Any number of people have these false memories, muddy impressions, or (if you like) apocryphal delusions. But it doesn’t change the fact that what you collectively “remember” simply did not happen.
That scene looks exactly the way I recall it, and the way it appears on my oldest VHS copy. I really do think your memory is playing tricks with you.
No offense, and I’m not trying to be snarky, but your recollection is directly opposed to my own.
Likewise, and it doesn’t look to me like there’s any sort of digital jiggerypokery going on. Ben’s hand isn’t near his lips, its along side his cheek - not, I think, the position one would hold their hand in if they were smoking a pipe or hookah. At any rate, considering how long ago the change would have to have been made, I don’t think editing it out was technologically possible for the time. Look how clumsy the digital manipulation was when Lucas came out with the Special Editions - Han shooting first, and walking around Jabba, in particular, came out amazingly hokey looking, and that was with cutting edge, 21st century technology. Editing out a prop (or, more ridiculously, compositing someone else’s hand into the scene, as Sage Rat suggested) would not look any where near as smooth using late '70s/early '80s tech.
In the above clip, the odd play of shadows on Ben’s hand, and the way Ben keeps his head still while the hand moves, does make me automatically suspicious. I have no doubt that the scene is real and doesn’t involve CGI in any way. But the quick suspicion we’re prone to here, I think, is a sign of how much we’ve become accustomed to CGI.
Makes me a little sad, like when my daughter sees elephants on TV and asks me if they’re “real,” or just recreations like she sees on the dinosaur shows on the Discovery channel.
I can’t argue that the scene was edited as I had no existing recollection of the hookah, but I still think that in the linked clip, if you look very carefully from exactly 19 seconds until 22 seconds, the combination of his hand movement, leaning back, and mouth opening and closing look to me to be very much what it might look like if he had been holding a hookah tube in his right hand and biting down on the mouthpiece.
I may just be a victim of the power of suggestion by the OP, but I’m also not so sure the tech wasn’t there in the 70s to mask out a small portion of a few seconds worth of frames pretty seamlessly. It would just be different tech than they would use today but an artist could have hand edited the frames, for example.
Youtube comments do make me laugh in spite of myself sometimes.
Not a chance. The technology back then couldn’t mask travelling matte lines against a black starfield, or animate a black fill-in against the Emperor’s black cloak (in Jedi) without the effect standing out clear as day to these contemporary eyes. What you’re proposing by comparison is nothing short of a pipedream (pardon the pun) fantasy
I did find this:
It is quite a coincidence to me that at the very moment he uttered those same lines in the linked clip and appears to me to make all the motions of taking a hookah puff, in the novel he was really supposed to be smoking a hookah at that exact moment. I have no memory of a hookah in the scene but I was about 7 years old, and I never read the novel, but at the exact moment that phrase is uttered I noticed what appeared to be the motions of hookah smoking - even after coming in with no preconceived idea where I should be watching for it.
Missed the edit but I also hadn’t checked the link in post #2 …
After watching and re-watching the video it really seems that they shot it as written in the novel then changed it. I can’t discount the power of suggestion but still find it very odd the apparent hookah smoking in the video clip happens at the exact line it does in the novel.
She wasn’t a hookah, she was a queen, and she was my moth-ah!
Smoking on a hookah would explain why he doesn’t have all manners of fits when Luke, a farmboy completely untrained in weaponry, swings around a light saber in his living room. Then Ben seems to think Luke offered to take him to Alderaan before saying “I’m getting too old for this [del]shit[/del]sort of thing”.
He’s not going to let some farmboy with a light saber put the harsh on his buzz.
Is this the VHS edition the OP is looking for?
Because I own that version of the tapes and could check, in a month or two, after I move, assuming I could get hold of a VCR.
Please note, I have nothing to do with the creator of the auction in that link, and I’m not offering to sell anything.
Oh, I’m not offended in the least, and I’m perfectly willing to admit that I may have saw it wrong - after all, I read a book about someone who remembers the first moon landing - he clearly remembers going outside and looking up at the full moon and thinking how awesome it was, only to find out years later that the moon had NOT been full at the time; it’s just that when I look at the scene again, I can STILL seem to see that hookah!!!
Funny, though - I don’t remember noticing any other hookah-smokers. Might have been too much going on in the background during those scenes for me to pick up on. The scene with Obi-Wan had only two characters, making it a little easier to remember…
I DO remember that Han Solo shot first, though!!! :-}