Deleted Scenes to be included in Star Wars Rerelease on Blu-Ray

All six “Star Wars” films will be released on Blu-ray in the fall of 2011, but that’s not the biggest news. A never-before-seen clip of “Return of the Jedi” was screened for fans who attended the annual Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, Florida this past weekend.

George Lucas himself was on hand to unveil this scene. The scene was originally intended to be the segue between the opening scene of “Jedi,” which has Darth Vader on the new Death Star, and Luke’s rescue mission of Han Solo on Tatooine.

We now know for sure that Luke had to build his new light saber himself and not just get one from another Jedi, like his first one. (Obi-Wan (Ben) Kenobi gave him his fathers old lightsaber in Episode IV: A New Hope.)

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas, in an interview with the New York Times, explained why he waited so long to do the Blu-ray release: “We’ve been wanting to do it as soon as we possibly could, but we just wanted to do it when enough people would be able to buy it and see it. We came out with ‘Star Wars’ right at the beginning of VHS and we sold [only] 300,000 copies.”
He also added: “We learned from that experience that if you’re too early in the marketplace, there’s just not enough demand for it.” (Some may recall the original “Star Wars” was not released on DVD until 2004.)

The big selling point this time around, beside it being released on Blu-ray, are the additional deleted scenes. Star Wars fans can only hope that, in addition to this just-released light saber scene, the Blu-rays also include the infamous sandstorm scene from “Return of the Jedi,” the Wampa attack on Echo Base from “The Empire Strikes Back,” and, yes, the kind-of-creepy passionate kiss Luke and Leia share in “Empire.”