Back when the original Star Wars movies got a remastering for DVD in the mid-2000s, one of the things I wondered if they’d change or update was the lightsaber fight between Vader and Obi-Wan on the Death Star.
By that point, the prequels had firmly established a balletic lightsaber combat style that in comparison, made the original duel from 1977 look pretty dull.
The original has its own sort of tension, to be sure — but I still couldn’t help but wonder what a version of that scene shot in the fighting style of the later movies (or even the higher intensity of Empire or Return of the Jedi) might look like.
Well, now someone’s gone and made just that! Check out this fan film:
It feels much more like the Vader of any other movie Vader is in.
BONUS LINK: There are a million Star Wars fan films out there. I haven’t seen the vast majority of them. But one that I have, and that I think is well done, is VADER: SHARDS OF THE PAST.
BONUS LINK 2: This is a pretty deep rabbit hole to fall down, but one Czech fan’s passion project for years has been hand-reassembling a perfect version of the three original Star Wars movies.
Perfection is defined in this case as:
- the highest resolution possible
- containing the desirable fixes from the various remasters
- eliminating the undesirable changes from the various remasters
- as well as fixing additional things that none of the remasters bothered to.
Petr “Harmy” Harmáček’s quixotic quest to composite, remaster, and integrate scenes, shots, and even individual frames from various DVDs, laserdiscs, Blu-rays, film prints, deleted scenes, and the like has resulted in The Despecialized Edition.
(You can also read about it on Wikipedia.)