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I just watched all three of these movies for the first time, and they were pretty good, although some parts were inexcusably ridiculous, such as the part in Return of the Jedi with Jabba's "musicians". Has anyone else seen these?

Is that a trick question?

I'm not sure what you mean by that, because I was just trying to start a discussion about the original Star Wars movies, and for that sort of thing I think that the best way to start the conversation is to ask if others have seen/read the thing in question. No trick whatsoever.

I think that mct16 is both expressing surprise, and being slightly humorous: asking the question “has anyone seen these?”, about something old and obscure is understandable. Asking has anyone seen the Star Wars trilogy is a bit like asking has anyone on the forum heard of McDonalds, or Ford cars or Belgium or Tintin. The Star Wars films have had such a cultural impact on the last thirty years - it might be taken as more unusual that you haven’t seen them before now, don’t you think?

I’m old enough that I not only remember Star Wars coming out, I remember that it was just Star Wars, and not any of that new-fangled Episode IV: A New Hope malarkey. I still think it was the best of them, but I liked the others too - even Jabba’s band!

Even though I wasn't around in the days when "Episode IV: A New Hope" was known as just Star Wars, I really wish that George there had just left the originals and not changed them in any way. I would really like to see the original versions, not the ones that have scenes with computer generated ships or characters. (I am aware that you can still buy these)

I think the changes made were a mixed bag: some good, some bad.

I didn’t like the changes to Mos Eisley, for example, where he expanded the city added crowds and comedy robots and Jawas in the background. It always made perfect sense that in an environment as hostile as Tattooine that people would have stayed indoors as much as possible, and the fact that houses were underground was already established - it didn’t need embellishment.

However, the changes made to Bespin Cloud City were great - he opened up windows which hadn’t been there, added lighting to match the look of the world outside, and generally made it more impressive and less like an Eighties hairdresser’s salon.

My biggest disappointment was that he hasn’t released a decent transfer of the unaltered movies to DVD - I think that that was almost dismissive of the support that fans have given in the past. Instead of remastering them properly, and restoring them, he insists that as - in his opinion - the revised versions are now definitive, the older originals should only be regarded as works in progress and are therefore not worth the effort. I haven’t seen the DVDs of the originals, because the reviews were so bad, and I already have them on VHS in several different releases.

I really didn't like the added scene in the first one where Han has an encounter with Jabba. I also can't imagine how they managed to make that scene almost thirty years later!

It was filmed at the same time as the rest of the original, with actor Declan Mulholland playing the part in a sort of hairy jacket. The idea then was that a stop-motion puppet would have been inserted over him, replacing him, in a manner similar to that used by Ray Harryhausen to add models, such as skeleton warriors, into his films, or when Faye Wray appeared with Kong.

However that idea was abandoned, the scene was deleted, and they moved away from Jabba being a furry ape creature as designed by Ralph McQuarrie (probably because he would have been too similar to Chewbacca), and made him a slug instead for Jedi.

The scene was put back into the special edition using a CGI model Hutt mapped over the live-action performance by Mullholland; they also dropped a new live-action Boba Fett in there as a henchman (played by ILM animator Mark Austin), although he originally wasn’t shown until Empire.
This new CGI work isn’t too bad a match, apart from the fact that Jabba appears to be of different proportions to the Jedi version, presumably the better to fit the space in the docking bay, and also hide Mr. Mulholland, who was quite substantial, just not in the same places as the Hutt.

The cleverest bit is where they digitally altered Harrison Ford so that, as he circles around Jabba, he appears to walk over the top of Jabba’s slug-like tail, which of course hadn’t been known about when they shot it originally.

The real problem for me is that because the information exchanged between the characters in this “new” scene was necessary to the plot in 1977, it was then re-distributed to the dialogue of other characters in other scenes, such as Greedo talking to Han in the Cantina. This wasn’t edited out again for the special edition, so much of the information is given twice, which is redundant.

Thanks for clearin all of that up, Jock! I thought that that whole scene had been filmed recently somehow, and that they had found some way to make Harrison Ford look a whole lot younger, or that they had found a look-alike. I think that the best original film was Empire Strikes Back. I especially like the Darth Vader theme song.

No problem!


If you want to see how they would do that, take a look at the recent ultimate edition of Blade Runner: in that they used Harrison Ford’s son Ben to create some better shots of Deckard talking to the animal salesman on Animoid Row.
They mapped Ben’s head over existing footage from the original shoot of his dad, and the match is seamless. It didn’t require them to use his entire face, mostly just his mouth, and they gave him a prosthetic scar on his chin (not that you can see it!) like his dad has.
There‘s behind the scenes footage on the DVD of him doing the filming, and the likeness is uncanny!