(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.
