Restoring Star Wars

Updated

Director George Lucas used special effects to make controversial changes to his Star Wars series. Now one fan is trying to restore the originals.

Introduction

"People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians." — George Lucas, 1988

A long time ago

In 1988 George Lucas issued a statement to the US Congress rallying against movie studios releasing altered classic films, and urging the preservation of the unaltered works.

"Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with 'fresher faces', or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor's lips to match," he predicted, emphasising "our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten".

Decades later fans are now trying to preserve the cultural history of the Star Wars films, which Lucas blotted out with successive 'Special Edition' revisions.

Academy Award-winning practical effects were covered up with 1997-era computer graphics (CGI) that now look sorely dated. Actors and voiceover work were replaced and story elements changed, most famously the 'Han Solo shot Greedo first' debacle.

This would all be fine, says 'Despecialised Edition' project creator Petr Harmy, except for the fact that Lucas made it his mission not to make the classic versions of the films available again in decent video quality.

In a 2004 interview Lucas famously said, "I'm sorry you saw a half-completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be."

Harmy and other fans have been painstakingly restoring the original trilogy, frame by frame in high definition, as close as possible to the version released in cinemas.

He has been sourcing and splicing footage together from 35mm film, a 1993 master released on DVD, HDTV broadcasts and the high-definition Special Edition Blu-Ray release, in order to produce a HD version of the films without any traces of Lucas's changes.

A fan emerges

Harmy, a 27-year-old former English teacher from the Czech Republic, seems an unlikely candidate to lead the charge to restore Star Wars.

He was not even born when audiences were first introduced to a Star Destroyer crawling across their cinema screens in 1977 and he has no background in film editing.

"I remember seeing Star Wars on TV when I was about five," he says. "I have a distinct recollection of seeing the [Death Star] trench run on TV.

"Then later I got a copy of an old VHS of the original version of Star Wars which I watched so much as a kid that I totally wore it out."

For the sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, he watched Lucas's Special Editions first and then later hunted down the originals.

"It took a lot of effort to find the original versions on VHS here in the Czech Republic," Harmy says. "It was one of the greatest Star Wars moments for me when I finally got to watch it.

"Though it also made me pretty angry when I realised that some of the special effects shots I was admiring so much were actually re-composited digitally [in the Special Editions] and thus lost much of their historical value."

The last look Star Wars fans got at the original unaltered trilogy was in 2006 when old, un-restored masters also used for the Laserdisc versions were again used to make a limited run of companion DVDs for inclusion in a set with their Special Edition variants.

These editions also had their issues: the frames were not cleaned up, they were based off a master that was made with 1993 technology rather than the latest advances, and importantly, the DVDs were not anamorphic - enhanced for widescreen TV - or in high definition.

Until fans took charge, the original Star Wars trilogy had never been released in restored quality without Lucas's changes.

"I wanted to be able to show people who haven't seen Star Wars yet, like my little brother or my girlfriend, the original Oscar-winning version but I didn't want to have to show it to them in bad quality," Harmy says.

'Cultural vandalism'

Lucas changed a myriad of things in his Special Editions: from adding in CGI characters and backgrounds to changing audio — like bounty hunter Boba Fett's voice and making Darth Vader scream "Nooooo!" during Luke's final confrontation with the Emperor.

The ghost of Anakin Skywalker, played by Sebastian Shaw, was expunged from the end of Return of the Jedi and replaced with Hayden Christensen.

Lucas even went so far as to make nuanced changes like removing Anakin Skywalker's eyebrows during the scene where his helmet is removed by Luke.

Plus there is the issue of whether Han Solo shot Greedo first in the cantina on Tatooine (he did), and the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks's race, the Gungans, at the end of the final film ("Weesa free!" one of them cries).

"I have no problem with extended or director's cuts of movies at all but only as long as the original cut is also available in comparable quality," Harmy says.

"Like Blade Runner, when you buy that set on Blu-Ray, you get beautiful HD transfers of all five existing versions.

"The original visual effects in Star Wars were completely groundbreaking at the time and trying to suppress the original versions is, in my opinion, an act of cultural vandalism.

"It's an attempt to bury the work of those artists who spent thousands of hours working all the Oscar-winning art that was altered or replaced in the Special Editions."

Restoring a legend

"Sometimes some of the smallest changes were the most difficult to undo," says Harmy, who taught himself film editing skills as he went.

Some shots have taken him an hour to restore, others hundreds of hours — it varies with the complexity of the scene.

One of the most difficult scenes was in A New Hope where a CGI droid from Lucas's Special Edition moves through the background as Stormtroopers walk along on the planet Tatooine.

"The little droid flies through the scene and I had to replace everything it covered up, but also make sure that everything that is supposed to be in the foreground is there," Harmy says.

"I would always find some new problem - some edge of some object would move wrong, or the background would warp, or the shadows on the ground were wrong and there were like 50 layers, so it was difficult to find where the problem was. That one gave me a lot of headaches.

"If I had a 35mm HD source for it, it probably would have been a piece of cake, but this way it was super difficult."

Harmy used the limited 2006 DVD release of the untouched trilogy, which was based on a 1993 master, to patch footage without the droid into a shot from the HD Blu-Ray release. He also had to create custom layered "mattes" to make the patchwork scene appear seamless.

Aside from patching footage from a variety of sources, one of the major tasks was colour correction.

Lucas's DVD and Blu-Ray releases did a poor job of keeping the colour palette of the original films, and also introduced "glaring errors", Harmy says.

In one scene on the Millennium Falcon Luke's lightsaber is tinged green in the Blu-Ray release, but it should have been blue.

The entire trilogy on Blu-Ray also has a magenta tone that messes with the look of the film, he says.

Harmy had to colour-correct each shot to how the original would have looked using a scan of a Technicolor print.

The Despecialised Edition project has been helped along by the works of other Star Wars fans dedicated to the same cause, who Harmy knows online as: Dark Jedi, YouToo, Pugo, Team Negative 1, Belbucus, Hairy_Hen, CatBus and Laserschwert.

Fans have provided audio restorations, scanned 35mm film reels, upscaled footage and redone subtitle tracks.

Work needed to be done cleaning up scanned film reels to remove visual artefacts like scratches and dirt, and some of the aged footage was severely pink-faded, requiring the original colour palette to be sourced elsewhere.

Punch it

It has taken years to the restore the films to the point they are in Despecialised, but even now they are not perfect and likely will never be "complete", Harmy says.

"Despecialised is not a true restoration, it's a mashup of different sources of varying quality and it has always been meant to only be a placeholder until such time that a true restoration from 100 per cent authentic original sources becomes available."

Harmy has no plans to revisit his edition of A New Hope any time soon and Empire Strikes Back has had its 2.0 release, leaving a redo of Return of the Jedi's 1.0 version with better tools and footage the next focus.

Harmy's Despecialised Edition is well known among Star Wars fans online but it is only available to download as a legally questionable torrent.

So far, Lucas and new Star Wars franchise owners Disney have let Harmy be.

Since the franchise was sold, Harmy hopes it now means an official release of the original trilogy is possible.

"[Disney] have the resources and I think if they hit the right nostalgia strings with the marketing, they stand to make huge profits from the release," he says.

But for Harmy, the project is a hobby that has changed his career trajectory.

The former English teacher has now taken a job at Ultraflix, where he is working to prepare and restore films for Ultra-HD 4K streaming.

Credits

Topics: film-movies, arts-and-entertainment, science-and-technology, computers-and-technology, czech-republic

First posted