Team Negative One: the Star Wars George Lucas doesn’t want you to see

Earlier this year, one of the most ambitious film restoration projects ever attempted was finally unveiled to the public. After acquiring a well-preserved 35mm print of Star Wars in 2008, a fan known only as Mr Black recruited a number of collaborators and began the painstaking process of digitally restoring the film, frame by frame. After years of work, their unauthorised transfer is at last complete, and in January it went online, giving enthusiasts an opportunity to see the film as it looked and sounded when Luke Skywalker and friends first took the world by storm in 1977.

In other words, it undid all of the bad work done by George Lucas in the intervening four decades, during which he’s championed his ever-evolving Special Edition of the movie – complete with hordes of new CGI characters, gaudy colour changes and other unnecessary revisions – over the original cut, which he withdrew from circulation many years ago. Black’s bootleg, the latest in a series of attempts by fans to restore the film to its former glory, now represents the best available version of the film’s theatrical cut.

Of course, Lucas could easily render the entire project obsolete by allowing the unadulterated version of Star Wars to be properly restored and released through official channels, but that’s unlikely to happen any time soon. In 2004, Lucas told the Associated Press that he’s “sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it, but I want it to be the way I want it to be”. Today, anyone keen to see the theatrical cut by legitimate means must choose between an out-of-print VHS release and an excruciatingly low-res DVD bonus feature from 2006.

Such control freakery is a far cry from the Lucas of 1988, who went before Congress to warn that Hollywood’s mercenary tendencies might lead to a future in which old prints were destroyed and replaced with altered negatives. “This would be a great loss to our society,” he cautioned. “Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.” Twenty years later, a publicist for Lucas’s production company would horrify fans by claiming that the Star Wars negatives were “permanently altered for the creation of the Special Editions”.

Having seen both the original version of Star Wars and the most recent iteration of the Special Edition, it’s hard to disagree with the fans’ preference for the former. The “finished” film Lucas prizes so dearly barely feels like a film at all, but rather the centrepiece of a vast global brand, there to provide an anchor for a growing mass of follow-up material. The original, by contrast, offers a glimpse of what audiences encountered in 1977: a fascinating outlier – part pastiche, part technological marvel – that could just as easily have faded into cult obscurity as explode into a worldwide phenomenon.

• The main image on this article was changed on 5 March 2016. The original was from The Empire Strikes Back, rather than Star Wars.