RSO Records releases a double LP of John Williams’ soundtrack from Star Wars, coinciding with the movie’s release. A fold-out poster of publicity artwork of the climactic Death Star dogfight is included. The album becomes a chart-topper by the end of the year, and cover versions by other artists are released even before the year is out. Many listeners become lifelong film score fanatics on the spot. 
In Star Wars fandom of a certain age and a certain mindset (or, as Obi-Wan might say, a certain point of view), great stock is placed on rolling back the various “version updates” (to borrow some software jargon) to the original trilogy. The internet is awash with various “despecialized editions” and projects to locate, clean up and re-scan original negatives at the highest possible quality. The aim is to roll back the rontos, cease-and-desist the CGI, and erase the episode indicator that wasn’t part of the original 1977 release of the film. In other words, there’s a push to answer the subtitle “A New Hope” with a very firm “nope”. Lucasfilm (and, subsequently, Disney) doesn’t count “making that an easy task” a priority; if anything, they can’t stop tinkering with it, adding a word to Star Wars lexicon that never needed to exist in the first place: “Maclunkey!” While I don’t loathe the Special Editions with the religious zeal that some fans direct at them, it is baffling to see that there’s clearly a demand for a product – the best possible copies of the three movies as originally released, with no changes made – and watching Disney leave money on the table by aggressively not fulfilling that demand. As business decisions go, it’s counterintuitive on every level, but hey, the 4K77 edition is free if you know where to look.
As a thought exercise, though, I fixated on something else: since 1993’s delightful 4-CD box set of expanded editions of the original trilogy soundtracks, there has been a succession of revisions to the Star Wars soundtrack experience as well. No one has complained about these; they’ve gradually built up to the complete original scores being made available, and no one’s going to disagree with that as a goal. After all, as Star Wars sparked with is now a multi-generational hobby of soundtrack collecting, expecting – no, demanding! – the complete score has become the norm. If the complete score for modern media isn’t available upon the first release, a second, collector-focused deluxe release will probably follow, the dreaded double dip. But that’s good, right? It leaves us nothing more to ask for, no nagging omissions to frustrate the dedicated listener. We expect it now.
Except that in 1977, the Star Wars soundtrack experience wasn’t like that. It was two LPs of symphonic bliss, some of it re-recorded in arrangements specifically aimed at the record buyer’s listening experience, sequenced in something that was wildly different from the chronological placement of the music in the movie, and some liner notes on a gatefold album cover. And somehow, that experience – despite not including every cue recorded for the movie in sequential story order, despite not necessarily being the exact same performances heard in the movie itself – created an entire new hobby. For those of us of a certain age window, it was our gateway drug to a lifetime of listening to the symphonic film score.
So is it possible, in the modern digital age, to “despecialize” the listening experience and revert back to the original double-LP soundtrack listeners got in 1977? To hear only what the newly-minted 1977 Star Wars fan heard on record and not one note more? Can that even be done without a turntable and some nearly-50-year-old vinyl? It turns out that it is, thanks to a little-heralded re-release from 2018 whose primary purpose seemed to be getting a Star Wars soundtrack release out under the Walt Disney Records label, rather than Sony Classical, which has been the home of the first six movies’ music since the turn of the century. But it could be that Sony Classical wasn’t ready to let go of the original trilogy, which had, since 1997, all been built up to double-disc collections. So what was released under the Disney Records label were the original LP programs for each of the original trilogy, now treated to 24-bit remasters.
This is nothing but the original LP tracks, at their original lengths, in the original LP sequence. You can go home again. Well, that was embarrassingly easy. But here’s the question: how does all of this sound after over three decades of growing accustomed to discrete cues – all of them – sequenced in the order in which they accompany the movie’s unfolding story?
The sequencing would seem, on the surface, to be the most hard-to-grasp thing about the original LP running order, until one spots its resemblance to a running order for a concert performance, alternating busy action scenes with more sedate pieces. In both film and film scoring, action should be an exclamation point, not the whole point, and in the days of practical effects and miniature models, that pace was set by sheer expense as much as anything. This isn’t an anti-CGI rant, but just an observation that the calculus of how much action actually happens in an action movie has changed considerably with the advent of digital, and Star Wars movies used to be bound by this rule as much as any other movie.
The original running order alternates between frantic action pieces and quieter pieces to give the listener a chance to let their heart rate slow a little bit between those exclamation points (and would work well as a concert sequence too, letting the players breathe slightly easier between the pieces that give them more of a workout). So yes, the original LP kills off Obi-Wan and fends off the TIE Fighters before the Princess has even been rescued, and seems to intersperse scenes from Tatooine between all of the other scenes. In hindsight, this is a fascinating hint of the spotting process, which involved George Lucas and John Williams deciding where music would go, and for how long; in a movie with a 122-minute running time (going by the aforementioned 4K77 restoration), our last glimpse of Tatooine either from the ground or from space happens before the 54 minute mark. That would seem to indicate a mindset that the audience might need a bit more help from the soundtrack deciphering the mood of the droids’ plight and Luke’s life before his entire world was upended by the Empire.
Perhaps the strangest piece of sequencing, in hindsight, happens in the single track, which starts with music from the scenes of Luke and Han, disguised as stormtroopers transporting “prisoner” Chewie through the Death Star before a quiet segue into the earlier escape of the Millennium Falcon from Tatooine. Yet it’s a masterful build of tension before exploding into the stormtroopers’ attempt to ground Han’s ship. To be honest, I think it was years before younger me ever clocked that these were from different parts of the movie. And how about that Cantina Band music parked and the end of side two of the first record? Talk about a palette cleanser out of left field! (For all of my talk of flipping records, full disclosure: my first exposure to the Star Wars score was on 8-track tape, which eventually wore thin and broke, literally played to death; the 2-LP set came after that.)
And that brings us to the other part of the soundtrack listening experience that isn’t quite the same as it was in 1977. Unless your family had deep enough pockets to treat you to repeated theatrical showings at full 1977 ticket prices, there was no immediate recall or replay of Star Wars. You had this album. You might have had the delightful The Story Of Star Wars LP like I did. You might have had the novel ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, or the Marvel comics (another vital part of the 1977 fan experience for which I have a deep and abiding love), or maybe the storybook. (The Kenner Movie Viewer – a hand-cranked film-cartridge viewer that required an external light source – seemed like the height of luxury, just pure decadence for a middle-class kid.) The first movie didn’t hit broadcast TV until after Return Of The Jedi had been released; it didn’t arrive on videotape until 1982. In other words, for five years, there was no replay of the movie outside of theaters; you had all of these disparate bits of media giving you impressions of what it had been like to see the movie. Did anyone necessarily know or care that “Mouse Robot” and “Blasting Off” were from different parts of the movie? And did it matter?
I do highly recommend, at least once, hearing the original LP in its original running order, and just listening to it – or perhaps perusing one of the aforementioned paper-based ways of reliving the movie at most. No first-or-second-screening while the music is playing. Just listen, and remember that this was two slabs of vinyl that turned an awful lot of us into film music fans (and Star Wars fans) for life.
- Main Title (5:26)
- Imperial Attack (6:20)
- Princess Leia’s Theme (4:24)
- The Desert / The Robot Auction (2:54)
- Ben’s Death / TIE Fighter Attack (3:55)
- The Little People Work (4:10)
- Rescue Of The Princess (4:49)
- Inner City (4:16)
- Cantina Band (2:46)
- The Land Of The Sand People (2:58)
- Mouse Robot / Blasting Off (4:05)
- The Return Home (2:52)
- The Walls Converge (4:38)
- The Princess Appears (4:09)
- The Last Battle (12:11)
- The Throne Room / End Title (5:34)
Released by: 20th Century Records (1977) / Disney Records (2018)
Release date: 1977 / 2018
Total running time: 75:27