The Original Star Wars Crawl

The changes George Lucas has made to Star Wars over the past 20 years suck. Not only that, but anyone who wants to buy the original trilogy on DVD or Blu-Ray can't, because Lucas refuses to release anything but the ruined versions.

That's why a group of Star Wars fans began a project to release the original Star Wars movie from the original 35mm film. Pooling their money to buy a theater copy, they then went through the long process of cleaning the movie and transferring it to a digital form. This process is complete and their version has been released to the internet.

Finally, I can watch the original Star Wars movie that I've been watching since I was a kid... but there is one way in which the "original" is in a sense still "different"....

The fan-made version of Star Wars comes from a film reel from the original 1977 release of the movie. Since the text "Episode IV: A New Hope" was added to the opening crawl in 1981, and every version of Star Wars I've ever seen was after that, this means that I've never seen what the original opening crawl looked like to moviegoers when it first premiered in the summer of 1977.

Until now.

Star Wars Original Crawl 1977