It’s hard to believe that the sprawling saga that is the Star Wars franchise was once just a humble indie sci-fi film that no studio believed in. You had to be there, in theaters back in 1977, to be part of the wave that propelled the original Star Wars movie to being a generational hit, earning over $460 million at the box office during its initial release, with a theatrical run that lasted over a year, due to its exploding popularity.
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For a few years, it looked like Star Wars would go down as one of the greatest standalone hero’s quest stories ever told. And then, everything changed.
The Skywalker Saga Was Born With Just One Small Edit
On April 10, 1981, Star Wars got its third theatrical re-release, following the release of its sequel film, The Empire Strikes Back, in 1980. Unlike the 1978 and 1979 Star Wars re-releases, George Lucas and his editors decided to make one small title tweak that would change the entire franchise, forever. And all it took was one small edit.
Originally, the opening crawl to Star Wars (which summarizes the premise of the film) was just titled “Star Wars”, before jumping into the contextual backstory (“It is a period of civil war…”). However, when the 1981 re-release hit theaters, George Lucas had the opening crawl changed so that after the “Star Wars” title appeared and faded into the background, the opening crawl now had an official subtitle: “Episode IV / A New Hope”.
It was a needed change: When The Empire Strikes Back hit theaters in 1980, it had an opening crawl that was subtitled “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back”. That threw a lot of fans for a loop, raising questions about the series ordering, since it seemed to jump from the original Star Wars to chapter 5 of a much bigger saga. In an era long before the internet, or Film Twitter, Lucas didn’t get as much traction with interviews where he explained how he envisioned Star Wars as an entire saga, and that the first film was actually the middle of that saga. When making the first film, he had no idea if he’d ever get to finish the entire saga onscreen, so it was framed as a standalone story. After the massive success of Star Wars (1977), the full “original trilogy” was given the green light. Eventually, the entire nine-film story of the “Skywalker Saga” would become a reality. But the saga wasn’t truly, officially, a thing until that 1981 re-release forever reframed Star Wars as A New Hope.
At this point, the Star Wars movies have been altered and re-released so many times that this 1981 version feels obscure compared to, say, the significant visual effects updates, edits, and even massive character-arc changes that Lucas made to the entire original trilogy during their re-releases in the late 1990s. But it’s also a good lesson on recuts: changes don’t have to be big to be impactful, just significant in their purpose.
Star Wars movies are all streaming on Disney+.
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