The movie posters for George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy remain the most beloved movie posters of all time. And there were a lot of them. Each film in the original trilogy had different posters from different artists, and all of them remain iconic. But what is the history behind each poster? And why so many iterations, in some cases, of the exact same image? The YouTube channel Paper and Light celebrates the beauty of classic movie posters, now a sadly almost lost art form. And their video below details the history of the Star Wars OT posters, which is the most expensive today, and which is the best.
The video drops a lot of fun knowledge about the creation of all of these posters. For example, artist Tom Jung never saw a frame of the movie when making the “Style A” poster. He mostly worked from set photographs and production art. His poster has the infamous “Sexy Luke and Leia,” which doesn’t remotely reflect their actual appearance in the film. But as George Lucas said, he much preferred when the poster did artistic interpretations over being literal. The video discusses how Lucasfilm felt that poster was “too dark,” and hired the Brothers Hildebrandt to do a more colorful, kid-friendly version of the same concept.
The late, great Drew Stuzan is also mentioned a few times here. His poster for Revenge of the Jedi, before Lucas re-titled it to Return of the Jedi, is one of the most collectible posters to this day. Although, as the video points out, it’s not the most expensive Star Wars poster to purchase today. But we’ll let you watch the video to see which one fetches the highest price. Not to mention, which one they consider the gold standard of the classic Star Wars movie posters. Spoilers, but we agree with Paper and Light’s assessment of which one is the greatest.