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Fifty years ago, theaters welcomed a movie that changed culture forever, a movie that combined multiple genres into one unique space opera, a movie that was not called “Episode IV” or “A New Hope.” That movie was called Star Wars and it’s coming back to theaters.
As announced on StarWars.com, “a newly restored version of the classic Star Wars (1977) theatrical release — later renamed Star Wars: A New Hope, and then Star Wars: Episode IV–A New Hope— will play in theaters for a limited time.” Yes, you read that right. The film coming back to theaters is just called Star Wars and it’s the classic version, which means that it will not have any of the nonsense that George Lucas and Disney added later. No Jabba the Hut deleted scene, no Greedo shooting first, and certainly no Maclunkey.
Even though Star Wars is as prominent as ever, it has been a long time since anyone has been able to see the original movie. As part of the film’s 20th anniversary in 1997, Lucas brought Star Wars and its first two sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, back to the theaters, but only as revised “Special Editions.” These films featured digital additions such as robots and stormtroopers wandering in front of the camera and extended new scenes, including a deleted scene in which Han Solo meets with Jabba the Hutt and steps on his tail for no good reason.
The Special Editions suck. Not only do they clutter the screen with nonsense that disrupts the compositions, but the extended scenes rarely make sense within the narrative. And yet, Lucas insisted that the Special Editions were now the only versions of the movie, making the 1993 Laserdisc release of the original trilogy the highest quality release available.
(NOTE: before anyone gets grouchy in the comments, it is true that a DVD set did release with non-altered versions of the movies as special features. But those non-altered versions were VHS quality, worse than the quality of the Laserdiscs).
Not only did Disney hold to Lucas’s decree when they acquired the Star Wars property, but they added their own nonsense in the form of the word “Maclunkey,” which Greedo started shouting in the Disney+ streaming release.
With the announcement that the original Star Wars is coming to theaters, fans hope that Disney will release high-quality versions of the non-altered movies to home video. A 4K copy of the original films has long seemed impossible, but not now.
Yet another question remains: what do they mean by “original” Star Wars? Most believe that even in 1977, Star Wars began with a title crawl that read “Episode IV: A New Hope.” But that wasn’t the case then, when the crawl just started with the words “It is a period of civil war.” The title wasn’t added until the movie was re-released to theaters in 1981, after the release of The Empire Strikes Back and its title crawl, which began with “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.”
So are we just getting the original Star Wars? Or the original original Star Wars? Frankly, as long as it doesn’t have Han Solo stepping on Jabba the Hutt’s tail, we’ll take it and we’ll be happy.
Star Wars is back in theaters on February 19, 2027.
The post Star Wars Is Coming Back to Theaters, Without Jabba or a Subtitle appeared first on Den of Geek.
