Whether you’ve seen “Star Wars” once or a hundred times since its release in 1977, unless your name is George Lucas, or you looked over his shoulder on the set, you’ve never seen it like this — as clean as the day it was shot, digitally scrubbed and re-mastered for DVD, as part of the long-awaited “Star Wars Trilogy” boxed set.

Jim Ward, Vice President of Marketing and Distribution for Lucasfilm and Executive Producer of the collection, says that “A New Hope” (the film formerly known as “Star Wars”), “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi,” each on DVD for the first time, have been so radically enhanced as to be literally “good as new.”

“They look as beautiful as the dailies George saw in 1976,” says Ward.

Track Record

The optimal re-mastering of the trilogy was a keystone project for LucasFilm. “These are absolutely the crown jewels,” says Ward. But polishing the jewels involved epic wrangling of badly degraded master prints by film restoration expert John Lowry of Lowry Digital Images in Burbank, CA.

Ward, who’d watched Lowry work magical reclamations on the “Indiana Jones” DVD trilogy as well as on Lucas’s debut feature “THX 1138,” knew Lowry represented LucasFilm’s best chance of showing fans the films as the directors saw them long ago on production sets far, far away.

“We’d done a lot of work on the films prior to going to John,” he says, “re-mastering them in high-def, down-converting them into standard def, and re-color timing them. We actually took a cleaning pass through Industrial Light and Magic, as well, but then ultimately took them down to John to make them pristine.”

“The films are really not that old, but the real problem is that they’ve been so successful, and success breeds dirt.”

Success Breeds Dirt

Lowry, who’s restored more than a hundred films from every era, was surprised at just how far from pristine the prints looked when they arrived. “The material came in much dirtier and more beat up than we’d ever expected,” he says. “The films are really not that old, but the real problem is that they’ve been so successful, and success breeds dirt.”

The success of the “Star Wars” films was such that even the master originals had worn badly. “If a movie’s a real dog it sits on the shelf, the negative is probably pristine because nobody’s ever touched it,” says Lowry. “But if you keep pulling that original negative off the shelf to make yet another duplicate, it collects dirt. Just by re-winding it you create static electricity, which pulls everything in. So there was dirt, scratching and a bit of flicker due to age.”

In fact, nearly everything about the prints had degraded except expectations for their restoration. “George Lucas is a very fussy guy,” says Lowry. “We like to think that we are very particular, because we’ve done about a hundred movies now, and we strive to make our output pristine. So to work with a guy like Lucas is fabulous because he’s got his head in the same place, pristine.”

Next page: Three Months and 600 Macs