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Return of the Jedi, VHS, Fullscreen, CBS/Fox video, Australia 1986

Australian rental tape of Return of the Jedi. I believe this to be the first issue of this movie on home video in Australia. The film is in cropped "Fullscreen" with English Hi-Fi Stereo. There are no trailers or extras on the tape, just the CBS/Fox intro and the film. Unlike the US home video releases that had proper "theatrical" subtitles for the Jabba scenes, Australia are using the same master as the UK, with electronic subtitles. Non-English speaking countries would have received textless masters so they could add their local subtitles, but the UK and Australia could have used the "proper" subtitles. Perhaps there was just one PAL master produced for all the non-US territories? Bar codes were becoming ubiquitous by 1985-1986, but thankfully designers have stopped putting them on spines since then. The box seems to have been replaced at some point, as the wear on the paper insert doesn't match the box. I get nostalgic about old rental tapes, wherever they're from, so I grabbed it from eBay back in 2009. It reminds me of that time when watching a movie at home wasn't anything you could take for granted.

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