Nearly eight years ago, Disney gave George Lucas $4 billion for what is arguably the biggest film franchise in the world. Since then, Disney has released an additional five Star Wars films, raking in almost $6 billion worldwide at the box office. In those intervening years, the Mouse House also launched its own streaming service, Disney+, which now offers fans new 4K restorations of the original Star Wars trilogy and its prequels. Having those films all in one place, a place where the new films will also one day live, is a huge selling point for the streaming service—but it could be so much more massive.
Watching the versions of the original trilogy that live on Disney+ isn’t the same as watching the original trilogy that hit theaters. They’re not the movies that changed the world more than 40 years ago. If you go out and buy the 4K UHD Blu-ray box set of the Skywalker Saga that’s being released this week, that collection won’t have those films either. The new versions are pale imitations. They’re abandoned 3D conversions. They’re full of half-finished effects from the 1990s that were clearly practice for future movies.
These aren’t the versions that were nominated for 17 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. These movies didn’t change the world. They’re not the phenomena that upended the way movies were made from that moment on. Moreover, these aren’t the movies that fans want to see. Look at the comments on any article about the aforementioned Skywalker box set. Half of them are people asking if they’re going to include the theatrical cuts, and the other half are people saying how they’re not going to buy the sets because they already downloaded a fan restoration of those original movies.
But not all hope is lost. Disney is steward of this historical artifact now. Now that the 4K versions are on Disney+ and the box sets are up for grabs, Disney should be able to give fans the theatrical cuts once again. They clearly do exist. Watching the originals on Disney+ could just be another option on the home screen—one that’s sure to attract more than a few new subscribers. There could even be a whole new box set. Releasing those cuts just gives Disney more bang for its 4 billion bucks. Two versions means two revenue streams!
But how did all this happen? How did the Star Wars movies get changed and tweaked so many times? It’s, well, … it’s a whole saga. In this piece, we’ll break down the history of the alterations and show how they break the movies.
Why the Special Editions Exist
In the early ‘90s, Star Wars was having a renaissance. Timothy Zahn released a series of novels known as the Thrawn Trilogy and reinvigorated a somewhat dormant sector of pop culture. Soon after their release, Kenner brought back Star Wars action figures, which hadn’t been seen anywhere but fans’ private collections in nearly a decade. The time had finally come for Star Wars mastermind George Lucas to start working on the long-promised prequel trilogy, telling the story of Luke Skywalker’s father and his turn to the dark side of the Force.
The issue was, could the folks at Lucasfilm pull it off? What could they do to make sure everything was going to work smoothly and, more important, cheaply? With the 20th anniversary of the original film approaching, they decided to start planning in late 1993 for a 1997 rerelease. They started storyboarding the Special Edition of Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope about a year before Lucas started writing Episode I (aka the movie that would become The Phantom Menace). In order for Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic division to figure out if they could make theatrical visual effects efficiently, there was only one thing they could do: make actual theatrical effects.
While John Knoll (now ILM’s chief creative officer) experimented throughout ’93 and ’94 with using off-the-shelf software to create starship shots, another team got to work hand-animating Jabba the Hutt into a deleted scene from A New Hope “using Jurassic Park technology” (Jabba’s skin shaders were taken from the T. rex). The idea was to use those shots as pitch material to sell Fox, which had cofinanced the original film, on the Special Edition. If they could sell Fox on paying for a rerelease, they could use the skills honed on sprucing up the old movies to make the new ones.
Most of the changes made to the movies didn’t just develop techniques for future use, they also provided guidance for how much (or how little) planning Lucas would have to do for the prequels. If ILM could insert a dinosaur in a shot filmed 20 years before, it could add Jar Jar Binks to a shot filmed six months before. ILM designers tested the “virtual studio” so shots could be approved remotely. They built models and concepts that could be reused and expanded on in the prequels.
George Lucas talks about this in the July 1999 issue of Cinefex:
“I was fairly confident that we could pull off what I was envisioning in the new films, but I really felt that I needed to do some concrete experimentation and tests to make sure that I could pull off this vision that I had. So part of it was, “Here’s a small version of what we’re going to do. These are the challenges.” I picked certain issues and certain things I wanted to develop, and I was able to put them in categories and say, “OK, we’re going to try these.” I wanted to see how much they would cost and what the processes would be, because to do the new films I had to take those and times them by a hundred. So yes, the special editions were a means of researching and testing what I was going to try to do on [The Phantom Menace].“
How the Special Editions Broke the Classic Films
Eventually, the entire trilogy of original films got Special Editions (The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were added to the plans not long before the 1997 release date). All three ended up with shots and scenes not in the original films, and while folks can argue those changes involved aspects of the movies that Lucas had a problem with, many of them also conveniently line up with techniques that could be useful for the prequels.
But that’s not the only issue with them. Most, if not all, of the changes made to the movies that aren’t just recomposites of the original effects actively harm the movies by being in them. They ruin the emotional beats and narrative flow. There’s a whole category of changes designed to tie into the prequels, movies that are generally perceived as mediocre at best. One cannot watch the classic films now without constant reminders of movies a lot of fans would prefer to forget.
“Finally they’re going to see what it was that bugged me so much—because now I can have it be exactly the way I wanted it to be. Well, maybe not a hundred percent. But it went from being what, in my mind, was maybe 60 or 70 percent of what I wanted up to now being about 93 or 94 percent of what I wanted it to be.”
—George Lucas, Cinefex, March 1996
Here are the major changes to the movies in the Special Editions, what research/assets they provided for the prequels (if made for the 1997 Special Edition release), and how they hurt the movie by being there today.
(There have been so many versions over the years, it seems necessary to give a quick breakdown. First, there were the original theatrical versions. Those were all redone for the 1997 Special Editions, heretofore known as 97SE. The 97SE versions were then used for the DVD version (04SE), which has changes made during the production of the prequels to help create a Saga Edition. Then there are the Blu-ray versions (11SE), which are the same as the DVD version with a handful of additional changes done as rough drafts for the abandoned 3D conversion. Finally there is the “Disney” version, which launched with Disney+ in 2019 (19SE). This was the final draft of the 3D version done just before the sale to Disney, using 97SE as a base and redoing all of the changes made up to that point.)
Changes to A New Hope
While not part of the Special Edition changes, “Episode IV” and “A New Hope” were added to the crawl for the 1981 rerelease in preparation for the upcoming “Episode V.” This is the first instance of changing the movies for the sake of the “saga” as a whole. Adding the extra lines also threw off the movements of the title theme music that used to synchronize with the paragraphs. The first example of the changes ruining the artistry of the originals was also the first change.
Looking for the Droids
The first addition seen chronologically in ANH is a pair of new shots of stormtroopers combing the desert on foot and mounted on dewbacks. The original shot is also present, but with animated dewbacks added. The reasoning behind the change is that it shows the extent to which the Empire is searching Tatooine looking for R2-D2, C-3PO, and the Death Star plans. However, in a movie that has focused almost every scene on the droids, it’s not necessary to have shots that don’t feature them, particularly medium shots of people wandering aimlessly.
The additions did show that ILM could make brand new footage that matched shots captured on location. It also allowed them to make a ship model they could modify as needed and taught them to make CG creatures that could interact with sand, something that would pay off a lot in The Phantom Menace. Despite that, the dewback model was rebuilt for the prequels, and the test model was left front-and-center in a classic film.
R2-D2 Hides
This next one is a change made for the 3D version (seen as a rough draft in 11SE and recreated for 19SE), but bears talking about as it doesn’t make any logistical sense. There is no visible way for R2 to have gotten into this cave to hide from the Tusken Raiders. And after Obi-Wan calls R2 to him, you can see the cave behind R2 and the rocks are gone. There is no creative reason to insert some rocks, shift them around in each shot, and then have them completely disappear when they’re not needed anymore. Moreover, the Tusken Raiders wear goggles that block much of their peripheral vision and likely function as desert sunglasses, so it’s possible they might not be able to see R2 even when they’re looking directly at him.
Obi-Wan’s Yell
Here’s a change that keeps getting adjusted: the sound Obi-Wan makes to scare off the Tusken Raiders. In the original film and the 97SE, it’s roughly the same audio as a dewbac