Ack phfft? “don’t think anything had been changed before that”? Sorry, but I remember Jabba being played by a fat guy, as well as Han shooting first, and of course the original movie wasn’t subtitled “A New Hope”. And by the 80s VHS releases, you couldn’t get those, though the first laserdiscs had them, if you had laser discs.
IIRC, that wasn’t ever in a finished cut…although it was in the accompanying novelisation. Actually, a whole lot of stuff was in there that was filmed but edited out.
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He does mention it in the article. He also mentions the regrettable fact that they’re not anamorphic widescreen, but simply letterboxed 4x3 dubs of the old letterboxed standard-def laserdisc edition from 1993, meaning they’re both letterboxed and pillarboxed on a modern 16x9 TV, unless you blow up the image so much the resolution completely falls apart.
Still, those are closest (in terms of changes from the 1977 release) that can be relatively easily found. I made sure to grab myself a set when they came out.
I saw the movie in 1977 as a seven-year-old, but I also benefited from an insider brother. Even though Star Wars wasn’t released commercially on videotape until 1985, I had a Beta bootleg copy in 1981, which I’ve probably watched over a hundred times. I’m still jarred every time I hear C-3PO’s added line about the tractor beam, since that wasn’t present on my tape.
Too bad it was 4x3 center-cut, though.
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They also included it in the Marvel comic adaptation. I think I read that Lucas always intended to replace the fat guy with an animated something-or-other. Dunno if Marvel’s version approached what Lucas had in mind, but obviously a CG character wasn’t possible in '77, and I guess Lucas didn’t want to resort to a hand-drawn animated character, like the Id monster in Forbidden Planet.
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I saw it at the drive-in. blew my little mind.
What’s with these Lucas people anyways? They don’t normally leave money on the table like this.
Sure many people would settle for a pirate copy of the original original were it released, but even that furthers the franchise and they’d sell millions of hardcopies in a fancy box anyway.
Maybe they’re waiting for it’s bi-centennial?
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Unless you saw the movie in 1977 in The theater you have never see the original cut. One of the earliest changes made to Star Wars was within weeks into its theatrical run. I Remember seeing the original sound mix and then the mono mix in 1978 and remembering the final battle sounding different, and I was like hey something is different. There were Super-8 digests and 16mm releases of the Original may release available for purchase back then. Those are the closest you will ever get to seeing it.
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I had that novelization, so when Lucas said he was putting that scene back in I was really interested. It … was better in my head.
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As if there is anything better than Laserdisc!
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I remember seeing SW the summer it came out, when this was the main poster available for it. I recall being really bummed that the poster totally lied about Princess Leia’s look.
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I will say this for Lucas. He’s throwing away some possible bucks for his “vision.” That’s kind of artly, when I think about it.
I had friend whose brother smuggled one of this early, big honking VHS cameras into the theater and managed to shoot a copy off the screen without getting caught. Let’s just say it’s not how I want to remember seeing it in 1977.
(The bootleg brother, by the way, later became a bishop in his church.)
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This. I quote this so hard and I wish I could like it more than once. The author goes on about “egregious affronts” and “cardinal sins” which make my eyes want to roll right out of my head. I doubt you could find a more well documented and highly available thing than the many versions of Star Wars. Anyone with the technology to write a blog post also has the ability to download multiple variant copies of this old film. Of course, said person also has the capacity to STFU and not repeat the same boring old “Han shot first” tropes.
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Well, to be fair, Luke doesn’t look a whole hell of a lot like Mark Hamill either. But I’ll say this for the Hildebrandts: somehow they managed to make them look like brother and sister long before anyone suspected that might be a thing.
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IIRC, Clone Wars is no longer officially canon, so their knowledge is basically useless, right? They might as well be fully versed in Star Wars fan fiction.
Man, I had no idea how many changes Lucas made to the original, in fact I just watched it and was completely baffled. . .it seemed like a totally different movie!
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You might be surprised at how many people dabble in collecting those, simply because you can find them cheap and they have 70’s vintage movie poster art on them.
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