msycamore said:
Where comes that "vaseline on the lens story" from, was it from Lucas in the SE documentaries?
Precisely. He said something like, "The best we could do was put some vaseline on the lens and kind of fudge out the wheels." Even in '97 I was confused, because vaseline is clear and wouldn't make an orange blob like that. Then, at some point I also realized that a "vaseline on the lens" trick wouldn't work with a tracking shot.
Not sure if it was George's fuzzy memory, or part of the "talking down" of the original effects when promoting the SE. The shot may not have looked that good compared to the virtually seamless mirror effect used in the California pickups, but it took a lot more work than smearing vaseline on the lens.
The official 2006 comparison got it right: "The original 1977 version of this shot suffered poor image quality from repeated optical compositing to obscure the wheels of the landspeeder with a hand-animated haze." Still, the vaseline explanation has been become part of SW lore over the past 15 years, even though it's total BS.
And I found the quote about the effect. It was a Richard Edlund interview from 2010:
How do feel about George Lucas going back to the old Star Wars movies and replacing some of your old special effects with new computerized improvements?
When I went to the premiere of the Special Edition at the Fox Village Theatre, George was there. I told George: "I've heard you changed a lot of things and there's all these rumors about reshooting the opening shot... It's your movie and you can do with it what you want. It's not like someone coming around 40-50 years later, colorizing Shirley Temple." and he said: "You know Richard, there's that shot of the landspeeder..." and he didn't have to say anything else, because there's this one shot that's such a stinker in Star Wars and I can't stand it. Gary Kurtz shot this plate of the landspeeder taking off in the desert and you could see the tires under it. We had to get rid of the tires. This is pre-digital and I tried to rotoscope the tires underneath it and tweak the animation of the rotoscope so it didn't vibrate. Then I very carefully repositioned the sand area adjacent to where the tires were supposed to be and put that in the area. I almost had it perfect. If I'd done two or three more takes it would have been perfect, but George had sent it to Disney and had them rotoscope it. They tried doing a color match but didn't quite get the match; it was a little on the pink side, but that's what wound up in the movie. I'd nudge anybody who I'd see the movie with at that point, so they look away from the screen.
The only thing I question is Edlund's claim that the effect was sent to Disney. I'm pretty sure he got mixed up; work was outsourced to several optical and animation houses including Van der Veer, Ray Mercer, Modern Film Effects and DePatie-Freleng, but definitely not Disney. Harrison Ellenshaw was working at Disney when he did the matte paintings for SW (but even so, he painted the SW mattes in Van Nuys).