I thought of your suggestion too tellan and decided to take a look. I took a look at what shots are available to substitute for that scene and whether they would work well, I decided that I liked the original scene better. I think that what Darth Editous is doing by painting the reappearing R5 unit is a nice compromise between the two ideas.

The reason I like that original scene, even with its glaring continuity error, is because I feel that when Artoo slowly turns his head in Owen's direction it is like he is saying "see, I'm just as good." It is like he is showing that he is a perfectly funvtional astromech droid to Owen who didn't want to buy him until now. For some reason I have always felt that there was just that small bit of non-verbal communication in that shot. I don't think any of the other possible shots you could replace it with would be as good.

Maybe I am just on crack...has anyone else ever sensed that when watching that scene?

Anyway, with it only being that one shot, I think changing the droid's color would work fine. After all, you can't really see what is to the right of Artoo after Red blows up. Who's to say that the green R5 isn't actually there?

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I took aother look at the DVD just now and found one possible shot that might work as a replacement. Right after Luke concedes to his uncle he tells C-3P0 "C'mon." We see a shot of Artoo as Luke and 3P0 go walking by, and then Luke calls to Red. Well, if you reversed the film during that short shot of R2, and you edited Luke and 3P0's walk-by a bit, than I think that it might work...and it will be very similar to the shot we're replacing.

What do you think?