Star Wars Trilogy Special edition, VCD, 20th Century Fox Video Hong Kong, 2000

The first official releases of the Star Wars trilogy on a digital video format came from the Asian markets in 2000. For many enthusiasts this was the closest they could get to a DVD release at the time. (We would have to wait until 2004 before we saw the trilogy released on actual DVDs.) There were many of us who rushed to import this set from any Asian websites who catered to international customers. Due to the technical limits of the VideoCD format, only about 67 minutes of video will fit on a disc, so each movie is split across 2 discs. Each film comes in a 2-disc CD jewel case, housed in a cardboard outer box. There is no inlay for the 3 cases inside the box so to fill it out they include a 4th. empty jewel case. As expected by 2000, these are the Special Editions of the original trilogy. The films come in cropped fullframe format, with English 2-channel PCM tracks containing Pro Logic encoded surround sound. The regular and alien dialogue is subtitled in Chinese. There is no mention of it on the packaging, but just like the Malaysian edition, this release contains a "Sneak peak behind the scenes" featurette for Episode II, running approx. 11 minutes. The featurette is placed at the beginning of disc 1 of the first Star Wars film. It is letterboxed in a 16:9 aspect ratio within the 4:3 frame. The program is in English with Chinese subtitles.