A new trailer for the documentary Light & Magic marks Disney’s first release of original, unedited Star Wars footage. Disney+ is now the streaming home of everything related to Star Wars. But despite featuring hours and hours of Star Wars content, the streamer famously still does not offer the original trilogy in their pre-Special Edition forms.
The history of Star Wars the original trilogy erasure of course goes back a very long way. Indeed George Lucas himself was the first one to mess with the original movies when he released his divisive Special Edition versions back in the 1990s, featuring new and sometimes distracting visual effects. But more than just offer up these altered versions of his Star Wars films, Lucas endeavored to erase the unaltered originals from existence by making them commercially unavailable. Later when Disney acquired Lucasfilm and Star Wars in a historic deal, the hope was that the company would see fit to finally put out the non-Special Edition versions of the original trilogy films whether Lucas likes it or not. But even with Disney+ now looking for as much Star Wars content as possible, the altered versions of the original trilogy are all that fans can officially see. Indeed further alterations have been made by Disney to the Special Edition versions, taking Star Wars even farther from its roots.
Now Disney has seemingly made a small move back to the past by at least acknowledging the existence of the non-Special Edition versions of the Star Wars original trilogy. The moment comes at 1:06 of a new trailer for the Industrial Light and Magic documentary show Light & Magic, when a shot is featured of the Death Star exploding that importantly does not feature the Special Edition digital effects added by Lucas. See this tiny glimpse of Star Wars as it originally existed in the clip in the space below:
The show being teased by this trailer is a celebration of the history of ILM, the VFX house Lucas founded specifically to make Star Wars. So it makes sense that some original unaltered Star Wars footage would be taken out of mothballs and put on display here. What isn’t clear is whether this tiny acknowledgment of what Star Wars used to be marks a new willingness by Disney to finally relent and make the non-Special Edition versions of the films available to fans.
Of course it’s been claimed over the years that it’s actually impossible to release clean high-definition versions of the original unaltered Star Wars trilogy because the negatives have in fact been destroyed. Wiping the non-Special Edition original trilogy from existence would be a very Lucas thing to do, but there’s also reason to think that such destruction hasn’t actually happened, and there’s a Lucasfilm vault somewhere that does indeed contain negatives of all three of the original films as they were before Lucas tinkered. If these unaltered originals do exist, Disney would seem to have all the reason in the world to digitize them and make them available on their streaming service. It certainly would be a huge event for Star Wars fans if the original trilogy from before Lucas’ 1990s reworking suddenly made its way out to the world. The fact that this hasn’t happened yet, outside of small glimpses like the one afforded in the above trailer, would tend to suggest that the legend is true and Lucas really did wipe the originals from existence outside of a few snippets. But fans can continue to hope.
Source: Disney+/YouTube