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Is There Any Definitive List of Revisions and Retcons in the Star Wars Movies?


I remember seeing the original Star Wars on the first day it was released in my city (which, sadly, was a few weeks after it was released in many cities). Being a young geek who could only get SF in books and once a week from Star Trek reruns, I saw it as many times as I could that summer and it was etched firmly on my brain.



Within a year or two there was a re-release. I'm pretty sure this was not the re-release with footage of The Empire Strikes Back and a few friends and I noticed they had, at the time, added echo effects with Luke and Leia in the chasm.


That was my first experience with movies being retconned. As we all know, along the way, Lucas has made a number of changes to the original trilogy, mostly to the original Star Wars (including adding "Episode IV" to the title).


Is there a list of what changes, revisions, and retcons have been done to the Star Wars movies and when they've been done?



Answer



While they describe their own list as "partial", the most complete one I've seen is still the one at Wookieepedia as it compares the various versions.


But this list of SE changes is also really well done as it includes visual comparisons of the original and SE versions of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. It also includes a categorized XLS of changes to ANH, but sadly does not include documents for the other movies. Sadder, still, is the fact that it was never updated for the newer 2006 or 2011 edits.


StarWars.com has a nice writeup about some of the changes for the 2011 versions, but is incomplete.


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