Harmy's Despecialized Edition (2011)

Country

United States

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This is a fan-made restoration of the original Star Wars trilogy as they appeared in theaters before later edits. A team worked to recreate the out-of-print theatrical versions using high-quality sources.

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What happens

Star Wars: The Despecialized Edition, also known as Harmy's Despecialized Edition, is a fan-created film preservation of the original Star Wars trilogy films: Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983). It is a high-quality replica of the out-of-print theatrical versions, created by a team of Star Wars fans with the intention of preserving the films, culturally and historically. The project was led by Petr Harmáček, then an English teacher, from Plzeň, Czech Republic, under the online alias Harmy. The original Star Wars trilogy was created by George Lucas and released theatrically between 1977 and 1983. For the franchise's 20th anniversary in 1997, Lucas introduced noticeable changes within the films to address his dissatisfaction with the original cuts. These versions, promoted as the "Special Edition", included additional scenes, different dialogue, new sound effects, and computer-generated imagery. These changes, along with more changes added in 2004, 2011, and 2019 were carried over into subsequent home video releases. As of 2026, the original theatrical releases are not commercially available, and have never been officially released in high definition. The new changes were met with a negative response from critics and fans. Harmáček felt that changing the films in this way constituted "an act of cultural vandalism". In 2010, he began to create a high-definition reconstruction of the films' theatrical versions. He and a team of eight other fans used the 2011 Blu-ray releases for the majority of material, the lower-definition 1993 LaserDisc releases as a guide to the original version, and various other sources. The first version was published online in 2011, and updated versions have been released since. As a derivative work, Harmy's Despecialized Edition cannot be legally bought or sold in the United States and other countries with treaties respecting US copyrights, and is "to be shared among legal owners of the officially available releases only". Consequently, the films are mainly available via various file sharing methods. Reaction to the project has been mostly positive, with critics generally praising the quality and aesthetics of the work. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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