These rumours have been causing ripples in the Force for a while now, but the sleuths at Comicbook.com reckon they now have definitive word that the undadulterated, non-Special Edition original Star Wars trilogy is finally undergoing the Blu-ray remaster treatment at its new Disney home, for a release some time in the near future.
Ever since 1997, when George Lucas appended "A New Hope" to the title* of a film that generations just called Star Wars, fans have been clamouring for the non-interfered-with versions to be available again. Lucas always refused, continuing to tinker and stating categorically that his new versions were now official. We did get the originals as DVD extras a few years ago, but they were just prints ported from the old laserdiscs. Restoring the originals would, Lucas said, be prohibitively expensive because of the condition they were in. And if George Lucas thinks something is prohibitively expensive, it must be pretty damn costly indeed.
Disney, however, is not short of a few bob, and according to this intel has gone back to the original poorly-preserved negatives. So if this is really happening, we should soon once again be able to watch Han shoot first, to forget CGI Jabba, to revel in an empty Mos Eisley and cheer a ghosty Sebastian Shaw at the end of Return Of The Jedi. And all in glorious high definition at last.
Given that there's no official word yet, there's no release date either. But it's hard to imagine that Star Wars: The Purist's Trilogy won't form some part of the carnival around **Episode VII'**s release on December 18, 2015.
*And yes, before you start, we mean the title and not the crawl. The crawl was earlier.