Chat corner 30: A New Hope

[annathecrow]

Welcome to this week’s chat corner!

Optional prompt

This week’s topic, should you accept it, is “Star Wars: A New Hope”. The very beginning of everything!

Have you seen it? (I think it’s perfectly possible to be a SW fan without seeing the OT, for the record!) Was it your first SW? What made you watch it? How old were you?

…did you like it? Do you like it now, if your first watch was a long time ago?

 

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I'm not sure how many times I've seen New Hope but the first time was before it was called that 😉 It was when it originally came out in the theaters. I vaguely remember that it was already being lauded as a big hit by the time I did so it wasn't opening weekend or anything. I loved it at once and was very excited to hear there would be sequels. I don't recall who I went to see it with, but I know that I saw it more than once in the theater. So I'm thinking I may have gone with my parents the first time and the second with friends. I remember that neither of my parents liked it as much as Star Trek but they both quite liked the element of the Force in it.

I later owned the original trilogy on VHS, before the later tampering/improvements. I haven't seen it in some time now but still recall it so well I could probably recite most of the dialogue as we go along. Plus, there are so many elements of that film that have callbacks in other SW content.

[annathecrow]

Me and my little brother had a VHS set as well, although ours was... either late 90s or early 00s, I can't recall. We used to quote it at each other as well, although I've forgotten all of that by now.

I was always so confused by the whole SW "improvement" thing! I still don't know what changed when and how the movie looked originally, and at this point I'm too afraid to look it all up. XD

[yourlibrarian]

Being an older film, it could definitely use some improvement in remastering, particularly for the SFX sections. But Lucas decided to change certain things and insert some previously deleted content. I can't say I minded getting deleted stuff back but you've probably heard of the big controversy over the Han and Greedo scene.

I know that in 2019 when I saw ST: TOS remastered it made me quite happy, because I'd seen some older versions where, for example, there was a semi white box around the Enterprise in all its external shots, making the effects they had really obvious and clunky.