Direct from the Star Wars Celebration V fan convention, here is a deleted scene from Return of the Jedi, which Uncle George, in person at the con, confirmed will be included as an extra on next year’s Blu-Ray release of the original trilogy. This has never been seen by the public before today, not even in bootleg form as far as I’m aware. It was recorded from the con’s projection screen on a handheld cam, so the quality is somewhat dodgy and the hollering fanboy is an unfortunate distraction, but you can certainly see what’s happening. Watch it quick, before the copyright troops from Lucasfilm yank it down:

Bits of this scene appear in the Jedi novelization so it’s not completely unfamiliar to true fans. While Vader tries to establish a connection and pull Luke to him, Luke has returned to Tatooine and constructed a new lightsaber using spare parts from Ben Kenobi’s hut. (If you’ll notice, Luke’s replacement saber is very similar to the one Obi-Wan used in both Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars. That’s A New Hope for you whippersnappers out there.) I believe this scene would’ve appeared between the Emperor’s arrival on Death Star II — it’s an unwritten bylaw that all Star Wars movies begin with a ship in space — and the one of the droids approaching Jabba the Hutt’s palace. It was apparently cut very late in the post-production process, as it contains music and completed visual effects.

The scene isn’t that big a deal, perhaps, and it certainly adds nothing crucial to the story, but for fans it is something of a holy relic, long rumored and discussed, and it’s great fun to see.

Sadly, however, that Blu-Ray set is going to remain a big, fat “no-sale” for me. According to the New York Times, Uncle George is still blocking the release of the unrevised original Original Trilogy in any kind of decent-quality format:

Mr. Lucas said that to release the original versions of these films on Blu-ray was “kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good.”

 

“You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” he added. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.”

I am, of course, deeply annoyed and disappointed by his stubbornness on this point. But I do take a kernal of hope from this statement. Up until now, the Lucasfilm company line has been that the unrevised versions were destroyed during the 1997 “upgrade.” But I interpret that quote up there to mean that they do, in fact, still exist, he just doesn’t want to spend the money to restore them. Which means that someday either he will come to his senses and recognize that his true legacy to film history is what he did in 1977, or his heirs will need some money and realize that the first generation of fanboys will buy the original versions one more time. Until then, at least I still have my bootlegs…

My thanks to Mike G. for alerting me to the video clip.