A New Hope and the rest of the Star Wars trilogy may be preserved and pristine, but there’s something wonderfully tactile about the untouched theatrical print.
The 20th Century Fox logo wobbles as its accompanying fanfare tinnily rings out. An Imperial Star Destroyer roaring overhead is joined by scratches and splotches of dust. Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi glide into a rather subdued Mos Eisley with just one Dewback as a background extra.
These are just some of the wonderful sights and sounds you’ll find in a set of early Star Wars prints you’ll find in certain corners of the internet. Essentially, these are versions of the original trilogy as they were released in 1977, 1980 and 1983 respectively – with all their flaws, quirks and practical effects still intact. Scanned from some old prints of Star Wars (later A New Hope), The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, they’re grainy, faded and etched with years of dirt and scratches from where they’ve been hauled around cinemas and run through projectors. In short, they’re in a bit of a sorry state. So why do they look so captivating?
Watch A New Hope on Disney+, or maybe put on a 4K Blu-ray disc, and the difference is stark. C-3PO’s gold suit positively gleams; Stormtroopers are now rendered in crisp black and white. You can see every pore on Mark Hamill’s face. There’s the question, though, of whether Lucasfilm’s preservationists have gone a little too far the other way: film grain has been minimised to such a degree that you could almost forget that Star Wars was originally shot on celluloid.
Star Wars’ march towards its pristine, scratch-free future officially began in the mid-1990s. Franchise creator George Lucas, then still at the helm of Lucasfilm, decided to use digital technology to remaster and update his Star Wars movies in time for its 20th anniversary. A lengthy (and likely expensive) restoration process began in 1995, with the fragile and deteriorating negatives taken from the archives and painstakingly cleaned up.
Read more: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
Lucas’ more controversial decision, though, was to alter and update certain effects shots; a once deleted scene featuring Jabba The Hut was put back into A New Hope, for example, while Han Solo’s confrontation with Greedo was infamously messed with. We won’t rake over those much-discussed changes again in detail here; it’s enough to say that, whether fans liked it or not, the Special Edition cuts of the Original Trilogy, released from May 1997 onwards, quickly became Lucasfilm’s definitive versions of those films.
Tweaks and changes continued to be made to the Original Trilogy (“Maclunkey!”) as the movies were reissued for various home formats. The one thing that remained constant, as the films were released on DVD, Blu-ray and then 4K Ultra HD, was Lucasfilm’s reluctance to let fans see those unmodified, theatrical edits.
In 2004, the Special Edition DVD release contained both the Special Edition cuts and the theatrical versions; the drawback being that the latter were low-quality transfers from a 1993 LaserDisc release. Since then, the theatrical editions haven’t been officially available, either on disc or on Disney+. As a result, there are entire generations of younger people whose only official exposure to the Original Trilogy are those cleaned-up, eerily pristine versions now on Disney’s streaming service.
To watch those grainy Star Wars theatrical prints is to be reminded of their true roots. The saga didn’t originate in the early digital era of the 1990s, but the grungy, all-analogue 1970s. What would become A New Hope, first released to unsuspecting audiences in May 1977, is as steeped in the harshness and cynicism of post-Watergate America as it is the space fantasy of Flash Gordon matinee serials. Obi Wan Kenobi chops off a goon’s arm in a scummy watering hole; C-3PO unceremoniously dumps Jawa corpses on a bonfire; Stormtroopers turn Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle into a pair of twisted, screaming skeletons.
And yes, Han definitely shot first.
George Lucas then spent the latter stages of his movie-making career gently pedalling his franchise away from that grunginess; 2005’s Revenge Of The Sith may have had its moments of violence, but his sequel trilogy as a whole was given a clean, digital backlot aesthetic that was a world apart from the films he directed or produced in the 1970s and 80s. Rather than accept that his approach to filmmaking had changed in the intervening years, Lucasfilm instead began to tweak the Original Trilogy so it had more of the cleanliness of his sequels.
Lucas isn’t the only veteran filmmaker to do this. Director James Cameron recently oversaw new transfers of his 80s and 90s movies, including True Lies, The Abyss and Aliens. As he made plain in interviews, he was hands-on in that transfer process, and evidently wanted to put out versions of those movies that lacked the film grain of their initial releases. At the filmmaker’s behest, a post production company called Park Road was employed to use its AI software to digitally upscale the original footage, stripping out film grain and artificially sharpening the details underneath.
Read more: James Cameron, 4K remasters, and the use of AI
When complaints were made that these new releases went too far, Cameron issued an angry response. “When people start reviewing your grain structure, they need to move out of mom’s basement and meet somebody,” he said in August 2024. “I mean, are you fucking kidding me? I’ve got a great team that does the transfers […] All the Avatar films are done that way. Everything is done that way.”
Cameron has inadvertently proven his detractors’ point here. Avatar was made in 2009 with digital technology; Aliens and The Abyss were made in the 1980s with (largely) analogue techniques. It’s not unreasonable for fans of those latter films to want them to look as though they were made in the 1980s rather than the 2000s.
All of which brings us back to Star Wars. From 1995 onwards, the Original Trilogy has gradually morphed into a digitally-enhanced simulacra of what it once was. In certain shots, the work of talented puppeteers and artists has been replaced entirely. The charming Max Reebo Band puppets in Return Of The Jedi were overpainted with CGI in 1997, for example; the song the band performed, Lapti Nek, was replaced by the far less appealing Jedi Rocks.
As a result, chunks of the Original Trilogy are the products of the 1990s, 2000s or even later, as successive groups of people have stepped in and tinkered with those movies. Like Darth Vader, the officially-approved Original Trilogy is more machine now than man.
Of course, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the Special Editions by themselves, and certainly, few would argue that restoring and preserving the original negatives was anything other than a good thing. But by essentially keeping the initial, theatrically-released versions of Star Wars out of the public’s view, Lucasfilm is in danger of subtly rewriting its own history. A family sitting down to watch A New Hope on Disney+ in 2024 might be fooled into thinking that Star Wars always looked as polished and unblemished as, say, The Phantom Menace, The Force Awakens or the assorted TV shows that Lucasfilm has turned out since it was acquired by Disney.
Dog-eared and scratchy, the above-mentioned transfers of the Star Wars theatrical prints are the polar opposite: they’re likely even more tired and beaten up than the versions people sat through in their local cinemas over 40 years ago. All the same, they provide a fascinating glimpse into the Star Wars saga’s handmade, tactile past. If anything, they expose just how imaginative Lucas was in his (relatively) low-budget world-building, and how ingenious Industrial Light & Magic was, given the tools it had available.
In short, they’re Star Wars, warts and all.
A big thanks to Josephine Riesman (@josie.zone on Bluesky) for inspiring this article.
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