Disc
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Star Wars Special Edition, DVD, Bootleg "5-star collection", China 2002
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As the 2000s progressed, so did the Star Wars bootleg DVDs coming out of China. 2002 saw the debut of the "5-Star Collection" bootlegs. The source was still the 1997 US Laserdisc box set (even keeping the THX Laserdisc intro), but the bootleggers actually made an effort to misrepresent these as official releases. The "5-star collection" moniker aped the offical nomenclature of 20th Century Fox's own special edition DVD line.
The image is non-anamorphic widescreen, with original English sound, encoded as Dolby Digital AC-3 Stereo, AC-3 5.1, and DTS 5.1. I can't vouch for the integrity of the soundtracks being preserved from the original Laserdisc, but the bootleggers DID come through with the claim of DTS sound. Subtitles are optional, and available in English, Chinese, Malay and Thai. The menus are nicely designed, and the main menu screen is a motion menu playing clips from the film in the background, accompanied by the Star Wars theme. They call the first Star Wars "THE New Hope", but generally get the rest right, not using stills from the wrong film, for example. These are indeed dual-layered discs, as the files take up about 6.5 GB, well ahead of a single-layered 4,7 GB disc capacity. These, so-called "5-Star" versions were supposedly superior to previous bootlegs, they were the gold standard in bootlegs! The claim of anamorphic widescreen was bogus, but they fooled many into springing for this new set to replace previous bootlegs. The discs did have less compression due to being dual-layered, nice menus, a trailer for each film and nicely designed artwork. This was the best you could get at the time.
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DVD main menu
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Chapter menu (Sample)
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Languages menu
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Star Wars SE Trailer
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Star Wars SE Trailer
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20th Cenury Fox Home Ent. logo
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Dolby Digital "Egypt" trailer
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THX Cimarron trailer
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Fox fanfare
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A long time ago...
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Title card
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Opening crawl
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Star Destroyer
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Droid spa
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Binoculars
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Greedo subtitles
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Jabba subtitles
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Ben's saber
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Praxis effect
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End credits
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