Q&As About 'Star Wars': Why has George Lucas made so many changes to the original Star Wars Trilogy?

In Quora, Bryce Howell asks:

Why has George Lucas made so many changes to the original trilogy?

My answer:

Because as the filmmaker who conceived, created, and - in the case of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi - financed the Star Wars films, George Lucas was entitled to make changes.

It is a matter of historical record that Star Wars, aka Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope underwent a series of alterations even before 1981, which was the year that Lucasfilm convinced 20th Century Fox to reissue the film with its Episode IV subtitle. Before that, Lucasfilm had had to fix the audio mix, make sure that all the prints (both the 35 mm and the 70 mm) matched, missing lines of dialogue restored, and other minor adjustments that were needed at the time.

Followers of Star Wars history, as well as viewers who listen to Lucas’s audio commentary tracks on the DVDs and Blu-ray home media releases, also know that Lucas always thought that the special effects that wowed audiences so much in 1977, 1980, and 1983 fell far short of his personal vision for the movies.

Lucas has stated on many occasions that he was constrained by the limitations of what was “state of the art” technology in 1975 and 1976; many of the tools used by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) to create the dynamic visuals of X-wings and Y-wings attacking the Death Star or TIE fighters attacking the Millennium Falcon had to be custom-made because computer-controlled motion-control cameras were not available off-the-shelf at the time. Indeed, Lucas says that the reason why the Star Wars Trilogy’s palette of worlds is so sparse in comparison to the Prequels is that he had to shoot what he could with late 1970s-early 1980s tech.

A case in point is Coruscant, the Empire’s capital planet. In many of the early drafts for treatments for the Star Wars Trilogy, there were many ideas that Lucas had on a “wish list” of exotic Flash Gordon-like settings, including a gas planet with a floating city, a city-planet, an ice planet, a desert planet, a forest world, and a volcanic planet.

Some, like the desert, ice, and gas planets made it to the first three films (as Tatooine, Hoth, and Bespin.) The forest planet later became the Forest Moon of Endor.

Other environments, though, simply could not be rendered on film with the tech available at the time, so the city-planet (which was echoed/foreshadowed by the Death Star), an ocean world with flying whales, and the volcano world had to be set aside till technology caught up with Lucas’s imagination.

And that’s what all the changes basically boil down to. There were scenes in all three films where, for one reason or another, Lucas’s vision crashed against the wall of “Sorry, George, that’s the best we can do with models, animation, or puppets.”

If you read, for instance, the fourth draft of Star Wars, you’ll notice that the confrontation between Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt was originally intended to be in the movie. Harrison Ford and an actor named Declan Mulholland were filmed in the Docking Bay 94 set in Elstree; in this scene - which essentially repeated the Han-Greedo scene in the cantina but was there merely to establish the menace of Jabba - Lucas shot temporary footage with the intention of replacing the very human-looking Mulholland with a stop-motion alien. 20th Century Fox, however, wanted the film finished on time for a Summer 1977 release date and was reluctant to cough up even more money for more effects shots, so the Jabba scene was cut from the final version of the film. (It survived in Alan Dean Foster’s ghostwritten novelization as well as Marvel Comics’ adaptation, albeit with a humanoid alien rather than the later giant slug design we saw in Return of the Jedi.)

Many years later, as Lucas developed the digital tools he wanted to make the Prequel Trilogy with, he decided to test the limits of the new tech (which had debuted in the 1990s and were first used to make lifelike CGI dinosaurs for Jurassic Park) by redoing some of A New Hope's scenes and re-inserting the deleted Jabba-Han confrontation at Mos Eisley for the 1997 Special Edition re-release of the Star Wars Trilogy. The first iteration was, shall we say, less-than-successful; it looks better in the 2004 DVD version because ILM went back and used the Jabba CGI model used in The Phantom Menace.  

Every one of the Star Wars Trilogy’s films had bits and pieces that Lucas felt could have been better if he had had the tools at hand to create them properly. So once digital imaging proved that it could create believable dinosaurs in 1993’s Jurassic Park, Lucas believed that technology had finally caught up with his original vision for Star Wars