From the vaults of VfB comes this bit of cinematic history

George - the dumb bastards should sell you the rights back to LucasFilm, et. al., for one dollar, then drop the planned script for the actual remaining three movies [if that's actually a thing] and let JLongbone direct it...unless you'd rather finish it personally - you weren't pulling Hugh Hefner moves while directing and producing

Star Wars Deleted Magic Revisited

"Deleted Magic" is a feature-length documentary about the deleted scenes of the Star Wars trilogy, and about how the movies we know and love were made and edited together. It is taken from information, sources and home videos officially released by Lucasfilm. This project is not an official Lucasfilm project - it is an unofficial, not-for-profit research project, done in the spirit of fun by a Star Wars fan to be both informative and entertaining.

The idea is to combine all sorts of alternate, deleted and making-of footage into a full-length film that gives a better view of how the film we know as Star Wars was edited together. In addition to deleted scenes like the Biggs Darklighter material, you'll get a sense of the "Lost Cuts" of the films ... the longer edits that didn't have finished voices or effects.

Edited by Garrett Gilchrist. Original version 2005, Revisited 2009

https://archive.org/details/star-wars-deleted-magic

Thumbnail: https://x.com/starwarsiain/status/1740142571098349924

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObscureMedia/comments/df0vse/star_wars_deleted_magic_a_massive_collection_of/

That first Jabba scene is from the special edition with CGI slug Jabba. The original deleted scene has this fat Irish guy:

https://youtu.be/cw1gkNd6Z_8

I skimmed through it to see if this scene was included (maybe I missed it):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ayT0EZwbks

I’m still pretty obsessed how George Lucas made star wars 77. It’s real movie magic. Shame we don’t have this level of drive and vision anymore in film directors.

This is a very interesting documentary about the making of the first Star Wars film (and to a lesser extent Empire and Jedi) including a look at some of the deleted scenes, behind the scenes footage, and notes on subtle things that you might have never seen or noticed before.

Intention:

In March 2005, I created a DVD called Deleted Magic and released it for free, on a non-profit basis, on the internet. It was very popular. I’m told that Clive Young’s book Homemade Hollywood called it “The best documentary ever made on the making of Star Wars.”

In 2009, I decided to revisit the major deleted scenes of Star Wars. Most of these scenes had only been released in low quality, 12 frames per second, on CD-ROMs in the late 90s. I used the program Twixtor to generate new frames and restore these scenes to 24 frames per second – not a perfect solution during fast motion, but jaw-droppingly successful during dialogue scenes, and an improvement that is like night and day. I combined a multitude of new sources within the same frame to restore the Jabba the Hutt scene. I animated a shot of Luke and a Treadwell droid, and a shot of Ben attacking with his lightsaber during the Cantina sequence. I have restored these scenes to a quality never seen before, and placed them on this disc for you, edited into the original, unchanged Deleted Magic feature documentary from 2005. Enjoy.

Additional Notes:

A note that the special features also appear in slightly better quality than on the original Deleted Magic … ripped directly from other fine fan DVDs. The 1977 crawl does not appear this time round due to disc space (I had intended to use the version from my own Star Wars Classic Edition 2.0). Slightly different menu music this time round. You might find subtle references to two of my other fan DVD projects. The object of Deleted Magic Revisited was to recreate my original Deleted Magic DVD from 2005, but with new versions of five major deleted scenes. I had edited these scenes in 16×9 aspect ratio to preserve their quality. However, the original Deleted Magic was edited in a 4×3 aspect ratio, due to the many different sources used in the film, and the onscreen captions. So, it was impossible to place the new material into the film seamlessly. Instead, there’s an ugly jump as to another track as your DVD player switches ratios. I tried to place these switches in inconspicuous places, reediting some material from the original Deleted Magic in 16×9 to make the transitions easier. I’ve recreated the functionality of the original Deleted Magic DVD, not an easy task, as it’s a very complex DVD full of subtitles, photo galleries, many chapters and tracks, “stories”, alternate audio, different versions of things … I retyped the extra subtitles, recreated the image galleries, etc. Enjoy this new version!

Special Thanks:

Mark Johnson

Brad Cook

Peter Lopez

Jambe Davdar (Jabba the Hutt scene)

https://fanedit.org/star-wars-deleted-magic-revisited/