Lucasfilm may claim otherwise, but Star Wars fans really do want to see the original, unaltered original trilogy movies again. Every Star Wars fan has their own story. Mine begins in 1991, when I watched A New Hope on TV over Christmas. I was hooked, and it wasn’t long before I began devouring anything and everything Star Wars (amusingly, my journey moved on to Timothy Zahn’s “Thrawn trilogy” and the novelizations, which meant I was completely spoiled for The Empire Strikes Back‘s big twist by the time I got my hands on a VHS copy).
And yet, here’s the strange thing; it’s not really possible for me to ever experience that again. In 1997, George Lucas released a modified version of the OT – the Star Wars Special Editions. He went to great lengths to ensure the original versions were as hard to find as possible, even depositing the Special Editions at the National Film Registry rather than those first released. You can watch some pretty poor-quality, unrestored versions as bonus features on 2006 DVD releases, and A New Hope was briefly available on Roku, but… that’s about it.
Why Did George Lucas Make So Many Changes To The Star Wars Movies?
Looking back decades later, Lucas found himself feeling profoundly dissatisfied with the original trilogy. Some character beats felt off, special effects had advanced, and he generally wanted to rework the three movies and update them in line with his own changing vision (one of the most important changes was his decision to insert Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker’s Force Ghost in Return of the Jedi‘s final scenes). Lucas felt free to do this because of his views on ownership.
Speaking just last year, Lucas defended the Special Editions by focusing in on the theme of ownership. “I think a film belongs to its creator,” he observed. “When Michelangelo made the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he looked at it and said: I’m going to redo this part.” In his view, the Special Editions are the most perfect communication of his vision, and no other version should exist. It’s a simple argument – but it has one major flaw to it.
There’s One Problem With Lucas’ View
The core problem, though, is that the act of communication changes everything. Let me give an example: I’m a regular public speaker, especially at my local church, where I’m something of a lay preacher. When I prepare a sermon, I’ll run through it and pretty much memorize what I want to say. But everything changes when I actually get up to speak. If I fumble on some point, if I drop something or add something else, the people there don’t care what was in my notes. They care about what was said, what actually happened on the day.
I didn’t fall in love with the Star Wars Special Editions; they didn’t exist back in 1991. They weren’t the versions I grew up with, watching so many times the video-tapes wore through in the end. Now, watching Star Wars on Disney+, I feel an odd sense of discontinuity; there are moments that jar, because my memories of them are so clear, and they don’t quite match with what I’m seeing on the screen. Worse still are the changes I’ve mostly forgotten, because they draw me out completely, feeling weird in a way I can’t describe.
Watching a movie is an experience, an interaction between the creator and the viewer
This is the core problem with Lucas’ view: an act of communication involves the recipient, not just the speaker. Watching a movie is an experience, an interaction between the creator and the viewer, and the creator is not the only one who owns that experience. Lucas communicated one version of the Star Wars story, I received it, and it’s too late to change it. Attempting to do so subtly distorts the message anyway, because the change is disorientating.
Are The Original Star Wars Movies Just A Historical Curiosity?
Two years ago, Jon Favreau was asked whether Disney would ever release the original Star Wars movies. I have to be honest that I never expected a “Yes” – Lucas clearly has a strong view, and I think Disney would consider releasing them to be disrespectful. But Favreau took another angle, instead insisting there would be no interest.
“Do you think anybody but us, like the people who grew up with it, would care? That’s what I figured out: that the younger people have a whole different perception of what Star Wars is, you know? Each generation… for the millennials it’s the prequels, for younger people… sometimes it’s The Clone Wars.”
Now, I freely admit that Favreau has a point; I care because I grew up with this version. And yet, something feels quite uncomfortable about this argument, given how important nostalgia is to Star Wars. The movies and TV shows play on this sense of nostalgia all the time, using it to appeal to different audiences; OT nostalgia for people like me, prequel nostalgia for Generation Z, and even Clone Wars nostalgia for Generation Alpha (yes, that’s a thing). Favreau’s argument is understandable, but also utterly inconsistent.
Last week, the original version of Star Wars – predating even the 1981 addition of “A New Hope” as a subтιтle – was briefly available on a Roku app. It was a poor-quality upload, probably derived from the 2006 bonus feature, but I couldn’t help noticing a sense of excitement that ran through me at the idea of watching it again. I wasn’t the only one, as readership of that article proved, and I realized then how wrong Favreau was: yes, people care.
Even Lucas seemed to understand this at one point. Back in 2010, he told the New York Times he’d been wanting to work on a high-definition version of the original, unaltered OT for quite some time, but was waiting to see whether Blu-Ray caught on first. “We came out with ‘Star Wars’ right at the beginning of VHS,” he explained, “and we sold 300,000 copies.” Within a few years, he added, “They were selling 1 million, 2 million, 10 million. So we learned from that experience that if you’re too early in the marketplace, there’s just not enough demand for it.“
The problem, Lucas explained, was that the existing copies just aren’t very good anymore. “You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” he noted. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it.” In the end, Lucas clearly abandoned this project when he shifted to selling Lucasfilm to Disney, and it’s been forgotten since. Those poor-quality originals will have deteriorated still further, making it even more unlikely that we’ll ever see the Star Wars I grew up with again – whether there’s demand or not.
Star Wars
- Created by
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George Lucas
- First Film
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Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
- Cast
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Mark Hamill, James Earl Jones, David Prowse, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Ian McDiarmid, Ewan McGregor, Rosario Dawson, Lars Mikkelsen, Rupert Friend, Moses Ingram, Frank Oz, Pedro Pascal
- TV Show(s)
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The Mandalorian, Andor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, The Acolyte, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, Lando, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, Star Wars: Resistance, Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures, Star Wars: Visions
- Character(s)
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Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Rey Skywalker, Emperor Palpatine / Darth Sidious, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka Tano, Grand Admiral Thrawn, Grand Inquisitor, Reva (The Third Sister), The Fifth Brother, The Seventh Sister, The Eighth Brother, Yoda, Din Djarin, Grogu, Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, Leia Organa, Ben Solo/Kylo Ren
