By Mike Snider, USA Today, Nov. 1, 2005
Star Wars fans with a spare 13-plus hours (not counting extras) can now watch the groundbreaking saga from start to finish.
With today’s release of Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Fox, $30), all six films are on DVD.
“People will be able to watch it as one linear story, which was George’s original intention,” says Hayden Christensen. He played Anakin Skywalker in this year’s Sith and 2002’s Attack of the Clones.
Sith grossed $380.3 million as it lured back some of the audience lost by 2002’s Clones, which earned only $310.7 million, a big drop from $431.1 million for 1999’s Phantom Menace. Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) was the saga’s biggest at the box office with $461 million.
In this week’s battle of the heavyweight DVD releases, Lucas’ Sith is likely to beat Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and be among the year’s top sellers, says Scott Hettrick, home entertainment editor for DVD Exclusive magazine. Sith, he says, “is the final chapter in the saga that anyone who has ever been a fan of Star Wars will want to own.”
As with Menace and Clones, the DVD for Sith offers lavish extras:
Within a Minute: The Making of Episode III, a 78-minute segment, chronicles the 70,441 hours it took to create 60 seconds of Anakin and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber duel. “It’s rather extraordinary, the separate departments and number of people whose skills are involved to make this one minute,” says Ian McDiarmid, who plays Supreme Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious.
Among the six deleted scenes is Yoda’s arrival on Dagobah, where Luke Skywalker finds him in The Empire Strikes Back.
There are two levels of the Xbox version of the Star Wars Battlefront II video game and an Easter egg that shows Yoda dancing to a hip-hop beat.