Do you remember the first time you met Darth Vader? If you were lucky, you were about seven years old. It was 1977, and you’d been taken to the theatre. Or it was 1991, and you were on a couch, with the VCR rolling. From that sweet spot of innocence, the original “Star Wars” movies could appear as unimpeachable and monolithic objects of awe and delight. The martial music, the dizzying space shots, Vader’s singular menace—all of it seemed thunked down from on high, more Biblical revelation than fictional invention. And, despite all the discoveries (other movies, better acting, improved C.G.I.) and disappointments (Jar Jar Binks, a warlike Yoda) that would follow, part of that wonder stayed intact.

It is this vestigial amazement, durable despite the intervening years, that makes the two minutes and thirty-six seconds of gag-reel footage from the first “Star Wars,” first shown this summer at Comic-Con in San Diego by Lucasfilm’s J. W. Rinzler and now available online, so funny and strange and unsettling. (Update: The video had been taken down at the request of Lucasfilm, but it is available again.) It begins with about forty-five seconds of silence. The first shot is the one right before Vader makes his big, explosive entrance. Extras playing rebel soldiers run to take their positions, and as they do, one of them loses his helmet. He laughs, but the guy in front of him looks back, and a flicker of annoyance passes across his face. Maybe it had been a long day of shooting; maybe those damn plastic hats kept falling off; maybe he’d hoped to play an Imperial officer instead. In other silent sight gags, C-3PO falls over, Luke Skywalker’s hovercraft (land speeder, I know) appears to catch fire, and an alien at the Mos Eisley cantina breaks his finger. Later, a group of storm troopers try to blast through a door, but get caught up with each other, aimlessly stumbling against the scenery. These shots, stripped of audio, seem not like parts of the “Star Wars” universe but, instead, like rejected scenes from Woody Allen’s low-fi, science-fiction farce “Sleeper,” from 1973. You can almost hear that manic Dixieland clarinet.

As for the scenes with sound, we mostly get the familiar moments of actors flubbing their lines. There is Peter Cushing, as the haughty and doomed Grand Moff Tarkin, searching for the word “system”—as in the planetary system on which the Leia’s rebel forces are hiding out. Cushing had made his name playing all kinds of genre characters—Dr. Who, Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes—and so was surely accustomed to some pretty strange scripts. Talking about Death Stars and planets called Dantooine might not have been so different from explaining the process of building a human from spare parts. But what about Alec Guinness? He was a long way from “Macbeth” or “The Bridge on the River Kwai” or “Kind Hearts and Coronets.” In the reel, we see him miss a line after he is obstructed by Chewbacca’s hairy arm. Guinness’s quadruple take of exasperation communicates several questions he might have been asking himself: What is the name of this beast, again? How did I get here? How quickly can I fire my agent? (Guinness once called the movie “fairy-tale rubbish,” and during filming, he wrote to a friend, “new rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper—and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable.”) He wasn’t the only one confused by the script: Mark Hamill, flying in his X-Wing, asks how he is supposed to pronounce supernova? Is it super_nova? Or super_nova? This was, of course, not the only geeky phrase that had to be mastered. Imagine Harrison Ford at the first table reading, trying to parse such gems as, “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.”

“Star Wars” wore much of this silliness proudly—it was an homage to the campy Westerns and sci-fi serials that had come before it. Yet to a seven-year-old, and to the seven-year-old part of us that remains, those first movies transcended the essential flimsiness of their basic materials—the slapdash costumes and funny hair and improbable utterances. This peek behind the scenes, revealing the absolute absurdity of the movie’s conceit, only makes the near-magic of its final form all the more impressive.