“During the story conferences I had with Leigh, my thoughts weren’t fully formed and I felt her script when in a completely different direction….that’s when I sat down and wrote two drafts, which are closer to the film.” Here’s a quote from George Lucas from that book. In the book Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, it seems like Lucas’s decision to make The Empire Strikes Back the fifth installment in a series and not the second was made retroactively after the original screenwriter, Leigh Brackett, passed away. But, all official Lucasfilm sources, including the Lucasfilm website, clearly state it was the 1981 release in which this change was made. One 2005 book, The Cinema of Geoge Lucas, claims that it was the 1978 reissue in which Lucas added “Episode IV” to the crawl. Interestingly, there is a mild controversy as to exactly when “Episode IV” was added to the title crawl of Star Wars. LEFT: the 1977 opening crawl of 'Star Wars.' RIGHT: The 1981 reissue. In other words, if you think George Lucas started retroactively messing around with the canon of Star Wars in 1997 with the controversial special editions, then you don’t know the history of Star Wars. His motivation was to match the original Star Wars with the opening crawl of Empire, which just a year prior had blown people’s minds by throwing an “Episode V” on the screen when everyone thought they were there to see “Star Wars 2.” Only this time, George Lucas decided to add “Episode IV” and “A New Hope” to the famous opening title crawl. On April 10, 1981, roughly a year after The Empire Strikes Back was released in theaters, 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm re-released the original film, too.
Here’s how the very first Star Wars retcon went down. And this time, it was called Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. And 37 years ago this week, four years after the original film hit theaters, it was released again. The film known as Star Wars wasn’t the beginning of a story, it was the middle. In the beginning, there was just “Star Wars.” But then, fans of the most popular science fiction movie of all time were thrown a hyperspace curveball.
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