It’s pretty well known to most by now that a fan-based group called Team Negative 1 got hold of one of the original, 35mm prints of Star Wars (1977), has restored and digitized it, and has made it available on the web for free. No inserted, digital squiggly monsters. No Greedo shot first. No cleaning up anything. No fucking “A New Hope.” It’s Star Wars. Gritty 1977 effects and all.
Since this restoration is not technically legal, I’m not going to link to it and provide any means to find it here. But, it’s not difficult. I found it in less than 5 minutes of searching, and I started streaming. At first, I thought, is it really Star Wars, no bullshit? The actual film I saw in the theater in 1977, that was a sensation and a cultural touchstone for an entire generation?
It is. Star Wars.
I thought, I’ll just watch that awesome opening, relive it a bit. Of course I ended up watching all of it.
I noticed a couple things:
This is a great movie. The “prequels” do not come close. It is also not just my old childhood memory driven by nostalgia. I’ve revisited more than one beloved thing from my childhood and sadly realized it sucked. Star Wars is bloody brilliant. I still love it. No, it’s not perfect. The effects are dated. I don’t care. Some of the acting is dodgy, but some of it is top-notch (Sir Alec Guiness, Peter Cushing, James Earl Jones, Harrison Ford, for starters.)
Bottom line: a movie is more than the sum of its parts, and this is a fucking great movie.
So what if the effects are dated? They hold up just fine; I didn’t find them intrusive at all, even though yes it’s obvious how dated they are. Lucas was an ass to mess with this. The movie doesn’t need it; it’s great just as it was (and is!) It’s great because the whole is great. It’s still exciting and awe-inspiring and yes, even beautiful. So many iconic moments that we all know: the opening fight, the desert landscape with the droids trudging through it, the binary system sunset, the first glimpse of the Death Star, Leia’s rescue, the battle through the trench, the fantastic music. Updated CGI effects make none of that better than it already was.
Disney is beyond stupid and Lucas is an ass. There are tons of people who want to throw money at this, and get the original. SHUT UP, AND TAKE MY MONEY.
I know, I know. How edgy of me…Nope, not edgy, it’s mainstream. Because this is a great movie.
I just finished watching it, for the first time in almost two decades (since the bullshit effects-vandalized version.) And I feel like a bell that has just been rung on Easter morning.
Google it. Watch it. Some people will still go all “blah blah overrated.” Ignore them.
Did the Stormtrooper say “Open the Blast Doors! Open the Blast Doors!” Did Aunt Beru say “I think so” in a melancholy tone instead of an innocent one? Did the food processor make extra noises?
As far as it being great, remember that Lucas had all nine stories blocked out (or twelve, as some of us remember being told) and he picked the one he thought would work the best and make the biggest overall impact on audiences, even though it’s halfway through the story arc.
He may have screwed up a lot since, but he picked the right thread to tug in the beginning.
A few years back, the on-campus theater showed the original Star Wars, without even the “A New Hope” added to the crawl. I’m not sure what format it was, but it was clearly available somehow at that time. I think it might have been an extra feature in one of the deluxe DVD sets?
Are you talking about the despecialized versions? I bootlegged them(relax, I own more than one copy of the commercial movies). They were amazing and very well restored. I can not vouch that they are 100% identical to the original releases, but they looked to be and they were in glorious 1080p clarity. Loved them.
I know he said this, but I don’t think it is totally true. I think he had some of the first three movies planned out, but even those were loose at best(I don’t think he even was 100% that Vader is Anakin, etc.). The prequels and sequels were not even partially formed. I mean, maybe he gave some thought, but not much.
I simply can’t communicate how shocked, shocked I tell you, this leaves me. :rolleyes:
What irritates me is that for years it was twelve episodes/four trilogies, and then one day it was simply nine/three and what other trilogy? This gets lost in the other “fixes” and retcons but it bugs me more than HanShotFirst and all that.
He may have had a lot of extra material he had to omit, but I think it’s clear from all the discontinuities that he was far from having everything “blocked out.” Though the ending of the first movie left the possibility of a sequel wide open, it had to function as a stand-alone feature out of necessity, since no one really expected it to succeed.
I remember reading (probably in ***Time ***magazine when Empire or ***Jedi ***came out) that there would be six more movies: three set before the Skywalker era and three showing the restoration of the Republic, all seen through the eyes of Threepio and Artoo.
I don’t remember reading it anywhere, but I know that around/after The Return Of The Jedi (I wish I’d bought the Revenge Of The Jedi poster at the convention :smack: ) the talk was that there would be nine films in total; three prequels and three sequels.
Starlog interviews with Lucas and Co. pre-Empire bear this out. I’ve never heard talk of any more than 9 films total.
And I concur that Lucas had no more than a rudimentary outline of the story arc, otherwise you have to wonder why he was going with the incest-thing in SW and Empire.
I’d like to see it, but I’m against any “bootleg” file distribution, and aside from that I’m firmly convinced I’d be the one person out of a jillion that’d be prosecuted for downloading it.
I saw Star Wars in the theater when it came out. We had no idea what to expect, we were going to Six Flags the next day and just went to the nearby theater to pass time the evening before (same day Elvis died, saw the news as we were leaving the motel room).
This is an original print of Star Wars as released into cinemas in 1977, restored and digitized by a group calling themselves Team Negative One. Read about it here: Original ‘Star Wars’ 35mm Print Discovered and Restored That link won’t tell you where to download it, but it isn’t too hard to find.
He didn’t actually, it’s just a myth that he spreads (though he may believe it himself by now). The original 1977 release was just titled “Star Wars”, the “Episode IV: A New Hope” was added to the crawl when it was re-released. It’s well-established that he hadn’t decided that Darth Vader was Luke’s father until Empire was filming, along with a number of other major plot points that would have been clear if he really had a nine-story master plan. The number of supposedly pre-plotted episodes have changed - sometimes it was six, sometimes nine, apparently twelve too, and there’s no evidence of a solid blocked out plan of stories from 1977 or earlier either written or from people working with or close to Lucas.
What’s always puzzled me is how Vader failed to sense the presence of/recognize his own son and daughter in the first movie. Apparently The Force was nowhere near as powerful as he’d claimed.
