Okay, I’ve synced the first Indonesian dub and plan to proceed with the rest (available in the normal places). The Star Wars dub was bowdlerized – that is to say, someone had edited out all the naughty bits – and so it was a real pain to restore, and there are parts missing, which revert back to English. Sadly, this is the only version of the Indonesian dub I have access to right now, but the next version of Project Threepio will include Indonesian “titles” subtitles, to translate the untranslated parts.

What people consider to be naughty can be pretty idiosyncratic, and I’m guessing in parts due to not having the accompanying edited video, but this appears to be the naughty bits of Star Wars: any dead body or severed body part, any closeup of anyone shooting a gun or brandishing it in a dangerous manner (people getting shot not an issue), Leia hugging Han (but hugging Chewbacca and kissing Luke is OK), people drinking, smoking, or talking about engaging in illegal activities such as smuggling. And misc other things I couldn’t figure out.

Most other parts of the film were largely intact, but the cantina and the Death Star were edited to shreds. Thankfully, only a few lines of dialogue were lost because a lot of the cut scenes had no dialogue. But still… ugh. Although as someone who actively edits out parts of the film added in 1997 or later so that it syncs to fan edits of an out-of-print version of the film, maybe I shouldn’t throw stones.

Either way, I don’t think the other films, or dubs in other languages, have this problem. Just a one-off. But I’ll be holding off on releasing that new Project Threepio until I can confirm there aren’t similar problems in any of the other dubs.