This story is best viewed on a computer/tablet.
Excitement was in the air as my father walked down the steps towards the house on an otherwise average afternoon in 1996. At nine years of age my needs were pretty simple.
I was all about Macintosh computer games and toys related to the things I was interested in. With the internet still very much in the dial-up modem era, growing up in mid-nineties Australia was arguably a much less demanding, more scheduled reality for kids. Sunday night network television movies, landline telephones, and Agro's Cartoon Connection in the mornings before school.
Any cool new thing that was a must-have for kids was advertised on TV and executed in the playground. On this fateful afternoon I was excited, because my incessant pestering had obviously reached flash point for dad: he was bringing me a new toy. Each step he took brought me that much closer to having something I'd been fixated on thanks to a bunch of well-targeted ads...
A brand new set of Star Wars Micro Machines.
Pictured: The survivng Star Wars Micro Machine Army of 1996, circa 2015.
I was introduced to Star Wars by one of the neighbourhood kids in 1994, and like many millions before me I was quickly obsessed by the universe George Lucas had created. It was an epic space opera, featuring an aspirational farm boy, a princess, a scoundrel, and a wise elder of a dying art - all crossing paths in an ongoing struggle to save the galaxy. And there were lasers. Some pretty captivating stuff for any nine year old kid.
I borrowed a set of well-worn VHS tapes of the original trilogy, recorded straight off broadcast TV, and began to immerse myself in the story. Pinching the VCR from our lounge room, I screened A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi every night as I went to sleep - for months.
Suffice is to say, I've seen the movies.
Once Return of the Jedi left theatres in 1983, the Star Wars trilogy was doomed to a low-fidelity existence on the day's consumer formats, and by 1996 a whole generation - my generation - had never seen or experienced Star Wars as it was always envisioned to be seen: on the big screen. For years the meagre VHS was the only way to watch Luke Skywalker and his merry band pan-and-scan their way across the galaxy, cropped to fit square TVs.
Such was the magic of what George Lucas created - the basic story far transcended the home viewing experiences of the time. Though little did I know, there was hope on the horizon with two suns. Imagine my face when I saw this trailer during a screening of Space Jam in 1996:
"See it again...
for the first time."
Celebrating the then upcoming 20th anniversary of Star Wars, the 1997 Special Edition successfully revitalized a hype train that had been losing steam in the years past Jedi. The marketing behemoth behind the franchise, having roared ceaselessly since 1977, simply charged on and started producing new merchandise à la the Micro Machines I so desperately wanted, to ride the renewed wave of popularity.
Star Wars was back baby, and it was about to rock my nine-year-old socks off. What I didn't know or understand at that time however, was the actual importance of the Special Edition.
"When I first saw the original negative, it was gone," says Lucasfilm's Producer on the Special Edition, Rick McCallum, talking to American Cinematographer in 1997 about the physical state of A New Hope. The outright complexity of the original shoot in 1977, the article goes on, and the surprise "overwhelming success" of Star Wars (as it was then known) meant the original film negative was in a pretty bad way by the early 1990s.
The number of different Kodak film stocks used during the shoot also meant that the whole negative couldn't just be 'washed' together in one step - the movie had to be fully disassembled into its original segments, washed by hand, then reassembled. Further to that, many of the visual effects shots involving multiple on-screen elements - like X-Wing's flying down the Death Star trench - had permanently faded and needed to be reassembled from scratch.
To say 'it must have been a gargantuan effort' is putting it mildly.
(Image Source: OriginalTrilogy.com)
The 'Special Edition' moniker wasn't just PR spin for an upcoming re-release of a twenty-year-old movie - it was a necessary step to save the film before it literally faded away. But George Lucas also realized some other opportunities lay within.
"For the redo, we didn't change anything more or less than what George wanted," says Rick McCallum, again in American Cinematographer.
"There have been special editions of other films where directors have gone back to restore the cut the studio took away from them, but nobody's ever gone back to reshoot and augment those things that they clearly saw but couldn't achieve at the time. It's such a romantic vision."
Lucas's "romantic vision" started with a list of two dozen shot alterations for A New Hope - but the project's scope quickly increased from a relatively straight-forward visual effects tidy-up, to something on a much grander scale. Although discussions surrounding the Special Edition date back to 1993, production on the long-awaited prequel trilogy had been set well into motion by the time A New Hope was actually being restored in 1995. For Lucas, the Special Edition had become an opportunity to test out this new-fangled 3D CGI technology for the very first time, well before rolling the cameras on The Phantom Menace in 1997.
The tone of the Special Edition operation had swiftly shifted from restoration to correction; correcting the bugbears and faults of the 1970s cutting-edge limitations to Lucas's vision, as he saw them, using 1990s cutting-edge computer technology.
He could finally finish his 'abandoned' film.
Inset: Jabba inserted into A New Hope circa 1997. (Image Source: The Jam)
Main Picture: Irish actor Declan Mulholland was a stand in for Jabba The Hutt in a deleted scene from Star Wars (1977). The scene was cut due to technical issues, until 1997. (Image Source: The Humanoid)
"I wanted to have Mos Eisley be more exotic...
more like a real city.
(It's) what really prompted a lot of this redo on the film."
Armed with a freshly reassembled, colour timed and cleaned master - courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, Pacific Titles and YCM Labs - Lucas could have called it a day, knowing he now had the 'perfect' copy of the original film in the can. It ultimately just ended up being the perfect template.
According to an exhaustive essay on the restoration process (which is a fascinating read in itself if you have an interest in film preservation), it was not feasible at the time to scan the entire movie and turn it into a high-res digital copy to make alterations like they would today. Instead, segments of the film slated for change were individually identified and sent to ILM for scanning at 2K resolution (just above today's "full HD"). The changes were made, the result was printed back onto film, and those pieces were then cut back into the original negative. As author Michael Kaminski notes, "The O-neg was slowly being subsumed by new material".
The Star Wars that fans knew and loved for twenty-years prior was becoming something like Darth Vader - a sliced and diced hybrid of man and technology.
Pictured: Original concept art by Ralph McQuarrie (Image Source: Wookieepedia)
While the fresh CGI additions were cool to a nine year old, and more along the lines of Lucas's original vision for the film, the slide down the revision rabbit hole had only really just begun. The 20-million-dollar Special Edition served as a profitable facelift at the time, but the problem with the term "cutting edge" is that it's specific to whatever time it's said. Save for the Death Star battle changes, many of the 1997 CGI additions to A New Hope have aged poorly.
In an infamous interview with Associated Press before the original trilogy hit DVD for the first time in 2004, Lucas again reiterated that "the special edition is the one" he wanted out, and the original movies were "available on VHS" if anyone wanted them. He had quietly made further changes for the DVD release, and the original trilogy had dropped the "Special Edition" moniker entirely.
Drafting is an important part of any creative process, and Lucas saw his first iterations of the films as just another version in the reject pile. It's easy to understand his viewpoint - he's an artist and it's his creation, so in the wake of creating the context-altering prequel trilogy, he made revisions so that all six films - the prequels and the originals - would fit together with a cohesive narrative.
"It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it."
According to Michael Kaminski's book, The Secret History of Star Wars, Lucas this time wanted the original trilogy to reflect "the slicker and more high-contrast look of the prequels". By all accounts, the actual result was a shameful mess of inconsistent colour, crushed blacks and magenta.
Washed out magenta tones everywhere.
From Greedo's first and last shot, awful colour, and the near silence of John William's Academy Award winning score in the Death Star showdown - by the 2004 DVD release of Star Wars, a loud portion of the legacy fan base was getting pissed off.
This was apparently 'the' version of the film, so why was it such a sloppy departure from what I remembered? Surely I wasn't the only one feeling a disturbance in the force.
With Revenge of the Sith in the digital-can, Lucas turned to prominent film restorers Lowry Digital to again "clean-up" the original trilogy and remove the rest of the films analog blemishes, digitally. A digital master was created, and now the limits to revision were endless.
(Image Source: 2004 PAL DVD Release)
Not supposed to be green.
Pictured: Leicester Square Theatre, 1977. (Image Source: Prospect Magazine)
On the one hand, this was clearly a man that was passionate and serious about what he had created. But on the other, his comments and actions were widely perceived as a casual and complete disregard of fan interest. A kind of arrogant, Cartman-esk "I do what a want". It was a game of control; something Lucas has grappled with throughout his career.
But by Hayden Christensen's ghost, this time he had a problem.
The very same technology he'd been using to enhance his creations was just as quickly becoming his undoing. Disgruntled fans, increasingly disappointed by each stroke of Lucas's digital pen, began widely circulating bootlegs from the 'reject' pile. Control was slipping away.
Pictured: Peter Mayhew's 1976 draft script of Star Wars. (Image Source: Behind The Magic)
For years, particularly in the early 2000s, the highest quality version of the original films were all conversions of the Laserdisc's from 1993. While miles ahead of VHS, it was still a painfully low quality source that got worse as the television got bigger.
As internet connections increased in speed, bootlegging was no longer confined to illegal market sellers pushing bad merchandise. A torrent was just a few clicks away.
In light of the rampant availability, Lucas begrudgingly authorized an official release of the 'drafts' in 2006 - with two catches. Each film had to be bought individually to get the "bonus disc" featuring the theatrical cuts, and all were sourced from - you guessed it - the Laserdisc masters. It was a classic double-dip scenario, and a exceedingly lazy attempt to corner the bootleg market.
Lucasfilm's Jim Ward told USA Today at the time, "It is state of the art as of 1993, and that's not as good as state of the art 2006".
In the wake of news about the lazy 2006 re-releases, concerned fans from the Original Trilogy fan site petitioned Lucasfilm to put in the effort and release a higher quality version. Their passionate pleas were dismissed in a statement from the company's publicity department: "We want you to be aware that we have no plans – now or in the future – to restore the earlier versions."
After subsequent petitions also failed, Original Trilogy fans started looking at alternative methods to restore the films - especially after the 2011 Blu-ray's revealed the same quality issues had carried over from the earlier DVDs. They decided the answer was to produce a fan edit.
Enter 27-year-old fan, Petr "Harmy" Harmáček.
Pictured: Star Wars merchandising boss, Marc Pevers. (1977) (Image Source: People Magazine)
In releasing the Blu-ray's, Lucasfilm had finally handed the fans a flawed template, as they saw it, in sparkling high definition. As Lucas himself had done 14 years earlier, Harmy and a team of online contributors set to work on a painstaking effort to correct the past. Eventually "Harmy's Despecialized Edition" was born.
In an interview with ABC's Daniel Miller, just before the theatrical release of The Force Awakens, Harmy says he simply wanted to show people "the original Oscar-winning version", free of the changes that often buried the tireless efforts of the original artists under layers of CGI.
"The original visual effects in Star Wars were completely ground breaking at the time and trying to suppress the original versions is, in my opinion, an act of cultural vandalism."
Harmy built the Despecialized Edition using the Blu-ray as a base, carefully inserting portions of scanned film and elements upscaled from Laserdisc, digital television recordings, and production stills. The latest version also has 21 different audio tracks, culled from almost forty years of home and theatrical releases of Star Wars.
Nothing officially released has been as definitive, and this is an entirely fan-made effort distributed for free. The project resides in a bit of a copyright grey-area, but with no money changing hands, lawyers for Lucasfilm and subsequent owner Disney have left it alone to-date.
Pictured: Petr "Harmy" Harmáček.
(Image Source: Dominik Jůn/Radio Prague)
See the staggering amount of work that went into creating the DE at Harmy's Youtube Channel
(Image Source: Redditor "Aperman")
However ethically murky the methods of obtaining such fan edits are, the quality and thoroughness of the Despecialized Edition of A New Hope speaks for itself. Though the keen-eyed observer will inevitably be able to tell that some scenes have been manipulated, as I could, the movie looks and feels more like it should.
George Lucas's penchant for magenta has been corrected for the most part. And while the DE is still technically a work-in-progress, Harmy told the ABC that ultimately his version is only meant as a placeholder until a "true restoration from 100 per cent original sources" comes along.
Well, that time has come.
Although film prints were generally owned and reclaimed or destroyed by studios at the end of a movies theatre run, there exists a black market of privately owned prints. In the years since its 1977 premiere and the 1981 re-release, the Kodak quick-fade problem that plagued the Star Wars master has also reportedly affected many of its copies as well. Unfortunately for Lucas however, time has also failed to reclaim every copy of his 'draft'.
Enter "Team Negative1".
After a few false starts and a few thousand dollars spent on unusable prints, "Mr Black" (not his real name) obtained a Spanish low-fade 35mm print of Star Wars off eBay. It wasn't perfect, but it was all there.
With no background in film at all, and having faced difficulty in getting any commercial outfit to do a scan of a copyrighted movie, Mr Black's prints sat in a pile of canisters for a couple of years awaiting a solution. In 2011 he found a partner, and together they bought an old projector, rigging up an amateur digital capture solution to start recording every frame in 4K.
With a small group of contributors dotted across the USA, Team Negative1 began the daunting task of manually cleaning up every frame in a conscious effort to retain the 70s aesthetic of the film.
In January of this year they finally released their Silver Screen Edition online - and it is absolutely incredible.
“In that sense, there’s an aesthetic. The older crowd, the retro crowd, is like, ‘give me the grain and give me the matte boxes and give me a little weave in the picture...”
Pictured: A capture of the infamous Greedo scene from the Silver Screen Edition.
It was all there - the desert scenes were all grainy, Han shoots first, the laser flashes were red instead of magenta, Luke's lightsaber was blue, and John Williams' soundtrack was pumped right up in the theatrical stereo mix as model X-Wing's flew-by.
The movie feels exactly as I remember from watching it on god awful VHS tapes ad nauseum. Leaving the CGI additions aside, the digital tomfoolery might have removed the dirt and the grain, but it also erased the soul of the thing. It simply hasn't felt the same since that time, and if you search your feelings I'm sure you'll know it to be true too.
The emotional attachment to these distant feelings is the entire driving force behind all of these projects. Lucas felt like the original films didn't match up with his vision, and the fans felt the same about his altered ones. Passions and technology converged, and now the discerning viewer can choose from a stack of versions.
Pictured: A Star Wars trading card, personalized and signed by Garrick Hagon (Biggs).
With Mickey Mouse having bought Lucasfilm for a casual four-billion-dollars in 2012, George Lucas is now out of the picture creatively. The 40th anniversary of Star Wars is also right around the corner, and I find it hard to believe Disney will sit on the opportunity to sort out the saga once and for all. The previous digital negative was reportedly only at 2K, so with 'Ultra HD' consumer gear right around the affordability corner, it'll need to be done at some point.
And if they don't? Team Negative1 is currently working on a Technicolor print of Star Wars, alongside similar 35mm-based restorations of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi - so either way, they're coming. In the meantime, obtain the Silver Screen Edition and see the film again, for the first time. It's more than worth it.
Harmy's cut of Star Wars was already enough for me to literally give away my officially sanctioned Blu-ray's, but watching the Team Negative1 print brought back a presence I'd not felt since... I was nine years old.