CT Greedo Scene, is it even needed now

The Jabba design that was used in Jedi wasn't created til that movie's pre-production, as far as I can tell. So at the very least, even if there was a possibility of making Jabba a stop-motion creature in SW, he would not look like the Jabba we know.

The difficulty of integrating a stop-motion character and making it realistic, the way the scene was shot, and the fact that the Jabba character was actually played by an actor rather than a placeholder, who was wearing a fully designed John Mollo costume, the lack of a contemporaneous design for a Jabba creature; these things all lean me towards the idea that compositing in a creature effect was something that might have only occurred to Lucas later on, or at the very least was something he considered pre-SW, dropped for the film's actual production, and later reconsidered.

Interesting point; I think several of the SE-and-later changes have subtly reduced the extent to which the OT is "from the adventures of Luke Skywalker" while elevating Vader (the ghost scene changes, the added lines in the throne room). Adding the Jabba scene does also remove a moment of the audience's shared experience with Luke "taking his first steps into a larger world" (I think his lines are meant to play off how the audience would think he Falcon looks cool - but maybe they are 'played straight' with the ship looking nothing like a traditional scifi vehicle).

 

Here's the excerpt from the actual shooting script (Jabba wasn't in the initial 4th draft):

http://starwarz.com/starkiller/2010/03/star-wars-the-adventures-of-luke-starkiller-revised-fourth-draft/

The additional sentence referring to him as a slug-like creature was added to the published version of the 4th draft included in the Art Of Star Wars in 1979.

 

"IMPOSSIBLE" is a very slight exaggeration, but Harryhausen's work actually demonstrates oierem's point. Harryhausen didn't film Jason fighting against actor stand-in "skeletons". If he had, he would have had not only to incorporate the stop-action models but also painstakingly paint out every bit of stand-in that wasn't covered by the models - on top of the frame-by-frame animation required for every point of overlap-interaction. This in an era when simple wire removal was prohibitively expensive. Heck, even when doing Jar-Jar in CGI two decades they had the actors talking to air/tennis balls to avoid this particular headache.

Given the state-of-the-art in 1977, any shot looking to add such an interactive stop-action character would surely have been filmed sans stand-in. The fact that no such footage seems to exist indicates that stop-action character insertion was
either no-longer or not-yet a concern when the scene was filmed.

 

I said it before. If the "stand in" wasn't supposed to be in the finished shot, they could have worn jeans and a t-shirt. But they had a costume on him, which clearly states Jabba was human at one point. Thus, the wonderful human being line made sense then.

 

I agree with this. I never liked the insertion of the Jabba scene. Not only was it redundant, but it made Jabba look weak, as he essentially kowtows to Han. Plus, even after improving the look of CG Jabba, he still looks crappy.

 

I dunno, this line always made sense to me (having watched the SE) as Han being sarcastically commenting on Jabba's utter difference from humanity - both physical and empathetic.

 

Well said, this is true for me too.

 

Like so many lines & moments in SW related to major story changes, it worked fine both ways, & was meant to be ironic in both instances anyway.

 

True. Isn't it amazing, the way "certain points of view" can be inserted into the OT? GL either has a ton of incredibly vague foresight, or he's the luckiest filmmaker ever.

 

It doesn't look silly to me. It's just there to convey the information that Han is being sought by bounty hunters. Frankly, Han's cold dismissal of Leia's upcoming execution on the Death Star made him seem more cold-blooded to me than his shooting of Greedo. I don't see what the big deal is.

 

Only the generation that grew up watching the OT on the big screen when they first came out appreciates what was before. He should never have messed with the Greedo scene. It was perfect before, and now, it's a joke. If he wanted to add back in that scene with the human stand-in, he was better off just altering the dialogue and renaming the character other than Jabba the Hutt. The super-imposed Jabba looks fake, fake, fake and out of place, and adding in Boba Fett is complete crap. He took two great and mysterious characters and made them common and less interesting.

 

The revised Greedo scene is silly . . . because Lucas had him shoot first before Han killed him? That doesn't make any sense to me. I can understand you arguing that the addition of the Jabba scene made the Greedo scene obsolete. But I do not see how Greedo shooting first should be labeled as "silly".

 

i enjoy the new jabba scene,
it makes it mesh with the revised
special editions better.

however, the original han shoots greedo
first scene should always be there. it's one
of the scenes that stood out to me when
i first saw it in the theater in 77, and has
stood the test of time.

changing it around doesn't work well for me.
it changes han's character too much

later
-1

 

^ This. Plus what others have said about Han's character.

Eliminate the Jabba scene altogether, and go back to the Han-was-the-only-one to shoot version.