The idea for the Special Edition soundtrack release began life in 1993 when Michael Matessino (editor of expanded soundtrack releases) and (producer of the 1993 sets) were working on a project together and got to talking about the 1993 sets. Matessino expressed his displeasure at several of his perceived flaws with the 1993 set, including its use of many wrong takes for the cues from the original film, its over-reliance on the original album presentations for the first three discs, and the random order of the fourth, not to mention that there was still over 40 minutes of unreleased music. The rumored fifth disc for the box set might have helped alleviate the last concern except that it had fallen through, and potential plans to release it as a bonus disc with the 1995 widescreen VHS release also never went anywhere. After Lucasfilm began to talk about doing theatrical rereleases of Star Wars, Matessino got his chance. Redman went to Lucasfilm and suggested that they do complete score releases as a tie-in with the Special Edition theatrical releases. Once they got approval they went to work.
Matessino's intention with the sets were to be as complete and chronological as possible. This meant abandoning the original album presentations and trying to include as much material as possible. For the original film, one of the most important things to get right for Matessino was to ensure that all the right takes were used. At the time the sets were first being assembled, the final performance edits and Ken Wannberg's paperwork on which takes to splice together were missing, so Matessino had to do it from scratch by comparing the complete sessions with the film and with the original OST album. Eventually, well into development of the sets Fox archivist Ron Fulgsby managed to find Wannberg's original paperwork (including spotting sheets and recording logs for both Star Wars and ROTJ) and they were able to verify the accuracy of Matessino's edits. The missing 16-track masters with Wannberg's performance edits were never found during development of these sets, but it later turned out that they were in possession of John Neal, the person who remixed the score for its release on the original OST. These 16-track masters eventually found their way onto ebay around 2014, stemming from someone who got them from the John Neal estate. Lukas Kendall of Film Score Monthly would claim that he and Matthew Wood were aware of them, and that they were likely scanned by Lucasfilm.
Since the master tapes were missing, Matessino ended up sourcing most of the Special Edition release from a set of 3-track 35mm mag tapes. He referred to these in the Film Score Monthly article on the Special Edition sets as a second-generation source, but we know from Chris Malone's research and interviews with Alan Snelling that the original sessions were recorded onto two 35mm mag film recorders, one of which was kept as a backup. It's possible that the 1997 sets were either sourced directly from this first-generation set and Matessino misspoke (which the Malone document hints at), or else it's also possible they were sourced from a second-generation copy of this backup set. A couple cues were sourced from the incomplete part of the 16-track masters that they did have, namely the original version of [3m2 Rev.] Lost R2, as well as the first two takes of [1m2] Main Title. Chris Malone speculated in his document that some cues were actually sourced from the same 1993 digital transfers created by Bill Wolford for the boxset due to containing the same 19 KHz tone heard on all cues from the Anthology set, although there is no hard proof that this was the case.
Special Edition cover (2004 Sony Classical)
Total Time: 57:35
*previously unreleased
**contains previously unreleased material
Total Time: 48:16
*previously unreleased
**contains previously unreleased material