Star Wars: Le retour du Jedi (1983) [147835]

This review is for the French version of "Return of the Jedi" (Le retour du Jedi) [147835] in PAL. The film is presented in the widescreen letterboxed format and was first released to laserdisc in 1990 in France. Naturally this is dubbed in French, and done quite well, if I may add. The film is spread across three sides on two laserdiscs in a gatefold cover. The cover is actually quite attractive for the older CD-Video laserdisc titles with nice pictures inside the gatefold and others on the back cover. The laserdisc opens with about 5 minutes of other titles available with short scenes from each film, including the original "Star Wars" film. There are no encoded chapter stops on this release. Even though this set contains two PDO gold colored discs, my set contains no trace of laser rot!

The video transfer is pretty good for a laserdisc of this age and since it is the unaltered Lucas version, that makes it even more special to me. Naturally this is not going to look like the later THX tansfers from 1997 but I feel that it holds its own quite well and certainly looks better than that dog-poo we were given on DVD in 2006 marketed as the original theatrical releases....give me the laserdisc version anyday!!! The picture is reasonably sharp in this release with no visible noise that I could see. I really thought this release was a nice job for the time period when it was released, especially for PAL. The audio is not bad and has nice strong dialogue that is easily understood.

I give it a thumbs-up!