Watching STAR WARS At Home Before VCRs

In the days before home video cassette players, it was awful hard to see a movie once it had screened at your local theater. But for collectors of 8mm films, it was as easy as setting up a screen and threading a small projector. Eight millimeter films and projectors were the home entertainment precursors of video tape and were not that uncommon among families in middle America. In addition to cameras and film sold to consumers so that they could film family events, holidays and vacations, reels of edited highlights from popular movies were also available for purchase.

YouTube has two different versions of Star Wars that were released for fans in those pre-VCR days. The first is a 10-minute, silent black and white reel that features two sequences from the film. The first is where Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke about his father, the second the escape from the Death Star. Subtitles help to describe what is going on in each scene. The second is in color and has sound and is a compaction of nearly the entire film down to eighteen-and-a-half minutes.