Watch All Six Star Wars Movies Simultaneously
I think I’ve told this story before, but its never been more appropriate than right now. A few years ago now, when I was leaving my current job to join my current company, my buddies decided to throw me a party. And at said party, they decided there wouldn’t be a more appropriate thing to do than to watch all six Star Wars movies. Woah. I say, that’s a long party. No thanks! I mean, thanks and all… but what I didn’t understand was, they wanted to watch all six movies at the same time. Six TVs. Six DVD players. Six buckets of popcorn. And it was an epic night that took twice as long to set it all up than it did to actually watch the movies.
Think about putting six TVs in the same room at once. Just that alone is a logistical nightmare. Add six DVD players… six remotes, six movie discs. What order do you put them in? How in heaven’s name do you start them all at the same time? It was crazy. But an awesome experience because we were able to crank the volume on the three that were having a light saber battle at the same time, and down shift the other three. We quick edited straight to the really awesome stuff and avoided the other stuff on the fly. Give me more of Three and SIX!!! Now ONE, FOUR and FIVE! It was frenetic and awesome in the geekiest awesomeness ever. It’s a night I’ll never forget. Beer, friends and all six Star Wars movies at once? Brilliant. I can die happy now.
Until I learned about a project of senior Archer animator Marcus Rosentrater. Marcus has overlayed and intercut all six movies into a single movie. Not edited together. No. Literally overlaid the movies into each other so you are watching it as if all six screens are melded together. And while it is really really difficult to watch from end to end (believe me, I’ve tried) it is gorgeous to look at from a screen shot standpoint. Occasionally you see just gorgeous meldings, like Yoda and Luke talking while Anakin is seen as his younger self is heading headlong towards his evil self. Or various lightsaber battles occurring layered over one another. There are some truly beautiful amalgums here. Some really lovely foreshadowings and some fascinating overlaps. But the rest of it is just one LSD trip of hallucination after hallucination that really makes you begin to wonder if you are going insane, tripped out by the thing the you love the most.
George Lucas’ movies had a timing and a rhythm that was carried forward from movie to movie and reel to reel. And you can see this rhythm by watching them simultaneously. But you might be less sane at the end of it. If you want to give it a shot I’ve embedded it here at the bottom. First though, here are some hand picked screenshots of just how beautiful the overlays can be:
