So I’m in the process of putting together my own video regarding the editing of Star Wars. My belief is that none of the deleted scenes that have been released come from the Jympson cut. Most of the analysis on what the Jympson cut is tends to focus on how scenes are ordered, what scenes were deleted, and little trims that were made to existing scenes.
If you look at the raw footage of Yoda’s death scene in Return of the Jedi it’s 31 minutes of alternate angles of the same 5 minute scene. For example there are 6 alternate angles of Mark Hamill saying, “Master Yoda, is Darth Vader my father,” a wide shot, a side profile close up, a front facing profile, an over the shoulder onto Yoda, a reverse over the shoulder onto Mark Hamill, a close up of Yoda.
What this means is if you really wanted to you could cut a version of that line that used all 6 angles or just 5 or just 4 or just 2 or just 1. You could also reorder which of those angles you used where and for how long. Given that just that line lasts 5 seconds and the shortest amount of time you can hold a shot is 1/24th of a second, it means that there are over 42,000 ways you can cut just that line. Only a very small handful will be creatively effective from an audience standpoint.
What this means is that given that the second team started from scratch, building their version from the raw takes, the Jympson edit doesn’t so much contain different content. The content is more or less what was in the screenplay which dictated what the actors said and did. The difference is in the specific coverage used and the duration of each shot.
In other words it’s not possible to recreate the Jympson cut with anything close to reasonable precision, not without the raw footage itself and the Jympson cut to use as a guide which if you had it would negate needing the raw footage to begin with. But then having the raw footage would satisfy the nagging mystery that is at the heart of the interest in the lost cut.
The mystery evaporates once you understand the process of filmmaking. Jympson’s edit isn’t a different movie. It’s the same movie just cut differently. The issue is confused by the little trims that have come to light over the years (Han’s girlfriend, post TIE attack celebration, Tagge’s line about the Sith Lord). They cause fans to think that there’s an entirely different movie made up of entirely different conversations and stuff happening.
But it’s probably more in line with what this guy did with the raw takes of the Yoda death scene.
You yourself could also take that same Yoda footage and come up with your own variations. And that’s ultimately what The Lost Cut is. Some guy’s decisions that are different from the decisions made by a different person whose decisions then became the official version.