Below, on the death-white wasteland which is the planet Tatooine :

Besides its appearance in the Star Wars Storybook, the deleted scene where Luke Skywalker looks up at the space battle is kept in Marvel's Star Wars comic adaptation, albeit in a shortened form, just three frames long.

In this version, there is no mention of moisture vaporators and Treadwell is absent. The brief scenes are just enough to establish the character of Luke Skywalker, the desert planet Tatooine, a passing mention of some in-universe technology (macrobinoculars and the landspeeder), and the town of Anchorhead, which we are told will be the location of Luke's next scene.

In the introduction to Star Wars: the Original Marvel Years Omnibus No. 1—the 2015 reprint of the original 1977 comic-book adaptation—script editor Roy Thomas explains the discrepancies between the comic-book version and the theatrical release of the film:

… my part in the comics consisted mostly of riding herd on [Howard] Chaykin [the illustrator] (not hard to do, since he did a fine adaptation) and adapting the dialogue and captions from screenplay to comic. Of course, we couldn't know that George [Lucas] was going to make a number of last-minute changes in early scenes of the movie, which would lead to our receiving irate letters from readers who couldn't get their heads around the fact that our comic book couldn't 100% reflect what had happened up there on the silver screen.

In this first couple of pages there are some subtle differences of vocabulary and nomenclature compared to the screen version. Where the Star Wars opening crawl talks about "Rebel spies", the comic has a "brave alliance of UNDERGROUND FREEDOM FIGHTERS". The GALACTIC EMPIRE is not "evil" but "awesome". The Empire is constructing a sinister new BATTLE STATION, but the name DEATH STAR is not mentioned. Princess Leia's starship is captured not by a "tractor beam" but by "grappling rays". Threepio's first lines include the characteristic "This is all your fault!" which he follows by calling Artoo a "half-sized Thermo-Capsulary Dehousing Assister". I'm not sure what that is, but it is just as well that that line was cut from the film…

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Treadwell, Moisture Vaporator and Luke Skywalker

My Lego interpretation of the deleted scene at the beginning of Star Wars. Image of Tatooine's binary suns borrowed from Ralph McQuarrie's concept art for the original Star Wars film.

After the opening scene was cut, the Treadwell droid didn't make it into Star Wars, but it did show up in the Empire Strikes Back, where it was assisting Chewbacca repairing the Millenium Falcon.

Treadwell shows up again in Chapter 10 of The Mandalorian: when Mando returns to Peli’s hanger, a Treadwell repair droid is cooking the dragon meat on a pod racer engine.

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In another galaxy, in another time … on a planet named Tatooine

In the theatrical release of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, does not appear until 16 minutes in. But early edits of the script had him in the opening scene. According to The Star Wars Storybook, the story begins like this:

One day, Luke was adjusting his uncle's vaporator with the help of a worn-out, broken-down robot named Treadwell. He glanced skyward to search for a cloud. Not a sign of one—nor would there be until he got the vaporator working again. But way up high a brilliant beam of light caught his eye!

Luke grabbed his macrobinoculars for a better look … two silvery specks—skyships for sure—were exchanging heavy bursts of fire. The sky was exploding with red, blue, and green flashes of light.

If Luke had had the powerful telescope he longed for he would have seen a small galactic cruiser racing through space on a wild, zigzag course … skillfully dodging the red, blue and green flashes of light that came from the weapons of a huge Imperial starship. … The galactic cruiser shook as the flashing light beams finally hit their mark—the main solar fin. The battle was over. The Imperials pulled up alongside the cruiser.

Conventional Holywood wisdom says that you should introduce your hero to the audience at the beginning. But the choice to cut this scene was the right one. Luke becomes a less-obvious hero and the story is stronger for it.

Episode Zero also comments on another motivation Lucas may have had to cut this scene. He was a fan of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa at film school, and was influenced by Kurosawa's film The Hidden Fortress (1958). In a 2001 interview, Lucas recalls, "as I was beginning to write the screenplay and put it together, I remembered the one thing that had really struck me about Hidden Fortress and I was really intrigued by was the fact that the story was told from the lowest characters." The protaganists of Hidden Fortress are the tall, bossy servant Tehei and his short, insolent colleague Matashichi, who get caught up in someone else's battle and bicker their way through the rest of the film.

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A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away...

… at least, long before Disney got their hands on it, when "Star Wars" was the name of a film and not a franchise.

Star Wars has to be the film with the most released versions. Even before it was renamed Episode IV: A New Hope in 1981—four years after its initial theatrical release as Star Wars—George Lucas had been tinkering with and re-editing his creation. The film even has its own Wikipedia page which lists its many releases and the differences between them.

For purists, and those who remember the childhood wonder of Star Wars on the big screen in its original version, there is Petr Harmáček's Despecialized Edition—a restoration of the film to an edit as close as possible to the original theatrical release, with the intention of preserving it as a cultural and historical artefact.

But it's possible to go back even further: to earlier scripts, concept art and scenes that were shot but hit the cutting-room floor before the film's initial release in 1977.

Evidence of this prototypical version of the film could be found in the books and magazines on the shelves of my childhood bedroom: Marvel's comic book serialisation in Star Wars Weekly (issue 1 is dated 8 Feb 1978), the Star Wars Storybook (Armada, 1978) and the Marvel Official Collectors Edition magazine (no publication date given in the magazine, but it was "on sale now" according to an advert in Star Wars Weekly No.5 dated 8 March 1978).

The creators of these books were working from a late draft of the screenplay rather than from the finished film. There are some divergences from what finally appeared on-screen, which tell the story of Star Wars as it might have been.

In the next post in this series we'll take a look at the opening scene from Star Wars that didn't make it to the final edit. Read on in #thegreatestspacefantasyfilmofall !

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