The Star Wars Trilogy
The original Star Wars films deserve to be on the top of any list of rereleases if only for the fact that George Lucas never seems to stop rereleasing them. Each time, he tweaks them a bit more in the search for some sort of narrative perfection that likely doesn’t exist. In 1981 — one year after the release of the sequel The Empire Strikes Back — Lucas brought Star Wars back to theaters. Among other things, he reworked the now famous opening crawl to read, “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” (even early on he was thinking of all the films fitting together as one large story). In 1997, to celebrate the original film’s 20th anniversary, all three films were digitally remastered and rereleased to great fanfare. Again, Lucas made some minor but significant changes, such as making Han Solo less of a rogue by changing a scene in which he had previously shot a bounty hunter in cold blood. In 2004, all three films were again released (this time on DVD) with changes that brought them in line with the story set out in the series’ prequels. Not surprisingly, Lucas has talked about sending the original trilogy back to theaters once again — this time in 3-D.
