The little black oval in the corner that shows up every so often.
One thing I noticed on this watching that I never realized before: We see Luke being given the ceremonial heirloom weapon, we see him practicing with it, we see his mentor and the villain using similar weapons, but we never once see Luke himself actually using a lightsabre for anything but practice. That leads me to wonder if Lucas wasn’t already considering sequels, because if not, that’s a pretty big Chekov’s Sword.
I noticed this as well, for all the promotional media and toys showing Luke with a lightsaber he never once uses it as a weapon(well except for training) in ANH.
If you don’t know about it and want to blow some time I suggest you search online for the early drafts and revisions of Star Wars or ANH, one version had a grizzled old general Luke having to train cadets. The princess had a treasure and they both needed protecting in one(I think he wanted to use a Japanese actress?) a whole lot of cool details.
Also it is shocking how much Star Wars was cut down, Lucas must have had a freaking six hour film in mind in the beginning! Also a TON of things not seen until the prequels were in early drafts, including the Kaminoan cloners.
The Annotated Screenplays by Laurent Bouzereau is a shortcut to this, if you don’t feel like reading the numerous drafts. FWIW, the original treatment, based heavily on The Hidden Fortress, reads like a hybrid of ANH and The Phantom Menace.
Right. In the days before splicing single reels into one big one, those were the cues to the projectionist to swap projectors. The first one was a warning, the second said, “Do it now!”
It was in the print I first saw as a 15 year old.
I laughed my heinie off.
Am I the only one who doesn’t fetishize the original cut?
I will grant you that Greedo shooting first is ridiculous in theory and execution and I would buy a copy that restored that original bit in an instant, but that’s less than a second. The explosions look better, and nearly everything else is improved or is net neutral.
I just don’t buy into the whole originilist mantra. and it’s SO PREVALENT with SW. You can hardly find a person without that exact same opinion.
What about the addition of CGI dinosaurs and Jawa and Stormtrooper pratfalls into Mos Eisley? It completely ruined the realism for me/
I’m an “originalist” for nostalgia’s sake, but honestly, watching the Blu-rays, especially in order (I-VI), I quite enjoy most of the changes overall. I can’t complain.
Still, it’d be nice to have the choice. The Blade Runner set, with five(!) different versions, is really the prime example of how to do it right.
Did someone stand up, wave his had across his face, and say: This is the not the movie you are looking for?
Just so people who have never seen the original version can get an idea of what was changed. The absolute worst change in my mind even worse than the Greedo shot first issue is the CGI Jabba scene, not only does it look hideous it turns a dangerous crime lord into a fucking joke. Jabba lets Han rip him a new er cloaca hole and step on his tail, WTF? W…T…F…? Way to remove all menace and spoil ROTJ.
More and more I really believe Lucas isn’t the filmmaker he was back in 77 and he is hell bent on inserting cartoonish elements into his universe. Look at the changes and you can see how much more childish they make the film, why?
Another revision question. I know “A New Hope” first appeared on the 1981 re-release. What I want to know is when Lucas decided that was the name of the first movie. Was it before or after Empire was released?
I think it’s less “originalist” than “nostalgic.” Fans just want to watch the movie they liked to begin with. I was even introduced to the Special Editions when I was pretty young - they were released in theaters when I was 13 - and that still doesn’t override all the times I saw the movies before that on TV and VHS.
That said, I do think that the changes are bad, when I’m being objective. On top of looking out of place, the CGI is just bad, and dated in a way that the 70’s SFX aren’t.
At any rate, Chronos’ experience sounds awesome, and I wish I had been there. It can be easy to forget, with everything that has come since, but Star Wars is still a fantastic movie.
The justification for this is that Ford walked behind the actor doubling the part, before they knew he was going to be a giant alien with a tail, thus necessitating some jigging to make it look like he’s stepping on a tail. In the original comic it’s just some big human he’s talking to.
Why they put it back in the first place is beyond me. It’s nearly the exact dialogue he uses when speaking to Greedo so it was really unnecessary.
I thought it was there for the 1979 re-release, meaning he decided it when Empire was in production.
I could be wrong, though.
Even aside from the nostalgia factor, a lot of the improvements were just bad. Like, effects artifacts showing up that didn’t before, or colors being “enhanced” to the wrong color. Or, in Empire Strikes Back, there were exterior windows added to some walls, that were obviously interior walls.
Now, things like the “Episode IV: A New Hope” not being in the opening crawl, that’s just nostalgia, and it doesn’t really make a big difference if it’s there or not. But a lot of the changes really were objectively and absolutely for the worse.
No, it was definitely introduced in the '81 re-release. Given that Star Wars was also re-released in August '79 but without the “Episode IV: A New Hope”, yet filming on Empire was complete by mid-September '79, I can only guess that Lucas hadn’t decided on a title for the original film until after Empire’s release.
To the previous poster:
“and keep it quiet.”
I know that Lucas now says it was always his intent to replace the human actor with a matted-in alien, but (even ignoring that the way the scene was blocked and shot makes it clear that this was not the original idea) it’s obvious to anybody who remembers the 1970s that the (fully costumed) human actor was cast for his resemblance to Jimmy the Greek, which name “Jabba the Hutt” is meant to evoke.
Holy shit Lucas is still altering the film nonsensically, look at this from the blu ray release:
Remember when R2 is hiding from the Tusken raiders? Well now they added CGI rocks to make it look like R2 squeezed in a too small hole:confused:
I saw that scene!
[Irish accent]
“Han me boy, why’d you shoot poor Greedo?”
[/IA]