Originally posted by: Guy Caballero
What was different on the criterion laser? I've read conflicting things.

The Criterion laserdisc has an effects shot that was added in for the special edition (the shadow of a UFO passing over Neary's truck), and the special edition versions of the first encounter on "Crescendo Summit" and the escape from the military helicopter at the Army Base on Devil's Tower. In addition to these minor gaffes, two entire (though small) scenes are missing.

The first is a scene at the Neary house just before Roy and Ronnie go to the Air Force press conference. The scene reveals that Roy has turned his hobby room into a UFO shrine ... with cut-out articles hung all over the place. He's also built a rather prominent model mountain in the middle of his miniature train layout.

The other scene is the lead-in to the famous Mashed Potatos scene. Roy is at his model train layout, furiously carving grooves into his model mountain. In the prior scene, the audience has seen a topographical map of Devil's Tower ... and the suspense is great as Roy is on to the fact that ridges must be carved, but is oblivous to the main solution .... the flat top that has not been featured in any of his prior mountain visions.

The Studio insisted that Roy's obsession with the mountain visions be practically excised from the film. So these two scenes were cut, as well as an ending of an earlier scene where he sees the shape in a pillow.

But, as the film exists now in all incarnations ... we never know that Roy is building a miniature mountain in his train layout until AFTER we see him sculpting the mashed potatoes at the dinner table. It's still a funny moment, because it's a silly thing to do. But the real joke is completely lost. The actual joke is that Roy can't stop himself from sculpting that mountain. He's compelled, he's obsessed, he's lost it. But if you don't see him do any mountain-sculpting until that point, one of the best jokes in Spielberg's film is lost ... along with two scenes that are very important to Roy's obsession ... the main feature of the film's middle third, that the Studio simply didn't like.

Apparently, they didn't want any humor in the film, as the other hysterical sequence of Roy tearing up the yard for building materials was also cut out of the Special Edition.

Wiser heads subsquently prevailed, and that scene was restored (along with the pillow and many other cuts) ... but the two scenes of Roy sculting his miniature mountain have never been seen again.

P.S. - there's also a Jabba analogy to Spielberg's CE3K revisionism: There still remains in all cuts of Close Encounters the scene of the ship stranded in the desert ... which conveys EXACTLY the same information to the audience that the film's opening did, i.e., airplanes stranded in the desert. If that's not the analog of the Jabba and Greedo scenes in Star Wars, I don't know what is.