Jambe,

I know you're probably already planning on it, but I wanted to stress that you should use MoveAlong's Lost Scenes project for your source material for all the Behind The Magic stuff. Even though I haven't seen it quite yet (should be soon!), it appears to be the absolute best presentation of the material so far.

On a similar note, you will undoubtedly want to reconstruct the Han/Jabba scene as well. There are many sources containing bits and pieces of this scene, in varying quality, and unfortunately none of them even combined have the entire scene or dialogue. One of the sources is the Making Magic CD, and I've got MoveAlong looking into that to see if the video from there can be extracted the same way the video from Behind The Magic was for his Lost Scenes project. Hopefully it can, and that will be the way to get those particular pieces in the best possible quality. ocpmovie did a nearly complete reconstruction of this scene, the best version of which is found on the Return Of The Ewok DVD. In it he combined pieces from all the known sources, and he wound up layering fullscreen footage over widescreen footage from the SE to achieve widescreen shots for every piece. What I'd like to do is put together a complete list of all the sources of Han/Jabba footage that exist to give us an idea of what's out there, what kind of quality it's in, and whether or not it's widescreen. ocpmovie's version was excellent, but I think it can be done even better since I think we have some better quality footage to work with than he had at the time. I'll get hold of ocpmovie to see if he can list all his sources for me.

My archives are open for this project, of course. I have a bit more knowledge of the first film and maybe more to contribute than I do the others because it's nearer to my heart, and also that's where I've concentrated more of my cut scenes research. So anything I can help with, I will.

On the title front:

Originally posted by: Number20
My title suggestion is Beginning Star Wars. I think this fits in well with Building Empire and Returning to Jedi.

I was really gunning for "Starting Star Wars", as it fits well with the other two titles, and also has that whole "starting wars" implication going on. But now that I think about "Beginning Star Wars", I think that works even better with the other titles:

Beginning Star Wars
Building Empire
Returning To Jedi

First you are Beginning, and with Star Wars it is also THE Beginning.
Then you are Building from there, which is what Lucas was doing as he built on what Star Wars began.
And then you are Returning again, which is where everything comes around full circle.

"Beginning Star Wars" has my vote. "Starting Star Wars" would be my second choice.

--SKot