Pardon the hijack, but does anybody know if the famous-but-never-seen Biggs scene will be on the DVD?
Greedo fired first. Greedo has always fired first. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
If you really want a good look at the original, get yourself a laserdisc player. I’m pretty sure you can still purchase some of the old SW laserdiscs off of eBay. If your main interest is seeing the Whole Picture, get a letterboxed version; if your main interest is seeing as much fine detail as you can in the center of a frame, get one of the harder-to-find pan-and-scan copies from CBS/FOX video.
What scene is that? I used to have the old SW screensaver on my old PC, it would run through the old script and had a promise of revealing something of the new films too. I never saw either, the Biggs scene or the new material. Anyone know what either was?
The bit with Biggs is in the novelization of the film. It’s basically Luke spotting the battle over Tattooine, rushing to tell his friends about it, and finding that Biggs is home on leave from his stint at the Imperial Academy.
Biggs goes on to tell Luke that he and some crewmates are gonna jump ship at the next opportunity and join the Rebellion. It’s exposition and mild character developement, but nothing terribly exciting, far as I can tell.
The scenes were at least partially filmed*, though I’ve heard conflicting reports over the years as to whether or not they were ever actually included in any cut of the film.
*There was a “Star Wars Storybook” released in 78 that had two or three stills from the “deleted scenes” in it. There’s one shot of Luke wearing a goofy-ass hat looking at the sky with his macro-binoculars, watching the battle, and another shot of him and Biggs standing on (possibly, it’s hard to tell) the roof of a building, presumably the bit where they discuss Biggs’ intended defection.
The missing 'Biggs Scene":
When leaving to fight the final battle, Luke is seen briefly passing his old friend Biggs while heading to his X-Wing. Luke says somehting like “I’ll tell you all about it later”. Of course, Biggs dies in the battle.
In the original film, there is a sequence back on Tatooine where Luke meets up with some of his friends who have gone and joined the “Academy” in a cafe kinda place. Biggs tells Luke what a blast they’ve been having in the service, and how he and some of the other guys are going to jump to the Rebellion.
The scene also shows a old lady nearly get run over by teens in a landspeeder (“You crazy kids!”, waving her fist like a silent film villan), and there’s a part where Luke can see a battle happening, but from the planet, it just appears as flashes of light in the sky.
The scene goes a long way to help understand Luke’s lonelness and re-enforces what kind of losses the Rebels had to give up to earn their freedom.
Lucas likely didn’t add it because he didn’t want to show death or the dark side of war for some reason some 20 years after the film was alrerady out.
The one thing that bothers me about it, if the kids were going to “jump to the rebellion”, does that means they were training to be Storm Troopers?
The Biggs scene appears, IIRC, on the CD-Rom called Star Wars: Behind the Magic (though I think it’s currently OOP).
I think I read an interview somewhere saying that the scene was cut because he wanted a straight narrative line, from the droids to Luke to Ben, instead of a lot of back & forth. The only real cross-cutting that occurs is between Luke/droids/Ben and Vader/Tarkin/Leia.
I thought that to mean pilots, Kenobi talks too about Luke’s father being an excellent pilot and Luke is seen with a model flyer of some sort too.
And yes I do remember that scene now. Luke looks up to the sky and sees two bright lights, the Leia’s Corvette being chased by the Star Destroyer. He points it out to Biggs who dismisses it as a ship refuelling in orbit.
Just wanted to say that the only reason for the Jabba scene was so George Lucas could placate the no-life fanboys with the orgasmic fanwank of sticking Boba Fett into the movie somewhere. There’s no intelligent reason why an intergalactic bounty hunter like Fett would be hanging around on a backwater planet such as Tattoine, much less cooling his heels with a second-rate mobster like Jabba.
And the special edition sucks. Aside from the larger, more expansive views of Mos Eisley, the rest of the changes made the movie worse.
Isn’t that precisely what he’s doing in Return of the Jedi?
I’ll second this. I was a wonderfully dramatic moment when Luke looked at Vader and calmly fell backward seemingly to his death. Really added some weight to the story. His screaming like a frightened schoolgirl on the SE ruins it.
Solo/Greedo shootout: Solo shooting first made him seem like a dangerous guy, probably a good quality for a guy who frequents cantinas filled with monsters. How does it help the story to lessen that image in the SE?
You know what? I didn’t even like those. If Lucas had jazzed up some of the effects, and restored the cut scenes, I could have lived with it, but he had to (in the words of Orson Welles) “rub his crayons all over my beautiful movie.”
Most of the crap with Mos Eisley was just splicing in shots of creatures moving around, and they blocked things which were happening in the background. There was a purity and an innocence in the original films, which was lost when Lucas redid them. It’s like calling Nigger Jim from Tom Sawyer “N-word Jim.” You lose all the flavor and color from the original, and you take a gourmet meal and transform it into a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Sure, more people will buy the Happy Meal, but does the Happy Meal really taste better? Of course not.
ArchiveGuy, nice link.
I see according to the review of the DVD:
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/reviews3/starwarstrilogy.html
Btw, I am also one who thinks this whole screaming over the changes is silly. I liked the Special Editions as well as the Originals.
And on the Han shoots first thing, I refer you to something written for the review on IGN.com, which I think is a good argument for the change (though I don’t care either way, really):
http://dvd.ign.com/articles/545/545786p3.html
I have to say I never saw it that way, but it makes a lot of sense. We are celebrating someone who shot first, but the lesson in Star Wars was not to be aggresive, for it leads to bad things.
There is one thing that wasn’t changed in the special edition (and presumably the upcoming DVD) that I felt was a glaring oddity. I’m talking about the claymation creatures that Han Solo and Luke rode in the begriming of Empire Strikes Back. I always thought it looked so hokey in comparison to everything else. Shouldn’t be that hard to CG it up a bit.
Oh, baloney. Han shot first because his life was in danger. And it doesn’t explain why Greedo tried to shoot him in the first place, which is really the dumb part as everyone else has said.
Someone also needs to beat Ridley Scott upside the head for not releasing the theatrical cut of Blade Runner on DVD (or VHS, for that matter.) Yeah, the ending’s darker, but why in God’s name did they omit Harrison Ford’s narration? That ruins the whole film noir-ish aspect of the original version!
At least Steven Spielberg had the decency of keeping the original “E.T.” cut in print.
Y’know, Max, now that you mention it… I remember when I was a kid, and *Star Wars * had come out, and the massive merchandising toy wave washed over us like a commercial flood…
…and I remember wandering around in the toy section of some department store… and at the time, Fisher-Price was selling these little hand-cranked movie viewer things, right? You could insert cartridges, and look in the peephole, and crank the little crank, and watch about 45 seconds of footage from a movie or cartoon, depending on what cartridge you slotted in.
The store had several, with the cartridges glued in and chained to the counter, so the kiddies could try before the buy.
I was a bit old for cartoons at the time, but I was fascinated with the ones that had *Star Wars * cartridges in them… and one of them had the scene where Han and Luke and Chewie are breaking into the detention center, blasting cameras, control panels, and evil black-suited Imperial officers.
One of those scenes, I just saw again on the web site that Max has linked to, above.
So… apparently, it was okay to have this for children on a Fisher-Price movie viewer in 1978, but it’s too extreme for DVD in 2004?
Jeez. I fear for the children…
Did Greedo have instructions to bring Han in alive?
Well, Fett had just brought Solo to Jabba a few days or weeks beforehand, so it’s safe to assume he was enjoying the liquor and women and whatever else was being offered by his celebratory host. He gets a reward, and he gets a little free R&R. Presumably when Jabba’s mood and hospitality go south, it’s time for Fett to move on.
Prior to that time, there’s absolutely no reason at all for Fett to be hanging around with Jabba.
Well, except for one thing: Now that we have a line of succession from Jango Fett to Boba Fett that involves Obi-Wan Kenobi who wound up on Tattooine and was at least partly responsible for Jango’s death, there is at least a thin rationalization for Boba Fett to be skulking around the desert planet. Why he’d be worried about Solo, though, is still a mystery.
It seemed to me that much more time must have passed between Empire and the beginning of Jedi than a few weeks. Aside from Luke getting his hand replaced, which had to be some pretty serious surgery, even with Star Wars tech, how long would it take to get Lando a job as one of Jabba’s palace guards? That can’t be something they give to anybody who walks in off the street. I always figured it had to be a couple months, minimum.
Of course, it occurs to me now that Jabba knew Han’s friends would try to rescue him, and so he could have paid Boba Fett extra to hang around and help catch them, too.
Bad things like being frozen in carbonite and sold to a ganglord? Lucas’s “theme” was already there in the original version. As for Han being a “reformed scoundrel” and not a “reformed murderer”, please. How many charges of murder were laid against Luke for blowing up the Death Star? How is Han killing the representative of a notorious crimelord in self defense somehow worse than Luke killing hundreds of thousands of employees of his own government in self defense?