Star Wars, Selected scenes, Super8 reel (9 mins.), Black & white, Ken films USA 1977

The very first "home video" of Star Wars? (It may have been predated by a month or two by the Kenner filmclip viewers?) This is a 9-minute digest of the first half of the film. They truncated sections of the story and focused on mostly single action set-pieces. There is no sound, and the clips are captioned with descriptive text, much like you'd find on old silent films. The editing of these digests was an art unto itself, trying to compress a film into a few minutes while giving the customer a satisfying beginning, middle and end. The digest starts with Luke and Ben in "Ben's dwelling" just as Ben gets up to hand Luke the Lightsaber. They watch the message from Princess Leia and the captions spell out "Luke is torn ..... between his responsibilities at home and his need to join the rebellion and fulfill his destiny". Then it cuts to a short establishing shot of the Death Star, and we're into the hanger escape where Leia has already been rescued. Vader and Ben's duel is omitted and you just see our heroes shooting their way to the Falcon and taking off. Leia consoles Luke and is interrupted by the sentry ship space battle, which is left to play out in its entirety (as far as I can tell). Then we cut to a shot of R2 with the caption "They're safe ... for now!" and we get a shot of the Falcon heading off into space and the screen cuts to black. The End. This was also released in a colour version. Apart from the colour, the edits are exactly the same but with some interesting differences. First of all, the colour version omits the traditional Fox logo and the Star Wars title card and replaces them with generic titles. The colour version includes credits for the cast, producer and director, which was skipped on the b&w version. The captions are the same on both versions, but with considerable timing differences. In the colour version the captions appear earlier, and appear to better match the onscreen action. Also, the colour image appears squeezed vertically when compared to the b&w version. This may just be a result of inaccuracies in my amateur film-to-digital captures though. Both the b&w and colour reels come in the same Ken Film's cardboard box, but you can tell them apart by the added "Color" sticker. In 1997, when Star Wars was re-released in the cinema, Empire magazine ran a whole issue devoted to the history of the film. They had a section on "the worst Star Wars merchandise ever" or something like that. One of the items listed was "the 7 minute, black & white, silent version of Star Wars". This was followed by the simple comment, "...it kind of lost something..."

Assorted screenshots:

Opening logo	Title card	In Ben Kenobi's dwelling	In Ben Kenobi's dwelling
A rare establishing shot	In the Death Star	Escaping the Death Star	Space battle
Space battle	They're safe ... for now!	Closing shot	End credit