Watch This Sneaky Video from Behind the Scenes of Return of the Jedi

I think the title card of this video (which uses an Amiga titler) does it for me:

Filmed in Sand-O-Vision
Making films grittier!

That pretty much sets the scene perfectly for this 7-minute clip by Jeff Broz of behind-the-scenes footage of the filming of Return of the Jedi. According to Slashfilm, Broz and others crashed the set while the crew was shooting the Jabba barge scene in Arizona. Shot on Super 8, it’s gritty enough to feel like a spy cam hidden inside of a 10-gallon hat, and the lack of sound only adds to the feeling of intrigue.

George Lucas and company were notoriously secretive about the filming of the original trilogy — please promise me you’ll never forget the wonderful Blue Harvest ruse — which is all the more impressive considering the massive scale the shoots required in the pre-CGI days. By the time Return of the Jedi was in production, Star Wars had become an enormous enough success that fans were rabidly scouring the Southwest in search of the Lucasfilm team.

That’s what makes this video so impressive. These days, if people really wanted to find out where something was being shot, there’s acres of Hollywood-focused social media landscape open for links, treasures like Google Maps and Earth available to track down obscure locations, and a cornucopia of cell phone- and camera-based video recording options that could easily be sneaked in anywhere. But back in 1982, tracking down even an enormous production like Jedi would require some insider tips and a whole bunch of maps from AAA. Oh, and it’d also require that aforementioned Super 8.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.

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