Last week, Lucasfilm shocked the world with the announcement that its plans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Star Wars with a theatrical re-release would mark the first official re-release of the original theatrical cut of A New Hope for the first time in decades. But the legacy of tweaks George Lucas has made to Star Wars is as long as Star Wars‘ existence itself… and what “original” actually means has been changing, from a certain point of view, from the very beginning.
No one, least of all Lucas, could have predicted the way Star Wars would change pop culture as we knew it when it first released in 1977. The movie that made it to theaters was one of a thousand compromises, with things tweaked and cut and given up on as Lucas strove to realize his ambitious ideas on screen. The moment Star Wars hit theaters, the director was not done pushing what he could change, emboldened by its immediate success—establishing a long history of his revisits to the movie that changed his career forever. Here’s a timeline of the changes made, from 1977 to the film’s latest version streaming on Disney+.
1977
After Star Wars‘ release in May of 1977, multiple changes were made between its initial launch and the film’s wider theatrical run later in the year: four visual errors in the film were corrected, including new laser effects and explosions during the Millennium Falcon‘s escape from Mos Eisley, a recomposition of the matte painting used to depict the exterior of the Massassi temple on Yavin IV, and changes to the cloudscape in the shot of the Rebel fighters leaving the base to assault the Death Star. The last change made didn’t affect the film itself, but its closing credits sequence, which was completely redone with new formatting and spacing.
Lucas also made multiple dialogue and audio changes between the 35mm Dolby Stereo and 70mm 6-track audio versions of the films, and the mono mix created in the summer of 1977. The changes were minor compared to audio tweaks to come over the next 50 years, largely adjusting the timing of certain lines of dialogue and effects, rather than radically changing anything outright, although some voiceover lines were altered for characters like Stormtroopers and C-3PO. Perhaps the most identifiable differences include a complete re-recording of Shelagh Fraser’s lines as Aunt Beru, done out of a belief by Lucas that her original takes sounded too British, and a correction so that Luke accurately says, “Blast it, Wedge, where are you?” during the Death Star assault, rather than cursing Biggs (that will become important later!).
1981
The first significant change to Star Wars is when it officially becomes A New Hope. Re-released in theaters after the launch of Empire Strikes Back a year prior, Star Wars‘ opening crawl was updated to include the subtitled “Episode IV: A New Hope” to match Empire‘s own use of the episodic titling. There were several other updates to the opening crawl beyond this most obvious one: a new starfield background was used, to match Empire‘s, as was the Star Wars title card, and a minor alteration in the crawl to capitalize “Rebel” in its second paragraph.
Those were not the only tweaks for the re-release, though: the opening shots of the Tantive IV‘s pursuit were recomposited to remove some visible bordering, as were slight changes to some effects like engine glow and the positioning of planets in the background of the chase.
1982-1993
A New Hope‘s first home releases also included some minor changes. The initial VHS, Betamax, and CED releases of the film used the 35mm Dolby Stereo audio track, removing a C-3PO line added in the mono mix when R2-D2 displays the Death Star’s internal layouts, where the protocol droid explains that shutting down one of the station’s tractor beam generators would free the Millennium Falcon. The limitations of CED and Laserdisc as a format meant those initial releases in particular also had a peculiar change: the film was sped up to fit on a singular disc, cutting its run time from 121 minutes to under two hours.
The laserdisc releases of A New Hope utilized a newly remastered audio track, but there were further changes in various iterations for the laserdisc release of the film over the remainder of the 1980s and early 1990s. The 1988 widescreen laserdisc release of A New Hope in America was based on the master used for a Japanese release from 1986, which had been adjusted to account for Japanese language subtitling. Attempting to correct the changes ultimately created an issue where the viewable section of the screen shrunk over the course of the film, but this was corrected in a 1992 re-release.
A 1993 laserdisc release of the entire trilogy, dubbed The Definitive Collection, used yet another newly supervised audio mix for A New Hope, this time incorporating elements from all three original Dolby Stereo, 6-track, and mono mixes, including the latter’s dialogue changes. These same editions of the film were rereleased on laserdisc and VHS in 1995, marking the last time the “original” versions of all three films would be available in a widely accessible format for another decade.
© Lucasfilm1997
We’ve reached the big one: the release of the Star Wars special editions. Beyond remastering and restoration of all three films for fidelity’s sake, A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi all received a swath of cosmetic updates to their visual effects, incorporating new, reworked, and extended shots that utilized CGI (including some that incorporated tie-in elements from other parts of the since-established Expanded Universe tie-in media, such as the presence of swoop bikes and Dash Rendar’s Outrider in Mos Eisley from Shadows of the Empire).
But perhaps more infamously, each film also received some narrative tweaks and additions, many of which are still debated to this day. We’ll stick to A New Hope, as that’s what we’re focusing on here: two significant added scenes include Han Solo’s encounter with Jabba in Mos Eisley, now featuring a CG recreation of the character’s appearance from Return of the Jedi (deleted scenes from the original film that this footage was taken from portrayed Jabba as a human, leading to an awkward addition here where Han “accidentally” steps on Jabba’s tail while walking behind him) as well as a brief appearance by Boba Fett in the background, and a scene added to the Yavin IV base where Luke and Biggs reunite with each other, giving the latter’s death during the Death Star assault more dramatic weight. The Special Edition cut also restores the “Blast it, Biggs” line change initially corrected in the mono mix of the film, presumably to further display Luke and Biggs’ bond.
Then there is, of course, the most debated tweak of all: the Special Edition adds an initial shot fired by Greedo during his cantina encounter with Han, moments before Han pulls the trigger on his own blaster to kill the bounty hunter, to create an impression that Han acted in self-defense rather than pragmatism. We’re not going to get into it, but we will revisit it over the course of the rest of this timeline, because people will spend years getting angry about it.
2004
The original trilogy’s first DVD releases, based on the Special Editions, incorporated further changes beyond remastering for the format, altering some of the additions from the 1997 releases while also providing some connective elements to the prequel trilogy, in full swing at the time of the release.
In the case of A New Hope, many of the changes are broadly audio-based, tweaking the effects on certain lines of dialogue or incorporating new sounds at certain moments—perhaps most significantly in terms of audio was a total rework of the voice filter used on Darth Vader, to better align A New Hope with the rest of the original trilogy—as well as corrections on color grading errors introduced in some sequences, like a pinkish hue over the scenes depicting Luke and Obi-Wan’s arrival in Mos Eisley. A newly updated CG model of Jabba to replace the one used in the Special Edition’s additions was also included, and for the first time, English language signage seen throughout the film was replaced with Aurebesh typography, marking a radical overhaul of the history of the written word in Star Wars.
Then, of course, Tatooine is also the home of another change: the Han and Greedo encounter is altered yet again so that the two fire almost simultaneously (although Greedo is still, by the blink of an eye, the first to pull the trigger). No one continues to be satisfied by this.
2006
The 2004 DVD cuts of the original trilogy were re-released for a limited time two years later, with one significant addition. As well as newly remastered versions of the 2004 editions, each release came with a bonus disc containing the so-called original versions of the films, available for the first time in a home format since 1995.
In actuality, these versions weren’t quite the originals. Although A New Hope reinstated the original, pre-1981 opening crawl from a remaining print, the rest of the audio and visual presentation was derived from the versions made for the 1993 laserdisc transfers of the original trilogy released as The Definitive Collection. Until 2027, this will remain the last official release of any version of the pre-Special Edition versions of the film.
© Lucasfilm2011
The saga’s release on Blu-ray for the first time introduced yet further changes beyond those included in 2004 and 1997. Again, these were broadly audio tweaks rather than anything particularly significant (such as Obi-Wan’s krayt dragon call to scare off the Tusken Raiders, changed again from a tweak made in the 2004 mix—the same scene includes an awkwardly framed piece of rock placed in front of R2-D2 in the small alcove he initially hides from Obi-Wan in).
That doesn’t mean the Han and Greedo scene doesn’t get yet further tweaks, though. A few frames from the moment of blaster fire are shaved off, bringing the timing of the altered scene back closer in line to the original, even as it keeps the near-simultaneous, Greedo-first tweaks introduced in 2004. No one continues to be satisfied by this.
2019
The launch of Disney+ in the United States brought with it yet another alteration of the film, part of a process to restore the film to 4K streaming quality. The streaming version of A New Hope arguably contains some of the slightest alterations to the post-Special Edition version of the film released over the course of the 21st century, broadly adjusting color correction issues on scenes introduced in the 1997, 2004, and 2011 releases.
That does not mean the most-tweaked scene in Star Wars history got off scott free, however. Now Han and Greedo’s encounter climaxes with an awkward cut to Greedo shouting “Ma Klounkee” before he fires. The scene otherwise maintains the pacing of the 2011 iteration, although it also removes a very brief visible shot of the Greedo dummy before it violently explodes. Not only does no one continue to be satisfied by this, they’re mostly comedically confused, birthing a new Star Wars meme in the process.
2027
That brings us back to last weeks news of that the previously announced 50th anniversary screenings of A New Hope will now not just arrive earlier in 2027, but with a version of the “original” film. As with everything we’ve gone through above, what that means with Star Wars certainly remains in flux, and Lucasfilm has yet to provide any kind of details about this release beyond its existence. A statement released by the studio has simply described it as “a newly restored version of the classic Star Wars (1977) theatrical release.”
We’ve got two years before we find out what the galaxy far, far away’s latest definition of “original” is.
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