Q&As About 'Star Wars' (Beating a Dead Tauntaun Department): When did George Lucas start tampering with the original Star Wars films by changing the special effects?

When did George Lucas start tampering with the original Star Wars films by changing the special effects?

Ah. Here we go, another loaded question with a subliminal anti-Lucas bias.

First of all, I will remind you that like it or not, George Lucas had every right to revise (not tamper with) films that he conceived, produced, and in the case of Star Wars, directed between 1973 (when he first wrote the story treatment for what he originally called The Star Wars) and late 1982 (when Return of the Jedi was in post-production and scheduled for a May 25, 1983 release.

It is a matter of record that Lucas was not happy with some of the compromises he had to make, technologically speaking, when Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi were produced. The first film’s budget, which came from the coffers of the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, were barely sufficient for the effects that Lucasfilm and its special effects division, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) were able to create. Most of the equipment used in the making of the then state-of-the-art effects, including the motion-controlled cameras required to give viewers the illusion that the X-wings, TIE fighters, Star Destroyers, and other spacecraft were moving across the vast reaches of space, had to be custom-built especially for Lucas’s modern space-fantasy saga.

Because Fox was reluctant to invest more than $11 million into a movie that no-one, not even Lucas himself, thought would be a blockbuster in the summer of 1977, the 33-year-old director and his producer, Gary Kurtz, had to abandon an ambitious scene in which an animated Jabba the Hutt faces off with Harrison Ford’s Han Solo. The Battle of Yavin, with its dynamic space dogfight sequence above the Death Star, also suffered from Fox’s penuriousness: if you look closely at the 1977 theatrical version, you’ll notice that several shots (mostly of TIEs swooping into battle and Rebel X-wings attacking the Death Star at the polar trench) are cleverly edited bits of the same shots.

Other flaws bothered Lucas, such as matte lines that showed in composite shots where live-action footage was blended with model photography, or space battles that lacked the speed or energy the filmmaker had in mind when he conceived each film.

I’m not going to list all of the elements of the Original Trilogy that Lucas was not happy with; suffice it to say that there were lots of details that he promised himself (as creator and executive producer of the bulk of the Trilogy) that he would go back and fix at the earliest opportunity, provided he had both the tech and the finances to do that with.

Sometime in 1994, the year that Lucas began his first draft of the screenplay for Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace, he realized that the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) effects had contributed to the phenomenal success of his friend Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Year the previous year. Lucas planned to create entire environments - such as the city-planet Coruscant - using a combination of miniature effects and CGI, but on a grander scale.

To test the still-young digital technology, Lucas decided to use CGI effects to tweak the Original Star Wars Trilogy to fix those flaws that had bothered him for so long in time for the 20th Anniversary of A New Hope’s theatrical release. Not only would this be the first big screen re-release of Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi since the mid-1980s (thus allowing kids who had seen the films only as full-screen VHS videos on TV to see it in theaters, where they were meant to be seen), but it also would whet fans’ appetite for the long-promised Prequel Trilogy.

Because the films were scheduled to be re-released in early 1997, it’s likely that Lucasfilm began working on the Special Editions as early as 1994. Even though Lucas did not need to rewrite three screenplays from beginning to end, new scenes/shots had to be scripted, storyboards had to be drawn, and new creatures, droids, and spacecraft had to be designed. The actual CGI and filming of new live-action footage (which had to match the original 1976–1982 stuff) was done in 1995 and 1996, and John Williams and Jerry Hey added their musical contributions to the Special Edition scores in late 1996.

Whether you personally agree or disagree with Lucas’s choices is irrelevant. He, as the creator of the Saga, had every legal right to fix things he felt needed to be fixed.