The original 1977 Star Warsis basically its own trilogy, Luke Skywalker's full coming-of-age tale. Part one: Escaping the moisture farm life on Tatooine. Part two: Breaking Leia out of the Death Star. And part three, the thrilling conclusion: Destroying that giant space station once and for all. Not knowing if there would even be sequels, Lucas crammed Star Wars with a fully fleshed out arc.
There was so much to that first movie, in fact, that when Lucas took his footage into post-production, most of the character backstory and alien world context wound up on the cutting room floor. Take Biggs Darklighter, Luke's childhood friend from Tatooine. When ol' Biggs turns up at the X-Wing hanger just before the Death Star attack, the two have instant rapport. Audiences think, OK, Luke has a fondness for all the friends' who abandoned him on Tatooine. That makes sense—he's a dreamer. Maybe a little pathetic, but hey, he loved his Biggs time growing up.
What viewers didn't realize at the time: This scene was not Mark Hamill and Biggs actor Garrick Hagon's first scene together. Before he appeared on the dock set, Hagon spent time in Tunisia filming scenes alongside Hamill on Luke's homeworld. The first chapter of young Skywalker's story was beefier, with scenes of the Jedi hopeful hanging out with his buddies.Think Lucas' American Graffiti… with robots.
Because of pacing, time, and the general silliness of the scenes, none of the footage made it into the movie. But as Hagon says in a short, new documentary on these "lost" sequences, one thing couldn't be snipped from the finished product: real friendship. That reuniting-in-Red-Squadron moment wouldn't have the impact it does without weeks spent filming material that Lucas would later dump in the trash.
In Blast It Biggs, Where Are You?, Jamie Benning—the documentarian between three feature length Star Wars "making of" documentaries— unearths the early Biggs scenes, interviews Hagon on his experience, and pieces it all together in a bite-size-but-fascinating look at what could have been:
And while we're highlighting Benning's work, check out his previous mini-doc, Slimy Piece of Worm-Ridden Filth, an inside look at how Lucas' puppeteering team brought Jabba the Hutt to life:
