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Nearly half a century since George Lucas and his team created it, the original Star Wars film remains the best of the franchise in my mind. Every line of dialogue, musical que, and quirk of this movie is burned into my very DNA at this point.
That said, I’ve watched this movie enough times with younger viewers that I know the pacing of the first half hour, while cutting edge in 1977, is a bit too slow for modern audiences. So, with the help of other editors and VFX artists who’ve helped enrich the stew that is now ‘A New Hope’ over the years, we’ve put together a ‘Quick-Start Edition’ that gets things moving a lot faster.
Special thanks to Broom Kid AKA StraightCutsNoChaser for helping me when I was stuck. His work has been invaluable. So, if you enjoy it, just know that a lot of the credit for that should go to him. And if you hate it, it was all his fault and I was helpless to stop him 😉
The first cut is the most painful, but I’ve seen so many kids tune out during the opening crawl that I knew it had to go. If that’s a deal breaker for you, let me remind you that this version of Star Wars isn’t necessarily for you, it’s for younger kids who don’t want to start their exciting space adventure with a long wall of text for them to read before the fun begins.
Next, JoyOfEditing came up with some clever fixes to speed up how quickly R2 & 3PO get to Luke at Owen & Beru’s farm. Finally, the original Kenobi vs Vader fight has been swapped out for a mix of FixItInPost’s souped-up cut with 21C Peasant Fan’s version that better blends with the original footage.
It goes without saying that there’s no CGI Jabba and Han shoots first (obviously).
This uses elements of Buzz Lightyear’s cut of A New Hope, which is itself a recut of a previous edit by ForceGhostRecon, which was cut from Lucas’s own re-edit of his original film. So it’s a real Theseus’s ship situation at this point 😉
This is for my ESL students, so it has hardcoded English subtitles. It can also be paired nicely with Wakeupkeo’s edit of the Galaxy of Adventures A New Hope anime and its ESL reader.
If you’d like a version without the hardcoded subtitles, I’ve made available JoyOfEditing, StraightCutsNoChaser, and 21C Peasant Fan’s work for you to incorporate into your own version in the same folder as my Quick-Start Edition.
It’s at the same link as all my other edits. If you don’t already have that link, please send me a Private Message. As always, suggestions are welcome.