Cast your mind back, lightsaber-wielding relics of a certain age, to the first time you saw the 1977 theatrical cut ofStar Wars. Was it in a cinema, surrounded by gaggles of wide-eyed space cadets astounded by this glittering, laser-blasted disco ball? Or perhaps on a VHS recorded off ITV’s small-screen premiere in 1982? Perhaps, if you’re under 30, you’ve never actually seen it, and a Star Wars without crappy CGI Jabbas, Greedo shooting first and gratuitous Tatooine dinosaurs is something you can’t even imagine. Maybe you actually think it’s called A New Hope, and is a sequel to all those brilliant films about Anakin Skywalker, trade route embargos, and midichlorians.
And perhaps you’re right. It’s so long since we’ve seen the original version of Star Wars, our collective memories of it as a gritty, charming space western may be nothing more than a mass hallucination. After all, George Lucas – the man who dreamed this whole saga up after falling asleep with his face in a pile of Kurosawa films and Flash Gordon comics – has spent years insisting the 1997 Special Edition is vastly superior. What if … terrifying thought … he’s actually right?
It would be nice to be able to say that we’re about to find out, givennews this weekthat the original cut will be screened this summer in London, in an actual cinema. The reality, of course, is that only a handful of us – is it bad at this point if I publicly beg for a ticket? – will be squeezing into the opening night of the British Film Institute (BFI)’s Film on Film festivalon 12 June, when the film will be shown not once but twice.
Still, it’s a start. There was a time, before Lucas’s sale of all things Star Warsto Disney for $4bn in 2012, when the thought of anyone being allowed to see the original cut was as likely as Jar Jar Binks being elected to the Galactic Senate. In the late 1990s, Lucas spent millions on tidying up the audio, adding digital gloss to the model space ships and cleaning up dirt and scratches on the original negative. What we did not realise was that this new edit, with all its preposterous CGI critters, would become the only version anyone would be permitted to view for the next three decades.
Some of Lucas’s comments – such as in 2004 to the Associated Press, when he said he was “sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it, but I want it to be the way I want it to be” – were tantamount to gaslighting on a galactic scale. Fans were made to fear that they might one day get to view the original cut again, only to discover to their horror that they somehow preferred the version in which Jabba looks like a melted garden gnome and Han dodges a blaster bolt like he’s doing the limbo. All fans really want is a version of the original cut that doesn’t disappoint.In June, a lucky few will discover whether Star Wars ever truly needed an update. Perhaps Disney is quietly awaiting the gasps of awe and reverence from the BFI before announcing that the rest of humanity will be granted access to this cinematic holy grail. And honestly, why wouldn’t they? Now that the Mouse House has successfully derailed Star Wars’s post-Lucas cinematic legacy with a trilogy that concluded with zombie clone Palpatine andthe weirdest space romance since Leia snogged her own brother, maybe a “despecialised” cut of Star Wars is just the thing to revive the saga’s box office fortunes. Surely it would be more effective than greenlighting a film in whichDaisy Ridley’s Rey tediously builds a new generation of Jedi wannabes, or a big-screen TV spin-off in which the Mandalorian teams up with a grizzled supporting character to retrieve a glowing space widget that may or may not explode if frowned at too hard. And if not, well – it would certainly be cheaper.