Our 7 geekiest Star Wars 1977 blog posts

Declan Mulholland as Jabba the Hutt in deleted footage from Star Wars

I suspect that all of us who like Star Wars may have pondered small points of trivia for longer than is healthy.

It's not uncommon for fans to be accused of lacking a sense of proportion. But as long as your preoccupation with obscure detail is not hurting anyone else, why should anyone else judge you for it?

In my latest recap of previous posts, before I return with all-new material in September, I'd like to point you to some of the geekier subjects that have occupied Episode Nothing in its five-year existence.

• There were three rather different sound mixes of Star Wars. Here's how Star Wars was a slightly different movie depending where you saw it, even during that first 1977 release.
• Who was the storm trooper who bumped his head? It was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, which became a famous movie blooper. But there was more than one actor who claimed to have been the trooper who hit his head on that Death Star door.
• Remember the giant skeleton in the Tatooine desert? Of course you do. But did you know it was left over from a successful children's movie of 1976? Here's the story of how a Disney dinosaur ended up in Star Wars.
• Did Elvis see Star Wars?  The king of rock and roll was a big movie fan, and he died when the film had been on release for almost three months. But did he manage to watch it?
• The Star Wars experience would not be complete without that opening fanfare and 20th Century-Fox logo. But Fox was not using that opening consistently on its films of the 1970s. We looked at the history of the Fox fanfare and how it came to be revived for Star Wars.
• You know how George Lucas claimed that a stop-motion Jabba the Hutt should have been in Star Wars, but that he lacked the resources to make the effect work properly? If something struck you as odd about that story, read one of this site's most popular posts.
• And finally, there's nothing geekier than imagining an alternative reality. What if Star Wars had flopped, or was a minor hit? Here's how the world might have been different.