Harmy's Despecialized Edition

Star Wars: The Despecialized Edition, also known as Harmy's Despecialized Edition, is a fan-created film preservation of the original Star Wars trilogy films: Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983). It is a high-quality replica of the out-of-print theatrical versions, created by a team of Star Wars fans with the intention of preserving the films, culturally and historically. The project was led by Petr Harmáček, then an English teacher, from Plzeň, Czech Republic, under the online alias Harmy.

The original Star Wars trilogy was created by George Lucas and released theatrically between 1977 and 1983. For the franchise's 20th anniversary in 1997, Lucas introduced noticeable changes within the films to address his dissatisfaction with the original cuts. These versions, promoted as the "Special Edition", included additional scenes, different dialogue, new sound effects, and computer-generated imagery. These changes, along with more changes added in 2004, 2011, and 2019 were carried over into subsequent home video releases. As of 2026, the original theatrical releases are not commercially available, and have never been officially released in high definition.

The new changes were met with a negative response from critics and fans. Harmáček felt that changing the films in this way constituted "an act of cultural vandalism". In 2010, he began to create a high-definition reconstruction of the films' theatrical versions. He and a team of eight other fans used the 2011 Blu-ray releases for the majority of material, the lower-definition 1993 LaserDisc releases as a guide to the original version, and various other sources. The first version was published online in 2011, and updated versions have been released since.

As a derivative work, Harmy's Despecialized Edition cannot be legally bought or sold in the United States and other countries with treaties respecting US copyrights, and is "to be shared among legal owners of the officially available releases only". Consequently, the films are mainly available via various file sharing methods. Reaction to the project has been mostly positive, with critics generally praising the quality and aesthetics of the work.

Background

The original Star Wars trilogy was a Lucasfilm production released theatrically by 20th Century Fox between 1977 and 1983, and was subsequently released on home media during the 1980s and 1990s. The films were distributed by CBS/Fox Video on several formats, such as VHS, Betamax, and LaserDisc. In 1997, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Star Wars, Lucas re-released new cuts of the trilogy to theaters, naming them the "Special Editions". The purpose of this release was to change the films to meet Lucas' ideal vision that he could not achieve during their original productions. A number of changes to the original releases included additions of enhanced digital effects, previously unreleased scenes, altered dialogue, unreleased and newly recorded music by John Williams, updated sound-effects by THX and Skywalker Sound, and entirely new CGI sequences from Industrial Light & Magic.

Reactions to the "Special Edition" versions remain controversial, with some commentators praising the picture and sound restoration, but criticising unnecessary additions such as computer-generated characters, creatures, and vehicles as well as alterations to the essential story; most notably, a short scene involving the bounty hunter Greedo shooting at Han Solo from the first film drew significant ire. Further changes to the series were added to the DVD release in 2004 to establish continuity with the prequel trilogy and to the Blu-ray releases from 2011. The final release of the theatrical cuts was in 2006, when unrestored masters used for the 1993 "Definitive Collection" trilogy on LaserDisc were added as a DVD bonus feature to a limited run – some fans pejoratively termed this release "George's Original Unaltered Trilogy" (GOUT).

Despite a high demand and many online fan petitions, Lucasfilm has refused to release the theatrical versions of Star Wars in HD quality. In 2010, Lucas stated that bringing the original cuts to Blu-ray would be a "very, very expensive" process; as of 2026, the films are still only widely available in their altered versions.

Production

Conception

Petr Harmáček (known online by the alias "Harmy") had watched a dubbed version of the original cut of Star Wars at the age of six, and had then seen the Special Editions of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on their 1997 release. Although initially admiring them, he became disappointed when he learned how much the films had been changed retroactively; he argued that replacing the original effects with re-composited digital effects was "an act of cultural vandalism". A fan of the original trilogy, he had written his undergraduate thesis on their cultural impact. After seeing a trailer for a cut of the DVD version of The Empire Strikes Back by a fan known as Adywan, Harmáček was inspired to create a version of the film that "undid" the various post-1977 changes and restored the theatrical releases, in high-definition. He described his motivation as: "I wanted to be able to show people who haven't seen Star Wars yet, like my little brother or my girlfriend, the original, Oscar-winning version, but I didn't want to have to show it to them in bad quality." Harmáček's edits were the first to recreate the theatrical releases in HD.

Editing

Harmáček began creating his new cuts in 2010. At the time, he was working as an English teacher in Plzeň and had no professional experience with film editing. Instead, he taught himself programs such as Avisynth and Adobe After Effects as the project progressed, beginning with Photoshop skills that he had developed in college. To remove the post-1977 changes, Harmáček went through the film frame-by-frame, correcting colors and rotoscoping. Undoing some shots took only an hour, while others took hundreds. Lightsabers were color-corrected, shots of the Millennium Falcon cockpit were un-cropped, Boba Fett's original voice was restored, and CGI characters and backgrounds were removed.

Sources

Most of the source material used for Harmy's Despecialized Edition was taken from Lucasfilm's official Blu-ray release of the films in 2011, while other sequences were upscaled from previous home video releases.

These include:

• The 2-disc "Limited Edition" DVD release from 2006. This set contains a low resolution copy of the theatrical cuts on a bonus disc. Harmy refers to this disc as "George's Original Unaltered Trilogy" (GOUT).
• The official trilogy on DVD box set from 2004, primarily the HDTV broadcasts of those versions of the films.
• The 1997 "Special Edition" re-releases, most notably digital broadcasts of those cuts along with their LaserDisc releases.
• The 1993 LaserDisc "Definitive Collection" box set.
• Digital transfers of a Spanish 35 mm Kodak LPP and 70 mm film cels, a 16 mm print.
• A collection of still images of the original matte paintings.

Harmáček edited these sources together using programs such as Avisynth and Adobe After Effects.

Harmáček was assisted by a group of like-minded fans from the website OriginalTrilogy.com. In total, they estimated that the project took thousands of hours of work between them. In 2011, one year after the project had begun, the first version of Harmy's Despecialized Edition was published online; new and updated versions were created regularly in the five years that followed. As of February 2026, the most recent versions of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are v2.7, v2.0 and v3.1 respectively. As a result of the project, Harmáček was able to quit his teaching job and in 2015 was hired by UltraFlix to prepare and restore a library of 4K-encoded films for sale and rent. He has since joined UPP, a Prague-based VFX house, as a 2D digital compositor and worked on such projects as Blade Runner 2049, Wonder Woman, and AMC's The Terror.

Legality

The legality of downloading Harmy's Despecialized Edition is contentious. As a fan edit, the cut cannot be legally bought or sold, and treads a line between fair use and copyright infringement. OriginalTrilogy.com states that the edits are "made for culturally historical and educational purposes" and that they are "to be shared among legal owners of the officially available releases only". Consequently, the films are only available via various BitTorrent trackers and through specialized rapid download programs using file sharing sites. Harmáček himself remarked: "I'm convinced that 99% of people who download this already bought Star Wars 10 times over on DVD." As of 2026, he had received no legal challenge from The Walt Disney Studios, the owner of Lucasfilm and 20th Century Studios, over the Despecialized Edition.