Q&As About 'Star Wars' History: When did the Original Trilogy of Star Wars movies adopt the Episode IV, V and VI subtitles? Was this met with confusion at the time?

On May 19, 1980, fans saw the first use of the numbered episode/subtitle format in a Star Wars Saga film. By then, Lucasfilm had already decided to rename the original 1977 Star Wars film as Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, but the new title would not be seen on screen until 1981. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. 

On Quora, Henry Hunter recently asked:

When did the Original Trilogy of Star Wars movies adopt the Episode IV, V and VI subtitles? Was this met with confusion at the time?

My reply:

In November 1979, Ballantine Books published the original edition of The Art of Star Wars. In Part One: The Script, readers discovered the new Episode number and subtitle scheme for the first time. I remember buying this book a few weeks after seeing The Empire Strikes Back. Oddly enough, even though I went to bookstores as often as I could as a teenager, I did not see any copies of Titelman's book in stores until the Summer of 1980.  © 1979 Ballantine Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

The trend was actually “telegraphed” as early as November of 1979, when Ballantine Books published a limited edition hardcover book titled The Art of Star Wars. Edited by Lucasfilm’s VP for Publishing, Carol Titelman, it was the first in an ongoing series of books that feature production paintings, storyboards, costume and prop designs, set designs, and illustrations and models of vehicles seen in Star Wars.

The book was highly coveted because, in addition to the titular art of Star Wars, it also contained the complete fourth revised draft of George Lucas’s screenplay for the film released to the public. It was not presented in proper screenplay format, but rather the easier to read “for public consumption format” that many of us were familiar with from reading plays in high school English classes.

The title page not only featured a line drawing of the film’s major characters and prominent aliens, but it also read: Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope

I don’t remember if that got any press coverage back in 1979. Considering how popular Star Wars was in those pre-Internet days, I would not be surprised if a newspaper or TV station somewhere did a story on Titelman’s book, but unlike in the early 21st Century, it did not go viral. I can tell you, though, that the hardcover edition was extremely rare, and because I didn’t go to bookstores often in those days, I had no idea that Ballantine had also published a paperback edition.

So the fact that the Star Wars Trilogy was going to have serials-like subtitles with numbered Episodes and that the Luke Skywalker-centered story would be numbered IV, V, and VI was known by a handful of readers at least six months before the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back; it just wasn’t something every fan knew at the time.

Most of us (I was 17 when The Empire Strikes Back hit theaters in May 1980) suspected that the film was going to be Star Wars II: The Empire Strikes Back. A few chosen film critics were tipped off by Lucasfilm a few weeks in advance of the May 19 premiere so they could mention the Episode V thing in their reviews/behind the scenes articles. But aside from that, we were in the dark, so to speak.

Oddly enough, Lucasfilm permitted Del Rey Books to publish Donald F. Glut’s novelization of the film in April 1980, several weeks before Opening Day. Again, even though many of us - including me - bought and read it before we saw the film, Lucasfilm did not permit the publisher to include the Episode V subtitle on the novelization’s title page or cover art.

Correspondingly, I was one of those moviegoers who went to the theater (the Dadeland Twin Theaters in Miami) expecting to see a slightly different version of the main title logo. I knew the film would have the 20th Century Fox logo/fanfare and the “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” card. And I knew it was going to have a crawl that updated us on what had happened between the first film and this new one.

What I expected to see before the crawl was something like this:

A fan-made "Main Title" logo from a homemade trailer. Image credit: Shawn Tyler Packard via YouTube

Imagine my surprise when not only did the Main Title of The Empire Strikes Back look identical to the one in Star Wars, but the “roll-up” was preceded by this:

© 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

So, yeah. Many of us, myself included, were confused. Not only was this the fifth episode of a series, but it now looked as though the original film was going to have to be renamed for consistency’s sake.

I wasn’t a regular reader of Starlog or any of the popular science fiction/fantasy film fan magazines, so I have no idea when those publications let their readers know that Star Wars was now going to be called Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope. I found that out for myself when I purchased The Art of Star Wars at the closest Waldenbooks store to my house in the summer of 1980…after watching Empire a few times with different groups of friends.

Now, there are some fans who claim they saw the retitled Episode IV: A New Hope in the Summer of 1979 re-release (which is where I saw the first trailer for Empire) of Star Wars. They will swear on a stack of Bibles or their grandparents’ graves that “Yeah, I saw Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope at the movies the year before The Empire Strikes Back came out.”

However, those fans are misremembering this. Star Wars had an extended release in 1977 and 1978; it was still playing in some theaters in Miami during my first summer in a house my mom and I had moved into not long before my 15th birthday. 20th Century Fox then re-released it in the late spring of ‘79, billing it in print ads, somewhat disingenuously, as its final time in theaters:

I remember going to see Star Wars twice that summer, and I can assure you that there was no “A New Hope” subtitle then.

What I think confuses the issue is that most of the I saw the Episode IV version in the 1979 re-release crowd was younger than I was at the time. I was 16 then, but lots of those fans who make the claim were five, six, or seven at the time. The next time Star Wars hit theaters after The Empire Strikes Back ended its run was in the summer of 1981, and by then Lucasfilm had added the Episode IV subtitle to the Main Title sequence.

By the time Star Wars was released on home video in 1982 - a time when VHS videotapes were sold at $80 a pop or more - the Episode IV: A New Hope subtitle was already official, so some kids who saw the movie at home from that point on were left with the impression that they had seen Star Wars as Episode IV: A New Hope in the 1970s.