Tuesday, December 18, 2007

for nerd eyes only

Back in 1977 my parents took me to The Cove Theatre on Halifax's seedy side of town to see Star Wars - or as I like to call it, In Space You Stand and Talk and Run and Shoot and BOOM and The End! In the days following the movie, my parents bought me the toys, the magazines, the trading cards and whatever passed for memorabilia in the late '70s. Some of the trading cards showed images that never appeared in the film - Luke wearing a daffy hat, Luke talking to his hotshot Academy friend Biggs - and if I recall correctly, the big comic and the novelisation also contained scenes with Luke whining to Biggs about his lousy life on the farm with the Sand People and the evaporators and his displeasure with a life of forced sodomy sand-based agriculture. Anyway, here's the scene. Note that the only closeup in the whole thing is on a droid's face.

YouTube - Star Wars Lost Intro

6 comments:

motherbumper said...

Got to get to Gottigen. I think I saw it at the Scotia Square cinema but it was so damn long ago it's hard to remember. How darn long would that movie been if all the scenes were left in? I'd probably still be in the theatre.

Anonymous said...

Oh, I would have relished every single thing. How could you not? Much later, I realized that whole Jawa thing was total anti-Semitism but at the time, I was entranced.

Bruce Johnson said...

Lucas had to trim back the shooting of the original due to time and money, so some scenes that were written wern't included. Most have been added back in to the 'updated' version of the film that kids see now. The Biggs charactor is more apparent as is Han Solo's first encounter with Jabba the Hut. Cinema is no longer a finished product. It gets make-overs if the franchise is successful. I hear the 'Final' directors cut of Blade Runner is coming out this month. I think that makes it the 3rd Directors Cut.

palinode said...

motherbumper - I remember going to see movies at Scotia Square. I think I saw Beverly Hills Cop there?

ozma - Jawas are Jews? What? I missed that bit completely.

lotus07 - By god I hated that inserted Han Solo-Jabba scene. It looked horrendous. I agree with you on the notion of films as products that can be revisited and revised (if the money is there, obviously).

On the Blade Runner front, you hear correctly. I own the 5 DVD extravaganza featuring every freaking version of Blade Runner. For such things the phrase 'nerd boner' was coined.

Ozma said...

No, that was a joke. My husband and I like to figure out which muppets are Jewish also. Oscar is not Jewish but Grover--very possibly.

But actually, a case can be made for racialist elements throughout the sci-fi species-creation motif.

xDashofPanachex said...

yeah, i watched return of the jedi first, on a taped-off-of-tv vhs that cut off the last ten minutes. I over came that to eventually watch and thoroughly enjoy the original trilogy several times over though. Woot!