Never challenge the determination of a dedicated fan base. In 2006, George Lucas claimed that all quality prints of the 1977 theatrical release of Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope had been “permanently altered for the creation of the Special Editions” and that remaining prints were in too poor of a condition to restore. In 2016, a group of talented fans under the collective moniker Team Negative One accomplished precisely that, spending three years digitally cleaning and correcting a damaged 35mm copy to near-pristine condition in what they’re calling the “Silver Screen” edition of the film.
Unlike similar fan projects such as Harmy’s “despecialized editions”—which used multiple sources to create a high-definition copy of the series’s first installment free of any post-1977 directorial tinkering—Team Negative One worked solely from the three original reels of the film. The difference between the two is more than philosophical (if a bit fine), as the 35mm restoration retains more grain, has some minor gate weave, and in general is less an attempt at a high-definition copy so much as a faithful recreation of the film’s theatrical appearance. Both are worthy re-realizations of Lucas’s original vision, and the Silver Screen edition still stacks up pretty well against the official Blu-ray of the film, even with the advantages the latter had in being scanned from the original negative.
