What Is 'Harmy's Despecialized Edition?'
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The twentieth anniversary of Star Wars was a big moment for LucasFilm, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace had started filming, the first new Star Wars movie to be made in a generation. George Lucas decided to celebrate with a new reimagining of the original trilogy.
Several changes were barely noticeable, explosions were cleaned up, and CGI was tightened. Others were massive. A whole scene with a computer-generated Jabba The Hutt was added into Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope and an extra blaster bolt was added to the Cantina scene, making it appear as if Greedo shot first….but we know better don’t we? #HanShotFirst.
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In 2004, to celebrate the conclusion of the prequel trilogy, the films were released again with more big changes. Hayden Christensen replaced Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker’s force ghost at the end of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of The Jedi. The original Palpatine was also edited out of Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back in favour of Ian McDiarmid. Marjorie Eaton played the holographic Emperor and Clive Revill voiced the lines in the earlier versions. The Ewok celebration song ‘Yub Nub’ was also changed for an extended scene to include prequel planets (Victory Celebration). Boba Fett’s voice was also changed from Jason Wingreen to Temuera Morrison.
With the films changing rapidly over several years, and with no promises that they would be protected in their original forms, an English teacher from the Cech Republic set to work to create a Blu-ray version of the pre-1997 prints. Petr Harmáček aka Harmy was a Star Wars superfan and a purist. His mission was to make sure that neither Lucasfilm nor Disney could destroy the movie that audiences fell in love with back in 1977. Harmy painstakingly taught himself to remove the changes from the films frame by frame, replacing them with material from the 1993 laserdisc releases, the bonus features on the 2006 DVD release and even some still pictures. Eventually, he found a small team of like-minded fans to speed up the work. He named the finished project The Despecialized Edition.
Harmy’s labor of love was never a money-making venture. He didn’t teach himself Avisynth, Photoshop and Adobe After Effects and spend days slaving over one shot because he thought that LucasFilm and Disney would ever allow him to get rich over the files. That was always impossible. As with any true fan, it’s always about the saga. The fandom has made many mistakes over the years in the name of protecting the integrity of Star Wars, but sometimes magic happens.
They are obviously not legal to sell, but fans will always be interested in seeing them unless Disney decides to release them. Harmy has said repeatedly he does not feel guilty for what is essentially video piracy, and that the people who acquire his copy of Star Wars have put enough money into the franchise to more than make up for it. The purpose of The Despecialized Edition is simply to allow new fans to see it in its original form and to protect Star Wars as a form of cultural heritage.
The popularity of Harmy’s Despecialized Edition shows that new is not always better. Fans have an affection for bloopers. We love that you can see an orange smudge under Luke’s landspeeder and that the cockpits of the snowspeeders on Hoth are almost transparent. It’s endearing that the lightsabres don’t seem to work properly from certain angles and you can see TIE Fighters flying through each other in the background of space battles. It reminds us that this was 1970s-1980s science fiction. Logan’s Run and Battlestar Galactica were made around the same time and fans love them, warts and all. Star Wars has continuously evolved since its release, and it shows just how far filmmaking has come in the last fifty years but that does not mean we cannot appreciate the journey. If Kathleen Kennedy was smart, she would put the original cut on Disney Plus, but until then, we have Harmy, (and those who have launched similar projects since) to thank for keeping it alive.
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