Star Wars vs Star Wars

In 1997, twenty years after the release of the original Star Wars, the film was brought back to theaters. This time, it was repackaged with some brand new visual effects. A trailer, shown before films like Space Jam and Independence Day, debuted and introduced a new generation of fans to Star Wars...

What fans young and old didn't know at the time, was that from then on, the only release available to them would be the Special Editions. What were the changes? Well there are too many to name here, and too many to put into one video. Most notably in the cantina, Han Solo is approached by Greedo, an associate of Han's who works for Jabba the Hutt. Greedo threatens to take Han Solo to Jabba dead if necessary, and Han shoots Greedo first. As a character moment, it shows Han's "shoot first, ask questions later" personality. It showed that he is not someone to take lightly and could be dangerous to our protagonists. In the 2004 DVD, Lucas changed the scene to a digital alteration of Han dodging Greedo's blast and shooting back, essentially removing what was a scene for character development.

The original theatrical versions of the first three films were limited to VHS and LaserDisc, and twenty-two years later, that has never changed. LucasFilm made numerous releases since then. To curb requests from the fans for a release of the unaltered theatrical versions, Lucas put them as bonus features on the 2006 re-release DVDs. So that's it then, problem solved? Not quite. They were versions ported over from the LaserDisc version, and as a result, were not formatted to newer televisions, resulting in a small image on a large screen, as seen below.

Since then, more changes were made when the 2011 Blu-ray was released. The fans had had enough, and after the contentious prequels, the fan-base that had hailed Lucas as their god, had now turned on him. A film was released in 2011 that showed the love-hate relationship between Lucas and his fans entitled The People vs George Lucas.

Enter an English teacher from the Czech Republic named Petr "Harmy" Harmáček. Harmy believed that altering the films in any way was "an act of cultural vandalism." Lucas himself has dedicated a large amount of time and energy to destroying any original technicolor print. His reasons are unknown. The copy given to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress is...the Special Edition. A great article was written about this very topic. You can read it here. So Harmy used what he was given, the 2006 bonus feature version of the films as well as the 2011 Blu-rays. With a team of eight other fans, they re-created the movies in their original theatrical form, now named Star Wars Despecialized.

The only downside, is that it is technically illegal to buy or sell, because it would be illegal for Harmy to make a profit. There are ways to find it, but they are sketchy at best. It was purely a passion project by the fans and for the fans. It quickly became the only way to watch the original Star Wars in the modern technological era. What also made the Harmy version so fantastic was its inclusion of every audio commentary of each film released up to that point. Harmy and his team's hard work cannot be understated.

As the decade continued, 4K (4,000 lines of resolution on screen) was entering the movie world. There were 4K restorations of classic films being released every month on standard Blu-Ray and 4K Blu-ray. Therefore, it was inevitable that Star Wars, one of the most financially successful movies of all time, and maybe the most culturally significant film of all time, would see a modern restoration. As the years went on, nothing but re-releases of the Special Edition Blu-rays appeared, even after the licence was bought by Disney. As of writing this, no release of the original Academy Award-winning film has been made available in HD or 4K. Disney+, a streaming service introduced last month, debuted all of the Star Wars films in 4K with High Dynamic Range. They look great, but there is a catch: they are still the Special Editions, and they suffer from streaming bit-rate loss. Essentially, the viewer loses picture quality because less information is being transferred. Casual movie watchers will never catch the difference, but things like banding and softness will hinder picture quality until the technology improves. Enter the 2016 Project 4K77...

At the time of writing this, 4K77 was a complete success. Team Negative 1 at thestarwarstrilogy.com claims that "97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K. The film negatives cost $1500, cleaning the film cost $870 (plus about $75 shipping each way) and then the scanning costs between $2,000 and $15,000. When a film is professionally scanned in 16-bit color as DPX image files, every single frame weighs in at 100 MB. With upwards of 175,000 frames in each film, a complete scan requires about 21 TB of storage. That's $1000 in hard drives" What was the money they made back in sales? Nothing, due to the same legal wall that Harmy faced. It was crowd and privately funded. It's so good that Harmy himself said his newest version of the Despecialized Edition  will take longer than expected because 4K77 "is so good that for my own personal enjoyment, I'm perfectly happy watching this version of Star Wars. So I don't have as much motivation as I used to to create a new [version] because back [when I created the Despecialized] the best version you could watch was the 'GOUT' (George's Original Unaltered Trilogy)", which is the 2006 DVD bonus feature version.

The Return of the Jedi (4K83) also received the 4K treatment shortly after 4K77 was released to the public, and The Empire Strikes Back (4K80) is in production. Harmy is currently working on a new Despecialized version with the updated 4K scan done by his fellow fans. Yet, the nagging question still remains, will Disney or LucasFilm ever officially release the original unaltered trilogy in 4K, standard Blu-ray, or even on streaming? For now the answer is no. But thanks to the efforts of a select few loyal Star Wars fans and film historians, we will continue to see more improved versions of a beloved classic. I for one will one day be showing my son the unaltered version. He will be fortunate enough to see it the way I saw it for the first time, but now in glorious 4K. 

With the fast-approaching end to the saga (in the form of The Rise of Skywalker), no other film in history has received the same treatment that Star Wars has in the complete systematic eradication of its original source. Maybe someday this will change, but preserving film history is important for future generations to see how far technology and culture has come in shaping the art of storytelling.