This past weekend, the community assistants of the building I live in organized a free movie for us, over at the second run theater on campus. All of the posters said that it was going to be Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. OK, that was a half-decent movie, that’s worth seeing for free. So I show up at the theater at the appointed time, and it turns out that wasn’t the movie we were seeing, after all.
It was Star Wars. As in, the movie just called by that title, with no subtitles present or necessary. The opening crawl didn’t say anything about episodes. Han shot first, last, and only. The lightsabres were all the right color. There were no CGI monstrosities looming over the immersive special effects. The TIE fighters didn’t have pale yellow boxes pasted around them. The explosions were real explosions. It was glorious.
I didn’t even know that that movie still existed, on any modern format.
Thankfully someone that could appreciate the unadulterated movie you were watching was in the audience. Savor the memory, when else are you going to be able to see such a thing?
To the best of my knowledge there’s never been a commercial release of Star Wars without the Episode IV at the beginning of the crawl.
And (hypothetical) bootlegs some hypothetical person I know might have seen back in the late
'80s that didn’t have the Episode IV were universally crap copies.
I can imagine how freakin’ cool it would have been to see a nice copy of the original Star Wars.
I don’t know about “pale yellow,” but many early transfers of Star Wars suffered in that the matting was clearly visible in the composite shots of combat scenes - big boxes around all the ships, as opposed to the apparently crisp black of the surrounding space. Looked slightly greyish to me, so maybe not what is being referred to - but it was bad enough that I never bothered transferring my letter-boxed VHS copies of the original series to DVD. Bleh.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the adulterated version, so I can’t be certain about the color, but yeah, I’m referring to the matting boxes. At the time, Lucas swore that it wasn’t his fault, that it only showed up because people didn’t have their TVs adjusted properly. I’m not sure what excuse he gave for Luke’s lightsabre being green instead of blue in the training-remote scene.
There’s a painstaking fan-edit out there, Harmy’s Despecialized Edition, which restores the originals using material from the recent editions, at the same time excluding all of the later added crap. Here’s a behind-the-scenes description of how it was done. (Of course it is a bootleg, so I leave it up to y’all to find it…)
I watched them all recently, and had much the same reaction as Chronos.
I bet the boxes were there in the film, just you couldn’t tell with the way the setup was with the projector and screen. Even though I didn’t notice them until the DVD, after I saw them there, every VHS version I have suddenly had them as well. WHAT HAS BEEN SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN
In 1994 I went to a charity event where they showed all three movies on a big screen. The copy of Star Wars we saw must have been one of the original prints and possibly similar to the the one you saw. The easiest way to tell is when R2 is plugged into the Death Star’s computer to find the tractor beam, there is no narration from C3P0 as that was added later. Also at the end when Luke gets out of his X Wing after blowing up the Death Star and everyone is running towards him he yells, “Carrie!” which later was muddled in the sound mix to just sound like “HeEEy!”
It was areal thrill to see them on a big screen. After seeing them on tiny TVs for so long you forget just how great they looked on one.
If you’re referring to the “Close the blast-doors” dialogue, that dates back to 1977–it just wasn’t present in all mixes. The same is true of Threepio’s dialogue regarding the location of the tractor beam.
