Star Wars Without Dialogue Shouldn't Work This Well

The 1977 movie Star Wars (now known as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) was a masterpiece in how it drew you in and made the viewer a part of the action. Part of that was because of the way it was designed to be driven by action instead of dialogue. Sure, it had dialogue, some of it quite memorable, and some of it amusingly bad. Almost 50 years later, we can watch the movie and pay no attention at all to what the characters are saying -but we can't watch it with the sound off because the music is so important. CinemaStix explains how that happened in this mini-documentary with commentary from George Lucas and John Williams. Still, this masterpiece had to be heavily edited to make it watchable. The essay the narrator refers to is How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit. In the end, it all came together to charm and excite a generation that still can't let go of the Star Wars universe.