Harmy's Despecialized Edition

Petr Harmáček (known online by the alias "Harmy") had watched a dubbed version of the original cut of Star Wars at the age of six, and had then seen the Special Editions of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on their 1997 release.[9] Although initially admiring them, he became disappointed when he learned how much the films had been changed retroactively; he argued that replacing the original effects with re-composited digital effects was "an act of cultural vandalism".[10] A fan of the original trilogy, he had written his undergraduate thesis on their cultural impact.[11] After seeing a trailer for Adywan's cut of The Empire Strikes Back, Harmáček was inspired to create a version of the film that "undid" the post-1977 changes and restored the theatrical releases in high-definition.[12] He described his motivation as: "I wanted to be able to show people who haven't seen Star Wars yet, like my little brother or my girlfriend, the original, Oscar-winning version, but I didn't want to have to show it to them in bad quality."[10] Harmáček's edits were the first to recreate the theatrical releases in HD.[9]

Harmáček began creating his new cuts in 2010.[7] At the time, he was working as an English teacher in Plzeň and had no professional experience with film editing.[9] Instead, he taught himself programs such as Avisynth and Adobe After Effects as the project progressed, beginning with Photoshop skills that he had developed in college.[3][11] To remove the post-1977 changes, Harmáček was required to go through the film frame-by-frame, correcting colors and rotoscoping.[2][13] Undoing some shots took only an hour, while others took hundreds. Lightsabers were color-corrected, shots of the Millennium Falcon cockpit were un-cropped, Boba Fett's original voice was restored, and CGI characters and backgrounds were removed.[3]

Most of the source material used for Harmy's Despecialized Edition was taken from Lucasfilm's official Blu-ray release of the films in 2011, while other sequences were upscaled from previous home video releases.

These include:

• The 2-disc "Limited Edition" DVD release from 2006. This set contains a low resolution copy of the theatrical cuts on a bonus disc. Harmy refers to this disc as "George's Original Unaltered Trilogy" (GOUT).[14]
• The official trilogy on DVD box set from 2004, primarily the HDTV broadcasts of those versions of the films.
• The 1997 "Special Edition" re-releases, most notably digital broadcasts of those cuts along with their LaserDisc releases.
• The 1993 LaserDisc "Definitive Collection" box set.
• Digital transfers of a Spanish 35 mm Kodak LPP and 70 mm film cels, a 16 mm print.
• A collection of still images of the original matte paintings.

Harmáček edited these sources together using programs such as Avisynth and Adobe After Effects.[10]

To help, Harmáček was assisted by a group of like-minded fans from the website OriginalTrilogy.com. In total, the project took thousands of hours of work between them.[10] In 2011, one year after the project had begun, the first version of Harmy's Despecialized Edition was published online;[15] new and updated versions were created regularly in the five years that followed.[5] As of February 2017, the most recent "despecialized" versions of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are v2.7, v2.0 and v2.5 respectively.[11] As a result of the project, Harmáček was able to quit his teaching job and in 2015 was hired by UltraFlix to prepare and restore a library of 4K-encoded films for sale and rent. He has since joined UPP, a Prague-based VFX house, as a 2D digital compositor and worked on such projects as Blade Runner 2049, Wonder Woman, and AMC's The Terror.[3][7]

The legality of downloading Harmy's Despecialized Edition is contentious.[2] As a fan edit, the cut cannot be legally bought or sold, and treads a line between fair use and copyright infringement.[16] OriginalTrilogy.com states that the edits are "made for culturally historical and educational purposes" and that they are "to be shared among legal owners of the officially available releases only".[7] Consequently, the films are only available via various BitTorrent trackers and through specialized rapid download programs using file sharing sites.[4][17] Harmáček himself remarked: "I'm convinced that 99% of people who download this already bought Star Wars 10 times over on DVD."[11] As of January 2020, he had received no legal challenge from Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, the owner of Lucasfilm and 20th Century Studios, over the Despecialized Edition.[10]

Star Wars 4K77 was a fan project to scan and restore original 35mm prints of Star Wars from 1977. The project name refers to the 4K resolution used and the film's release year of 1977. In 2016, a few 35mm prints were located and donated to group of fans called "Team Negative 1" (TN1), who scanned these prints at 4K resolution. TN1 released the film online in May 2018, first in the form of a 4K UHD file and then a 1080p downscale. According to the Project 4K77 website, 97% of the restored video came from a single print that dubbed in Spanish, with the remainder from an alternate print and some frames upscaled from the official Lucasfilm Blu-ray.[20]

TN1 followed 4K77 with Project 4K83, based on an original 35mm print of Return of the Jedi (released in 1983) that was discovered and scanned in 4K. According to their website, this print required little cleanup, and the restoration was released in October 2018.[21]

Project 4K80, a restoration of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), was begun by TN1 in 2020, reporting that although they have multiple prints, some were faded and they required substantially more cleanup, with a project two-year time frame to complete.[22]