As always my mind has been jumping around, and lately I have been thinking about Return of the Jedi some more. I’ve always been sort of against pushing Luke’s scenes on Dagobah because I like Luke’s introduction in Jabba’s palace. It’s a cool way to see him for the first time.
But when it comes to fan edits, I don’t think radical ideas should immediately be written off. Going back through this thread and others, I kind of see the argument people have made for bringing these scenes up to Act 1. I actually pulled up ROTJ on D+ and started to watch it while I was lying in bed, and I could not make it through the Jabba stuff without dozing off. It did make me think that Act 1’s pacing could potentially benefit from intercutting between Vader/Emperor, Luke on Dagobah, and Leia’s failed rescue attempt.
If you look back through the years, there has been one big issue that has kept this idea from totally working in edits. You don’t really have an explanation for why Luke shows up late to the Rebel briefing. It might be a little easier to have the Falcon and his X-Wing to go in the same direction, but it’s harder to explain why Luke crashes the meeting.
Some people have suggested having Luke and ghost Obi-Wan’s conversation take place in his abandoned hut on Tatooine. While this would be really cool, there are a bit of VFX issues that keep this from really being feasible.
I’m gonna feel a little dumb if this has already been suggested by myself or someone else, but here’s my idea. What if we reused some shots from the end of ESB, where Luke is getting his robot hand, and put it at the beginning of the Rebel fleet sequence, to imply that Luke is getting his hand repaired after it was damaged during Han’s rescue?
You could zoom the shot in a little to hide Luke’s shirt, or you could recolor it to make it black. But I think zooming in the shot would help make it feel slightly different anyway. Not sure if both hand shots should be used. And maybe an insert of R2 could be added to show him watching the repairs. Maybe add a random Luke line over it. Then it can cut to the Rebel briefing.
Not sure exactly how it would work with the flow of the music, but it’s just a thought for how to explain his tardiness.
For some reason I have been thinking about some of the more radical ROTJ ideas, one of them being Luke returning to the original Death Star debris and retrieving a kyber crystal shard for his lightsaber (which I think is totally doable with some altered shots and filming a little bit of model work).
I’m also curious if there’s been any work to restore the Luke building his lightsaber deleted scene. Something I tried several years ago was having that scene take place on Dagobah rather than Tatooine, but I’m curious if a better quality version exists out there somewhere.
EDIT: Looking back, I think the crystal retrieval idea came from Bingowings, a long-time member who started the prequel radical redux thread and has had tons of ambitious and cool ideas. I can picture in my head how this scene could be done in a way that makes it feel like it could’ve been an original scene.