Star Wars Blu-Ray Wampa Review

When I heard they were putting in the cut wampa scenes on the Blu-Ray I was excited. These scenes are from the attack on Echo base, which was a sub-plot that was eventually cut from the movie, well to be kind, the wampa looked bad! It is not easy to pull off realism when walking in stilts with arm extensions... yeah I speak from experience. My suit is not too far off of the original full size costume built and I see a lot of similarities in these clips, which makes me paranoid a bit on how mine! I have been pondering a re-work of the arms for a while now to get a more fluid and realistic movement. After watching this video, I am going to start up again on working on the prototype arm that is in the works. While this was a noble attempt, I agree with cutting the scenes. Personally I would have liked to seen footage of the "Bug Eyed" wampa, Story has it that this was their first attempt at building the Wampa, and the body doesn't look too far off from the footage seen above. Which makes me wonder if they swapped the head. This is the only wampa made that didn't make into the original movie, but at least we have stills. 

Also, so many people cringe when the mere mention of replacing original footage with CG, but if there is ever a scene I would be an advocate for it, it would be the Wampa scene. Lucasfilm did tweak the swatting arm scene a little bit when you can see the puppeteers red jacket, but there is still 3 different wampas seen in the actual film. Sure they look great in High Definition and I have noticed a few more things about the suit that I didn't notice before, but it would have been nice to see one consistent wampa. Their best chance was to reshoot everything as one costume during the "special edition" but it is too late for that. They could have taken the approach that they did with the Yoda in Phantom Menace and replaced all of these wampas with the one consistant CG wampa, it's ILM in 2011, I am sure they could pull it off seamless by now.