Star Wars: The Despecialized Edition

A remastered copy of the original 1977 Han-shoots-first version of Star Wars is out there and you can watch it but it’s probably illegal. But Disney is never going to show it to you, so maybe it’s ok to find it on Bittorrent?

The Despecialized Edition is the years-long work of a diverse group of people who have taken elements from many different sources and created the ultimate version of the first Star Wars film. It has also been upgraded to display properly on high definition screens, with high-quality sounds and a near perfect image.

The latest Blu-Ray release of the film serves as the skeleton for this edition, but elements of the 2006 bonus DVD that included the unaltered version of the film was also used to remove special effects and edits that were added by Lucas.

Here’s a short feature on the video sources used:

And here’s how to get the full film.

Update: Here’s an extensive side-by-side look at how dozens of shots were modified to make The Despecialized Edition.

• movies
• Star Wars
• video