Friday 22 July 2016

Star Wars on Super 8!

My dad had an old 8mm camera with which he took quite a lot of home movies.  Over the past few weeks I've been digitizing them.

I figured, since I was doing this anyway, I might as well do my husband's home movies too.  While my family stuck with the soundless films until the 80s when we got a camcorder, my husband's family upgraded to Super 8, which does sound.  And in addition to family movies, they also had these gems:  


Those are official Super 8 releases of Star Wars (in black and white) and Superman the Movie. Unfortunately, whatever chemical they used on the film to 'preserve' it, leached the blues out, so when you watch them now they're very red tinged.  They're also between 15 and 20 minutes each.

Since I can't post the video for copyright reasons, here are the scenes that make up the Super 8 cut of Star Wars (I can do Superman later if people are interested).

There's a still shot of the title (no exposition crawl), followed by Luke and Obi Wan talking about Luke's father and seeing Leia's message on R2D2.  The scene jumps to the Death Star where Luke and Leia meet up with Han and Chewie, before getting on the Millennium Falcon. There's a cut where Ben dies (that is, you see them walking across the floor immediately followed by Leia saying 'he's gone' and Han telling Luke to shoot the door - no lightsaber battle between Ben and Vader).  They leave the Death Star and have the tie fighter battle.  Leia hugs Chewie and The End comes up on the screen.

The ending was so abrupt I almost started laughing.  This cut wouldn't make any sense to someone who didn't watch the theatrical release.  It's not even a 'best of' cut, as they removed Alderaan being blown up and didn't have the cantina scene or anything from the last third of the film. 

Ain't history wonderful? 

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