DIGITAL L.A.; THE FORCE WON'T BE WITH DVD LOVERS.

Byline: David Bloom 

The home video version of ``Star Wars: Episode 1 The Phantom Menace'' will hit stores worldwide the first week of April, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. loudly trumpeted this week.

It's something of a movie distribution landmark, the companies noted, given the challenges getting versions of the film in all the appropriate languages shipped to all the appropriate sales locations at one time.

What Fox and Lucasfilm didn't mention, however, was a release date for a DVD version of 1999's biggest grossing film. That's particularly odd, given that creator George Lucas made history with the movie's digital projection in theaters in Burbank, Northridge and New Jersey last summer.

And Lucas plans to make yet more history with the high-definition digital video shooting of the next ``Star Wars'' episode. It'll be digital all the way, from whiz-bang effects shots to the most straightforward close-up of a plain old human, using special cameras built by Sony and Panavision.

So why no digital version of ``Phantom Menace'' for the home?

It's a question that's consumed a lot of Internet bandwidth in recent days among the remarkably single-minded fans of the series. But Fox officials say there's a simple answer.

``The truth is that George wants to do something really great with it, and he doesn't have the time,'' said Fox spokesman Steven Feldstein. ``He's in preproduction with the next sequel, and is doing the writing on it. He starts shooting on it this summer.

The DVD format provides the opportunity to do a lot of different things, but it takes time, and that's the one thing nobody around here has.''

So despite grossing $922 milllion worldwide so far on ``Phantom Menace,'' Lucas apparently can't afford to hire decent help to get the DVD version done.

And don't hold your breath waiting for anything else from that galaxy far, far away to appear in the new format.

Feldstein said not to anticipate a DVD version of ``any of the Star Wars movies, clearly not for 2000 or the foreseeable future.''

PLAYSTATION 2 BUZZ

With its Japanese debut just a couple of months off, Sony's PlayStation 2 is starting to generate buzz in lots of places, even in other cutting-edge corners of the vast Sony empire.

Ken Williams, president of Sony's Digital Studios Division, is already salivating over some of the possibilities the machine may hold for his group, which includes the visual-effects house Sony Imageworks.

Imageworks, already beaming over the warm reception given its ``Stuart Little'' release, may in the future take some of the digital characters and other resources it creates for films and put them right in PlayStation 2 games and other kinds of entertainment, Williams said.

Until now, gaming machines weren't really powerful enough to actually port over the gorgeous animated work of, say, a ``Stuart Little'' or Pixar's ``Toy Story 2'' characters.

``For many years, people talked about being able to migrate that sort of animation into games,'' Williams said. ``The reality was that by the time you dumbed down the models and shaders to fit within a conventional gaming environment, there was very little left.

"You might as well start over.''

Disney Interactive has come closer than anyone so far to such a direct transfer, using some of Pixar's motion data from ``Toy Story 2'' to guide the movements of Buzz Lightyear and other characters in the excellent Toy Story 2 games for PlayStation, PC and Nintendo 64.

But the PS2 could change all that. Its remarkable graphics power should make it easier to take, say, the red sports car that Stuart Little drives in the movie and put it directly into a racing game, Williams said.

``For the first time, with the PS2 we actually see an opportunity for this higher-quality work to be used for gaming,'' Williams said. ``The sheer computing power seems to be there.

I'd hope you'd be able to see the wind rippling through Stuart's hair over the (car's) windscreen.''

Williams said he hopes developers will use the PS2's graphic and computing power to create characters with compelling emotion and personality, something he said is largely lacking from most current games.

If that happens, ``it could reinvigorate the female sector'' of the gaming world, Williams said. ``Now you're talking about new markets, expanding markets, to people who have not picked up on gaming as we define it today.''

Williams also expects players will have much more control over their gaming experience, with the ability to custom design the avatars that represent their characters - and include much more interactivity, over the Internet in particular.

Of course, if the original PlayStation's history is any guide, it'll be a couple of years before developers fully exploit the new machine's capabilities.

Only now, five years into the PlayStation's existence, are developers regularly using 95 percent or more of the aging machine's power, milking surprisingly good graphics and game play from a relatively decrepit technology.