Roderick Vonhögen's Virtual Edition ~ Through the Force, things will you see ~ Roderick Vonhögen's Virtual Edition ~  Through the Force, things will you see ~ Roderick Vonhögen's Virtual Edition ~  Through the Force, things will you see ~
Indy's Idealistic Ending for Episode III
by forumer Indy500.
 
Part Two
A long time ago, when George Lucas announced ILM was working on a Star Wars ANH "Special Edition" that would feature digitally modified, previously unseen original footage, many wondered if the cut Luke and Biggs Tatooine scenes would be one of the new additions. Well, this footage was shown to the public for the first time ever during a surprise screening at the San Diego ComicCon that year, but it didn't make it into the ANH SE (no doubt for the very same unavoidable pacing reasons that Lucas originally contended with). Although the infamous Anchorhead footage remained on the shelf, Star Wars fans in theatres everywhere were happily surprised to see that the Rebel hangar reunion between Luke and Biggs had been unearthed and re-inserted near the end of the movie. As I've stated previously, the inclusion of this scene into George's "definitive vision" of Star Wars is the first and foremost clue that points towards the possibility of eventually seeing the missing Tatooine footage at the end of Episode 3.
Shortly after the release of the Special Edition trilogy on video, I remembered that in the original ANH screenplay Red Leader had said something to Luke about knowing Luke's father. I double-checked the script, and sure enough, Red Leader did have some extra dialogue to that effect. Red Leader approaches Luke and says, "Skywalker! Are you sure you can handle this thing?" Biggs chimes in and says, "Sir, Luke is the best bush pilot in the outer rim territories." If you've got half of your father's skill, you'll do better than all right ....
According to the original script, at this point Red Leader was then supposed to say to Luke :

"I met your father once when I was just a boy. He was a great pilot. You'll do all right. If you've got half of your father's skill, you'll do better than all right."

For the Special Edition however, this Red Leader dialogue has all been reduced down to simply, "You'll do all right" - no mention of knowing Luke's father. I was amazed to discover how ingeniously ILM deleted Red Leader's lines. Right after Biggs puts in the good word for Luke, Red Leader is opening his mouth to speak when a digitally inserted crewman carrying some hoses walks in front of the camera, creating a "wipe" which hides the fact that a section of film has been cut out. During the split-second that our view of Luke, Biggs, and Red Leader is being completely blocked by the crewman, we hear an excerpt that was taken from the MIDDLE of Red Leader's deleted lines where he says, "You'll do all right." As the crewman exits the frame to the left, we just barely catch Red Leader's lips forming the last two words, "all right," in perfect sync with the dropped in sound-byte.
Impressive, most impressive   ;o)
Watch closely as Artoo skips a few feet as he rises ! The only thing that betrays the edit is Artoo : the droid appears to "skip" a few feet as he's being slowly lifted into Luke's X-wing in the background.
After this discovery, I asked myself "Why?". Why did George even bother with the slick ILM trickery just to get this small, inconsequential scene into the movie? He could have just continued to leave it on the shelf, considering that for 20 years and several modified video releases, ANH had always been just fine without it. If he had felt that it was really necessary to have the reunion scene with Luke & Biggs in ANH, then he wouldn't have cut it from the original release. George Lucas is infamous for ruthlessly eliminating whole scenes and sequences from his films during the editing process. He doesn't usually go in later to add whole scenes unless he feels it will serve to further the story somehow. In his own words :

"Unless it's something that you absolutely have to have in order to motivate a character, unless it's actually a plot point, just personal history is not something that you need to put into a script. A script starts off big because you're trying to define the characters and the plot, but the work you do after the first draft is to make sure that you tell a very precise story and that you take out everything that's not relevant to your plot."

Obviously, George once felt that the film's plot was more "precise" without the reunion scene. Keeping his storytelling philosophy in mind, however, we must conclude that the re-insertion of the reunion into the ANH SE is an indicator that it now holds some relevance to his Prequel-expanded, "definitive" vision in some way - he now "absolutely has to have it" in the saga. So much so, that the scene had to be digitally altered before it would even work for him. Why did it become so important to restore this scene, when it's sole purpose was merely to resolve the still missing Luke & Biggs Tatooine scenes that got cut from the film's beginning? This fact is made clear on page 91 of The Annotated Screenplays :

"Luke is reunited with his friend Biggs ; this scene actually was shot but was deleted when the sequence at the beginning that introduced Biggs was cut out. The scene was restored in the Special Edition."

So again, unless we are to eventually see the corroborating Tatooine footage at the end of Episode 3, why is the reunion with Biggs now in ANH? I find that odd.

Another thing that I find odd is that during all the Special Edition hoopla, while every little detail of each new addition to the Original Trilogy (ANH in particular) was being dissected and scrutinized everywhere you looked, nobody ever mentioned the work that ILM did on the reunion scene. In late 1996, and on into '97 and '98, Lucasfilm's marketing machine was ensuring that we fans were being made aware of all the cool new stuff the ANH SE had to offer, through a wide variety of sources, including :

  • SW Insider magazine
  • SW Galaxy magazine
  • Various other sci-fi magazines such as Starlog or Cinescape
  • The Art of ANH SE book
  • The Topps SE widevision trading cards set
  • A variety of official SE collector's magazines
  • The ANH SE video pre-movie featurette
  • The Annotated Screenplays
  • The official website
  • These, along with any other sources that were touting the Special Editions, collectively detailed out every little ANH change or new addition for us. -Everything from how ILM dotted the distant horizon of Luke's farm with more vaporators, to the digitally enhanced color in the sunsets. We're talking nit-picky coverage. The Annotated Screenplays, for instance, pretty thoroughly documents the prominent changes that were made for the SE's, highlighting them in dark grey boxes next to the original script. For example, where the original script says, "The sandcrawler moves slowly down a great sand dune," a grey box off to the side gives us the amended, "The sandcrawler moves slowly over the rocky terrain." However, even with attentively small revisions such as this, there is no grey box highlighting Red Leader's altered dialogue. Instead, the book just has the original script with Red Leader talking about Luke's father, which is doubly-odd since the scene with those lines was never even in the original version of the film. When it came to addressing the addition of the digitally tweaked Biggs reunion scene, the best that any of the official sources could do was to offhandedly tell us, "The scene was restored." Most of them didn't even manage to do that much.
    Such a hush-hush attitude towards the resurrection and inclusion of this original footage (as well as the silence regarding the digital modifications that had to be made to it) seems just a tad strange to me. You'd think they would have pushed it into the spotlight a little more than they did. After all, it's not just some fixed shadow under a landspeeder, or a different view of Ben's house; it's a "brand new" scene featuring Luke Skywalker, the hero, for cryin' out loud! The fact that the whole reunion scene issue was largely downplayed and/or completely avoided in all Special Edition-related media makes me wonder why George Lucas didn't want to focus any attention on the efforts that went into putting this "new" little addition back into the story. ...Perhaps he felt that if he did call attention to it, the Star Wars community might then more easily begin to make the connection that the scene could be an important link to his plans for the Prequel story, which he was even then actively preparing to give us. George says :

    "I have to think of this as six movies now, I can't think of it as just one movie. I've got this dual reality in that they come out once every three years, so each episode has to stand on its own and have meaning on its own - except that it's only one chapter in the book. It's not the book. I can't sacrifice one for the other, so I'm constantly balancing between the now and the larger picture. The now has to be engaging, but the larger picture is what is really important."

    So, if the "larger picture" should culminate with the cut Tatooine footage appearing as an Episode 3 epilogue, then the Biggs reunion was restored to ANH in order to tie-in with and resolve it, as it was originally intended to do. But the clues that point to the possibility of this Epilogue actually happening don't stop with the ANH SE. Interestingly enough, both Prequel Episodes 1 and 2 contain links to the cut footage as well. These will be presented next.
     
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