What about the changes made to the prequel trilogy?

It is one of the most common, heated discussions in the Star Wars community. In 1997, the Star Wars special editions were released with several changes made to each of the movies. From that moment on it seemed like you could always find someone willing to lament the changes made to Star Wars. How Han should always shoot first, or the wrong actor is playing Anakin at the end of the movie or Ewoks shouldn’t blink, or why this or that change really messes up the entire flow of the original trilogy.

Every time a new release of the movies comes out (From the Special Edition release, to the DVD release, to the Blu Ray release, to the  debut on Disney+) it seems to come with a new round of changes for fans to pick apart and complain about. However, the original trilogy aren’t the only Star Wars movies to experience changes. While they aren’t discussed nearly as much, there have been multiple releases of the prequel trilogy and they’ve had changes as well. Some changes were bigger than others, but thanks to Star Wars fans being willing to break down every movie frame by frame, we can detail every single change.

The Phantom Menace

The most obvious change to the prequel trilogy was in the Blu Ray release for The Phantom Menace.  Originally, Yoda was a puppet in The Phantom Menace like he was in the original trilogy, but the puppet was replaced by a CGI model for the character in the other two movies of the trilogy. When The Phantom Menace was released on Blu Ray, The puppet version of Yoda was replaced to help create a consistent visual style across the three movies. Other changes to The Phantom Menace included more Podrace footage being included when the movie was released on DVD, including the introduction to several of the Podracers at the start of the race, and on the Blu Ray release the Force speed effect on Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan near the beginning of the film was redone in order to look better in the new format. Also, if you consider it a change, The Phantom Menace was the only one of the Star Wars movies to be converted into a 3D format.

Attack of the Clones

For Attack of the Clones, there were a few instances where some dialogue was either changed or added in the DVD release. Some dialogue was changed in the scene where Anakin tells Padme about killing the Tusken Raiders, and later on, when Padme is knocked out of  the spaceship during the battle of Geonosis, when a clone trooper asks if she is all right, her response was changed from “yes” to “uh-huh,” a more dazed response, given that she was just knocked out of a flying spaceship. The dialogue adjustments continued for the movie’s blu ray release when a voiceover of Shmi Skywalker was added to Anakin’s nightmare scene.

Revenge of the Sith

Of the three movies in the prequel trilogy, Revenge of the Sith seems to be the one to have the smallest changes across the multiple releases. There are a few instances where a straight cut between scenes was changed to a wipe cut, or Vader’s famous “NOOO!” near the end of the movie being cut down to be slightly shorter for the DVD release, but there’s not very much that your average viewer would ever catch as something that had been changed. Of course, Revenge of the Sith remains the most recent Star Wars movie that was directed by George Lucas. For the most part, changes have always been about updating the movies with the latest technology that wasn’t available at the time of production. In an alternate world where Lucas himself had decided to direct the sequel trilogy instead of selling the company to Disney, it’s very possible that he would have rewatched Revenge of the Sith in this context and seen a whole host of things that he would want to change.

With the rise of streaming, and the slow death of physical media, these kinds of minor tweaks are likely to become more and more common. We already have examples where mistakes that made it into streaming shows like The Mandalorian have been edited out and now the original version is not able to be watched at all. While the changes in Star Wars have frustrated fans for years now, one interesting side effect is that it has caused fans to furiously document every single slight change to any of the movies, allowing us to have a record of every version of Star Wars anybody has ever seen, even if they can’t see it anymore.