Despite giving away replica light sabers and opening their stores early for the launch this morning, the line-ups for the release of Stars Wars The Complete Saga on Blu-ray at Future Shop were very small. A mere dozen fans waited outside the Yonge and Dundas location. It’s not that the store won’t sell many copies, they will, but for the re-re-re-release of a movie series now more than thirty years old, most fans are content to pre-order and pick up later. Darth Vader seemed eager to get his copy early, but then for him there’s a controversy to deal with.

 

As with the special re-releases in 2004 and 1997, creator George Lucas has used his digital resources to make changes, and once again he’s drawn the ire of fans. This time its new dialogue added to Darth Vader’s final moments, where he now bellows “Noooooo!” as he rises up against the Emperor. Fans online have been quick to suggest that the stoic silence of Vader’s performance in the original was far more impactful.

If you saw Star Wars as a little boy or a girl, then you surely carry with you your own personal copy of the movie inside, the one you drew upon as you acted out scenes with your friends in the backyard. It’s understandable that Lucas’ revisions can feel as if they severe a connection with that relationship.

Truth be told, the changes this time are minimal outside of Vader’s melodramatic utterance. Across all six movies in the series are slight changes; removing a puppeteer’s arm here, changing the colour of an effect there. Some may not like the removal of Yoda’s puppet from the Phantom Menace (instead he’s now CGI throughout the whole movie), but there’s nothing here that will change the way you view events or characters the way Han’s changed encounter with Greedo did for many.

As if addressing that very sticky issue, Lucas has included in this boxed set the original rough cut of the Cantina scene. Here we get to see Solo make out with a female companion as Kenobi and Luke navigate the characters at the bar. We also get to hear the original dialogue spoke by the actor playing Greedo as he and Ford play out a scene that originally, as it turns out, went longer and left who-shot-who a bit vague.

The real value of the set is in the archival content. There’s a beautiful fly-through of Lucasfilm’s internal museum, a collection of artefacts that would be pretty magical to behold. For each film a number of props, models, and costumes have been scanned for 360 panoramas with accompanying details and interviews and I think it’s this material that makes the Blu-ray edition significant.

Included are a number of deleted scenes, there’s one of Luke meeting up with friend Biggs and pals in the original Star Wars that has long been a fan favourite, and several documentaries representing footage collected both old and new.

In a nod to how much Lucas has changed in his attitude towards fan culture, the set also includes a large collection of spoofs representing send-ups from the likes of Weird Al Yankovic, Robot Chicken, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, That 70’s Show and others.

Despite naming it “The Complete Saga” and marketing it with the tag line “own every minute”, it’s still missing material from earlier releases including deleted scenes and gag reels, perhaps leaving open a more complete collection to be created for the expected 3D edition of the saga.

Considering how many releases of the Star Wars franchise there have been over the past decades, it’s difficult to call this one a “must-have”, but I do, truly, enjoy the museum-like material on each of the major props, models, and artwork. It’s fascinating to learn that Darth Maul’s look was inspired by a photograph of a Tibetan Lama from the 1940’s or to see a complete skeleton of Jar-Jar Binks from artist Terryl Whitlatch, who used her background in zoology and palaeontology to create his creature look from a combination of an emu, parrot fish, and duckbill dinosaur. These are geeky tidbits, but delivered by people of astonishing imagination and creativity. That’s the kind of extra layer to the series I think a good home video release should have.