Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Just ask the people who watchedStar Warsin London last week. This wasn’t the standard, publicly available copy, but a vintage print of the 1977 sci-fi classic.Excluding those of you old enough to be around in the summer of 1977 when it was first screened, no one had actually witnessed it in its untouched state.Since that point, that particular copy hasn’t been distributed at all, locked up in a vault for complicated reasons.
All that finally changed this month, thanks to the British Film Institute, which organized a public screening of the 35mm pristine copy with the cooperation of Lucasfilm and withGeorge Lucas' authorization.It was anti-climactic. After decades of pressure, Lucasfilm turned the tables, savoring their chance to say, “I told you so.” Turns out that Mr. Lucas wasn’t drunk with power when he fiddled with his projects, covering up the blemishes. The London screening lends credence to Lucas' paranoia. He was aware of the film’s many deficiencies, eagerly trying to preserve the magic by any means necessary. Whether he was morally right is another question.
What’s the Big Deal About the Original Copy of ‘Star Wars’?
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
Re-released films are seldom exact 1:1 copies of the movie first seen in theaters. Films are reissued, re-edited, re-mixed, cleaned up, and color-adjusted.If you’re a certain age, you might recall the re-release copies of the first three films in the ’90s. Kids, new to the franchise, were none the wiser, but older fans, who had seen it on Laserdisc or recordedStar Warson VHS when it aired on TV years later, knew better. Yes, this was a kind of conspiracy.
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The director first “fixed” the movie in 1981, adding the amended title: “Ep. IV - A New Hope” to the intro crawl, albeit a minor modification. However, he didn’t stop there. The 1997 “Special Edition” introduced more drastic re-edits, including the notorious “Greedo shot first” alteration and a new Jabba scene. He also took it upon himself to obtain every single 35mm print according to theSave Star Warswebsite, a film preservation campaign launched by fans in reaction to Lucas’s overreach. These retouches didn’t win him any trust in the community.
For Their Eyes Only?
The Original 1977 ‘Star Wars’ Was Finally Seen in 2025
Kathleen Kennedy assured those in attendance that they were privy to a great privilege. Well, “privilege” may not be the most fitting word, but the night was definitely an interesting experience. Clearing up any legal issues, the Lucasfilm chief stated thatthe rare showing was perfectly legal, driving home the point that this print was the holiest relic ofStar Warsfandom.YetThe Telegraph’s Robbie Collin complainedthe original movie looked cheap and lacked the proper atmosphere, like actors in a high-school play bumping into wobbly, plywood sets, eliciting some unintended laughter:
“The slapstick between C-3PO and R2D2 looked clunkier, and therefore funnier; the Death Star panels were less like supercomputers than wooden boards with lights stuck on, and so better attuned to the frequency of make-believe. It felt less like watching a blockbuster in the modern sense than the greatest game of dressing up in the desert anyone ever played.”
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The fact is, viewers had their memories defined by nostalgia and the newer versions, not the primitive, authentic version seen only in summer 1977 — the one enshrined in the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1989. If you know anything about ’70s-era special effects, you won’t be surprised that the screening was a bit rough for modern viewers acclimated to CGI and AI. The originalStar Wars? They used vaseline. The low-tech, if brilliant, solutionwowed less-demanding moviegoersin the pet-rock and shag-carpeting phase of civilization.
The George Lucas Paradox
Is the original version ofStar Warsa movie that every fan must watch? Based on the reactions, probably not. Is it the one version that discredits all others? We wouldn’t go that far, because we all already have the definitiveStar Warsin our own head: the copy we first saw when we were seven years old, whether that was a modern Blu-ray collection, an illegal download from a shady website that came with bonus featurettes and bonus Trojan viruses, or a grainy VHS taping your dad recorded in 1992.
There’s room for compromise.Producer Gary Kurtz expressed the need for balance, explaining “that digital enhancement would stand out too much,” but that the studio pushed Lucas to sell box sets.Adding, “I feel like most of the digital enhancements that were done that added things — that weren’t just cleaning up matte lines and taking dirt out — are intrusive, and it would have been better without them.”
Lucas’s attempt to bury the vintage print was doomed to fail, as Disneyleaked unused clipson their streaming site. Instead of rendering it obsolete, he only built up the mystique. By manufacturing a palatable iteration, or at least a glossier one, he updated the film to modern standards, winning over judgmental, younger fans. Yes, production value matters. We may nitpick the guy for manipulating history, but as a businessman, his methods are probably what kept the franchise chugging forward years after the special effects grew hilariously outdated.You can stream the modern version ofStar WarsonDisney+.
