Star Wars comes home: the Super 8 releases from Ken Films

The 200ft black and white silent Star Wars on Super 8 from Ken Films

The story of Star Wars on home video really begins with its release on VHS and Betamax in May 1982. But long before then, there were some lucky people who were able to relive the Star Wars experience at home.  They were the people with Super 8 movie projectors.

In fact, according to this piece on the excellent website Saving Star Wars, the very first version of Star Wars to be viewable at home was the one released in late 1977 via the Kenner Movie Viewer.  These toys came with a cassette containing 200ft of 8mm film which you viewed by looking through a viewfinder while cranking the movie by hand.

However, the first version of Star Wars you could project onto a wall was from Ken Films, which initially released 200ft of the film – around eight minutes – available in three versions: black and white silent, colour silent or colour with sound.  When these proved successful, the company released a 400ft selection of scenes from the film, and then another 400ft reel.  If you were handy with a splicer, you could have edited these two 400ft compilations into a pretty decent half-hour version of the film, as this person has done on YouTube.  The second 400ft reel was also released in an anamorphic widescreen version for those who had the necessary lens for their projector.

It has to be said that projecting Super 8 films was a fairly expensive hobby.  Witness this advert placed by the company Leisuremail in the first edition of the British Star Wars Weekly in February 1978:

Star Wars Weekly  advertises the Super 8 film and the projectors to show it with

Prices here ranged from £6.25 for the eight-minute silent movie to £32.95 for a 400ft colour sound version.  A silent projector would cost you £19.95 and a sound one an enormous £165.  You'd have to multiply those prices by at least a factor of four to get a rough equivalent in today's money.  So not very many of us would have been in a position to send off the slip at the bottom of the ad that began "I would like to see Star Wars in my own home. Please send me the following at the speed of light".

(Incidentally, I love the way the author of that advertising copy was pitching it at the parent who would have to shell out for the movie.  And there's a certain poignancy in the sentence:  “Star Wars is a film will delight the whole family – the young will marvel at its colour, action and fantasy, those a little older will enjoy remembering their childhood dreams of personal adventure”.  They might as well have added:    "... which were destined never to come true.")

I did eventually get hold of a Super 8 print of the movie – the black and white silent version seen here on YouTube, which was passed on to me by a relative in the early 1980s, when I had finally acquired a silent projector but most people had already abandoned Super 8 for home video.  That 200ft film consisted of two scenes: Obi-Wan in his home telling Luke about the Force; and the Millennium Falcon's escape from the Death Star.  I could never understand why Ken Films had devoted half their precious running time to the talkiest scene in the film, but I loved owning the space battle in the second half of the reel, and I played it endlessly, hoping that I would somehow unlock the secrets of film-making by analysing every shot and every cut in that Death Star escape scene.

You might think – as I did for many years – that the story of Star Wars on Super 8 ended there.  But in 1989, as the Saving Star Wars article records, the British company Derann Films Services released the entire movie on Super 8 in anamorphic widescreen.   A print cost around £300, which made it a pretty exclusive item in a world which by now had VHS and laserdisc, but watching it must have been quite magical.