By Pete Vilmur
With all the digital conveniences Star Wars fans can enjoy these days on DVD -- extensive hours of content, alternate audio tracks, beautiful menus, scores of supplementary features, etc. -- it's easy to forget the saga's modest beginnings on home video, and the many steps it's had to take to reach its heightened status in today's video marketplace.
Because the Star Wars movies have been in constant demand since their home video debut in 1982, they serve as the perfect instrument to gauge the innovations of the ever-evolving and improving home video industry. From the crude analog recordings of the first pan-and-scan monaural Beta cassettes to the state of the art digitally-mastered Revenge of the Sith DVD, the following breakdown lists some of the more significant releases the saga has offered through the years.
1977
While Star Wars' legacy to the home video market formally began in 1982 with the first VHS and Beta videocassettes, fans could actually view A New Hope in their homes as early as 1977, although in a considerably abridged form.
Ken Films first offered Super 8 film clips of select scenes from Star Wars for home viewing on movie projectors (remember those?). With a public hungry to relive the excitement of Star Wars at home and many households still using projectors to view home movies, the Star Wars Super 8 market was a viable one for Ken Films.
Initially offering a mere 200 feet (9 minutes) of footage either with or without sound, Ken Films quickly bumped up their offering to 400 feet (17 minutes) of celluloid Star Wars bliss. Distributor 20th Century Fox actually considered the short reels a marketing tool rather than a consumer product -- after all, the rich but brief footage undoubtedly enticed many infrequent movie-goers to upgrade the Super 8 experience at their local movie theater.
Kenner Products also found some success in the Super 8 market with its release of a hand-cranked movie viewer that played five different Star Wars film cartridges, each containing a minute or so of footage. The silent presentation only provided half of the experience, however, unless one spun the Star Wars soundtrack album simultaneously on the hi-fi.
1982
The first time Star Wars: A New Hope was made available for sale to the public was on September 1, 1982 -- well, sort of. Three months earlier, video retailers had been sent a mandate by 20th Century Fox that stipulated all cassettes made available to the public on May 27 were to be for rental only, and not available for outright purchase until September 1. They were concerned that the sale of the tapes during the summer months might compete with the theatrical run of Star Wars, which was in its fourth re-release.
Many retailers scoffed at such demands, especially since they knew their market was anxious to take the blockbuster film home with them -- permanently. To maneuver around Fox's rental-only edict, retailers were offering the Star Wars cassette as a "lifetime rental", charging up to $120 to keep the video at home indefinitely. With 5,000-6,000 retailers to contend with, Fox couldn't pursue each one legally, and undoubtedly reconsidered its distribution strategy for future releases.
What fans who were willing to pay the hefty fees in those early months got to take home was either a VHS or Beta cassette of Star Wars, released in the signature full screen "pan-and-scan" format of the day. What's more, fans unfortunate enough to own the endangered Betamax machine at home had to experience their Star Wars presentation in mono -- only the VHS edition was recorded in stereo. Since many homes in 1982 still housed the monaural television sets of the '70s or earlier, this was not as ill-received as one might think today.
By the time the cassettes officially went on sale to the public in September for around $80, two more budding formats presented themselves to consumers graced with the prestigious Star Wars title.
RCA SelectaVision's CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) stored an analog signal on a grooved record-like disc, which was read by a stylus that literally rode over it like an LP. The format's most attractive feature was its price -- $35 -- less than half the cost of the videocassette versions. The Star Wars CED was even offered as a free bonus to those willing to shell out $300 for a machine to play one.
Laservision was thinking ahead of the curve in 1982, offering the very first laserdisc presentation of Star Wars for home viewing on a traditional 12-inch platter recorded in CLV (Constant Linear Velocity). CLV discs compressed a two-hour film onto one laserdisc, allowing 60 minutes of play time per side.
Although each of these formats possessed their own unique set of limitations, from monaural presentations to the inability to view scenes frame-by-frame, Star Wars had finally arrived on the home video scene, and was in for the long haul.
1984
Although Ken Films had released a short Super 8 reel for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, it was the film's release on home video in 1984 that really gave it widespread distribution. Released during the holiday season that year, Empire on video (both VHS and Beta, and both in stereo this time) would sell 375,000 units in just one year -- a substantial figure, considering that only 10% of homes in the U.S. had VCRs the year before.
Fortunately, Empire had been released in a boon year for home video recorders -- in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that personal home recording did not constitute copyright infringement, opening the floodgates for another 5 million VCRs to be sold that year.
Again released exclusively in the pan-and-scan format, Empire could also be purchased on both the CED and traditional CLV laserdisc formats.
1985
1985 was a noteworthy year for fans who enjoyed scrutinizing their favorite films a frame at a time -- literally. Star Wars and Empire were both released for the first time on laserdisc presented in CAV (Constant Angular Velocity), allowing viewers to watch the films frame by frame (some high-end CLV players offered this feature, but didn't show the actual film frames -- instead, it was more of a digital "screen-grab"). Still offered only in pan-and-scan, however, fans would need to wait several years before they could view the widescreen versions of the films using the CAV frame-by-frame feature.
