<P> 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 learnt 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 Adywan's cut of The Empire Strikes Back, Harmáček was inspired to create a version of the film that "undid" the 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 . </P> <P> Harmáček began creating his new cuts in 2010 . At the time, he was working as an English teacher in Plzeň, Czech Republic, and had no professional experience with film editing . Instead, he taught himself as the project progressed, beginning with Photoshop skills that he had developed in college . To remove the post-1977 changes, Harmáček was required to go 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 cropped, Boba Fett's voice was changed, and CGI characters and backgrounds were removed . Most of the source material used for Harmy's Despecialized Edition was taken from the 2011 Blu - ray release, while other sequences were upscaled from GOUT . To create the cuts, source material was taken from the 2011 Blu - ray releases, HDTV broadcasts of the 2004 DVDs, GOUT, digital broadcasts of the 1997 Special Edition, the 1993 LaserDiscs, digital transfers of a Spanish 35 mm Kodak LPP and 70 mm film cels, a 16 mm print, and still images of the original matte paintings . Harmáček edited these sources together using programs such as Avisynth and Adobe After Effects . </P> <P> To help, Harmáček was assisted by a group of similarly - minded fans from the website OriginalTrilogy.com, whom he knew by their online aliases Dark Jedi, YouToo, Puggo, Team Negative 1, Belbucus, Hairy_Hen, CatBus and Laserschwert . In total, 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 have been created regularly in the five years that followed . As of February 2017, the most recent "despecialized" versions of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are v2. 7, v2. 0 and v2. 5 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 . </P> <P> 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 November 2015, he has received no legal issues from Lucasfilm over the Despecialized Edition . </P>

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