I’ve been meaning to do a post on this for a while now, but since Bill talked in this week’s TSL about how Star Wars fans are on the verge of full-out revolt against what Disney’s done to the franchise as a whole, I thought it might be a good time to finally introduce you folks to what a large group of fans have already done to repair the damage George Lucas did to the original trilogy.
Since my family owns a copy of the ‘special edition’ OT, I went ahead and spent the 3.5 days it took to slow-crawl download the ‘despecialized’ version, which I promptly watched with a friend who’s a hardcore Star Wars fan (and utterly disgusted with what Kathleen Kennedy’s done with the new movies). She and I both had a hard time paying any attention to the story being told because we were so blown away by just how beautiful the OT’s cinematography is when you strip away all the crappy CGI that got slapped on over the last ~25 years.
The amount of time and money an international group of fans have put into this project is unfathomable, but the end result is the restoration of a masterpiece that would otherwise likely remain lost to us.
2 replies on “Saving Star Wars from itself”
I’m watching Bill get interviewed on Cross Roads. In he talks about the re-edit so Greedo shots first in Star Wars. Thing is, he claims the original version, the version where Greedo gets the drop on Han so Han shoots Greedo under the table, he claims that version doesn’t exist.
But it does!
There was a SpecEd of all three OT films that included both the late 90s expanded version AND the original version as released in ’77-’83. I have a copy of Star Wars on DVD on my shelf where Han shoots first.
But it functionally doesn’t exist unless you know where to look for it–the edition that’s currently sold has the weird version of the scene where both characters shoot at the same time, and that special edition with the original version was temporarily released only because the older fans made such a stink about it. And that one’s no longer available except second-hand:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3RXNKOQTUAX4Q/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00003CXCT