Nice to know I wasn’t the only one who unilaterally declared a Generic Imperial Guy to be Admiral Piett. In my case, it was the AT-AT driver. (He was fifty cents, and by 1985 you couldn’t find anything else in the way of a bad guy that wasn’t a Jabba’s palace reject. I’m not even sure why they offered the AT-AT driver without the damn AT-AT.) The actual Imperial officer (fifty more cents, yay!) doubled as both Tarkin and Jerjerrod. Poor schmucks needed the ego boost, they only had two stormtroopers to protect them, one of whom was Luke in disguise. Shame there weren’t actual figures of these three.
I think a Star Wars toys thread may be in order, Skopo.
Given the fact that SW only opened on 3 dozen screens the first weekend (according to the DVD doc), this seems highly unlikely that such few prints would have variations, and it seems equally unlikely that subsequent prints (when the film started to expand to many more theaters) would be taken from anything from the Internegative used for the first batch of prints.
You won’t find a more comprehensive listing of unused, unshot, and rumored SW scenes anywhere, and this site alleges that Veers’ death never made it past a later version of the ESB script stage.
But then in ROTJ we see a varying number of capital ships in the rebel fleet attacking the Death Star. I’m pretty sure there are more in the sublight speed scenes than arrive through hyperspace to attack the DS.
As for the ANH scene with Luke noticing the battle above Tatooine, the only time I was aware of it was when I got the desktop entertainment pack that showed the original script in the yellow scrolling text form.
Did anyone else get this pack? There was supposed to be a preview or sneak mention of the new trilogy (eps I-III) in it but I never had the patience or luck to see it.
There’s no such thing as a “wrong” internegative. The internegative is derived from assembling the original camera negative rolls into an assembled film. That means that there is, ultimately, a definitive “cut.” If there were alternate versions, they would exist in workprints, and the alternate footage would exist as negative trims, but you wouldn’t have two separate internegatives made simultaneously for such a small production run.
Well, the StarWarz site, if you’d look at some of the other “cut” examples, is remarkably thorough about pulling assorted stills and extraneous footage from sources (magazines, ads, toy boxes, etc.), but even they didn’t site anything about a rumored alternate version making the rounds in the theaters. Most of their citation is based on the script version–the studio “cite” was an add-on to what they had already researched, so they’re not really using the studio “party line” as anything more than corroboration of what they already surmised independently.
From the way I read their comment about the kamikaze scene is that it was never filmed, yet Dooku’s got a copy of the film where it happens. Now, perhaps they’re talking about the death of the particular Imperial general, and not just some random guy who gets taken out by a crippled snowspeeder, but it doesn’t read that way to me. They’re saying it was never shot. If that’s true, then all of us have some kind of bizarre “repressed memory” syndrome, and Dooku’s really gone batty because he just watched it the other night.
I guess we’re reading this differently. The site says that there’s no shot of Veers getting killed (presumably with a AT-AT cockpit POV of the snowspeeder on crash approach).
I don’t dispute that ESB has a scene with an out-of-control (not kamikaze; Dooku even admits this) snowspeeder. There’s no mention of a Veers confirmation anywhere in Dooku’s post. I’d have to check my original ESB to see if/how it varies from the DVD version (which I haven’t seen yet).
Thanks, never heard of that term before. I was trying to postulate that a small run of prints had been made for the expanded release but with earlier footage and nobody noticed until that run got out the door. That would explain why the official stance is that such prints don’t exist.
I went to see SW for the fourth or fifth time at a drive in with my aunt, uncle, and cousins in late '77 and swear I remember seeing the Biggs / Luke scene on Tattoine. I remember thinking"This is new, but it is boooooring…" I would dearly love to see that scene again, though.
Memory can play funny tricks. The marental unit has seen Highlander an ungodly number of times, and swears she can remember scenes where Conner removes the ox-yoke and meets Heather’s father at the broch even though she knows she hasn’t seen them. These scenes were in the final draft of the script and may even have been shot, but they’ve never appeared in any cut of the film.
I agree that memory plays tricks. It’s possible that I read the scene in the novelization (yeah, I read the whole novel when I was 7), and added it in later.
And, by the way, there was a real AT-AT vehicle, but my parent wouldn’t cough up the money for one. I did obtain a Scout Walker, which my AT-AT driver was quite happy with (though sometimes he had to arm wrestle my Scout Walker driver from ROTJ for the chance to drive it).
Yes, to clarify - there’s no shot of Veers specifically getting killed by the out-of-control speeder; just a scene of the out-of-control speeder crashing into the bridge of an AT-AT. It’s definitely not Veers that recoils in horror as the speeder crashes. This scene comes shorty after my favorite scene of the Hoth atack - where one of the AT-ATs “bends it’s knee” and sets the back leg, the head pivots to the left, and then it shoots a speeder as it flies by.
Hmmm, checked several video sources of the non-SE ESB and didn’t find this scene at all. IIRC, after said AT-AT shoots the speeder, we see the speeder crash into the snowscape, right? Is that the speeder you’re talking about, or is it another speeder? And shortly after this, Veers destroys the generators. Does this “crash into the bridge” scene happen before or after this? And do we see how the snowspeeder gets damaged (or is it simply out-of-control)? And I’m assuming we have an interior cockpit shot of a non-Veers AT-AT pilot recoiling, right?
I’m just going to throw out an example of how false-memory syndrom for Star Wars. I saw RotJ int eh theatre when I was 11 or so, and I always swore there was a scene where a Scout Walker steps on an Ewok. I was absolutely positive that it existed, but was cut for being too graphic.
Many, many years later, I found an old box of Mad Magazines from when I was a kid. In the MAD version of RotJ, there was such a scene. Now, I know I must have transferred over this cartoon that I don’t recall, and turned it into a scene from teh movie.
But I can still picture it vividly. Powerful, tricky stuff.
Dooku can answer the snowspeeder crash scene better than I can, since I’m only going on memory–and judging from this discussion, it will be impossible for me to find a video of the original theatrical release.
However, I still stand by my memory of the scene, though it’s a bit blurred. A snowspeeder is hit by laser fire, and the pilot screams (“I’m hit!” or something along those lines). The scene cuts to the cockpit interior of Veers’s AT-AT, and you hear a line or two of dialogue between the pilots and Veers–who is standing toward the back of the cockpit. Then you see through the cockpit window the crippled snowspeeder racing head-on, one of the pilot shouts something, and big explosion The next scene is an exterior shot of the AT-AT, which collapses onto its side.
And then you see a shot of Ewoks cheering (kidding!).
I’m sure it was Veers’s AT-AT that was hit by this particular snowspeeder, and that this scene happens after the generators have been taken out. It’s a different snowspeeder from the one that you see an AT-AT picking off with a swivel of its head (that great scene that Dooku referred to in his last post)–while that speeder just crashes into the landscape, the “kamikaze” speeder is hit moments later and crashes into Veers’s AT-AT.
You don’t actually see Veers getting killed, although I recall the explosion was significant enough to imply that he snuffed it. It’s possible, though, that he survived and pulled himself out of the mangled rubble of the AT-AT. I mean, there are people who believe Boba Fett survived the Sarlaac, so I suppose anything’s possible.
