The original Star Wars trilogy has been a perennial of broadcast TV marathons all over the world for decades. They’ve shown them in every country, and in just about every language. But recently, videos from old broadcasts of the OT from Chile have resurfaced online, which aired back in 2003. In these showings of classic Star Wars, they didn’t cut to traditional commercial breaks. Instead, they incorporated cuts into the films which made it seem like characters from the movie were advertising a regional beer brand called Cerveza Cristal. They’re fairly hilarious and luckily someone shared these lost treasures recently on social media.
You can watch these down below:
So, how do we know it’s real, and not an elaborate prank? Well, thanks to a 2004 report in The Guardian (via IGN), we learned that Lucasfilm was not too happy about these edits. Look, if anyone is going to make controversial edits to the original Star Wars films, it’s going to be George Lucas, not some beer company. Lucasfilm got its lawyers involved. But the report proves this was something that really happened once. Sadly, Obi-Wan Kenobi having a Cerveza Cristal tucked away in his Jedi robes, or the Death Star having a cooler hidden in the tractor-beam power grid never happened again.
So far, we’ve seen just the four Cerveza Cristal Star Wars beer ad cuts online. Hopefully, more turn up. I mean, none in the Mos Eisley Cantina? The one place in the Star Wars films where an alien reaching for a cold one wouldn’t feel totally abrupt? They must have done that one, right? Perhaps R2-D2 serving them on Jabba’s sail barge? That also seems like a no-brainer. Certainly more than Obi-Wan keeping a Cerveza Cristal in the same compartment as Anakin’s lightsaber. We have a feeling that even if those didn’t exist, someone out there is going to make them now. A few years back, someone even cut fake Cerveza ads into The Force Awakens! We expect the internet to get on this right quick.
