen and widescreen versions will be available for $29.98 each.

Leave a comment