Short answers, pulled from the story.
The 1997 Special Edition re-releases served two purposes: to commemorate the franchise's 20th anniversary and to test Industrial Light & Magic's CGI capabilities ahead of the prequel films. Lucas also used the opportunity to restore deleted scenes, such as the Jabba the Hutt confrontation originally filmed at Elstree Studios, and to make changes he believed brought the films closer to his original vision.
In the original 1977 release of A New Hope, Han Solo shoots the bounty hunter Greedo in the Mos Eisley cantina without Greedo firing first. The 1997 Special Edition altered the scene so Greedo shoots first and misses. Lucas has argued he always intended Greedo to shoot first, but a screenplay draft dated the 15th of March 1976, discovered in 2015 in the University of New Brunswick library archives, shows only Han firing. Greedo actor Paul Blake has also stated that in the shooting script, Han fired the only shot.
The original theatrical versions have never been officially released on home video in high definition. A 2006 Limited Edition DVD included the unaltered versions on bonus discs, matching the 1993 LaserDisc release, but those were the only official home media release of the originals. The master negatives of the original trilogy were dismantled to create the Special Editions, though high-quality separation duplicates exist.
Lucas testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in 1988 in support of legislation discouraging studios from altering films without the consent of their creators. He stated that people who alter or destroy works of art for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and warned that future technology would allow studios to replace actors with fresher faces or rewrite dialogue.
Hayden Christensen replaced Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker's Force spirit in the 2004 DVD edition of Return of the Jedi. Lucas explained the change to Christensen directly in 2005, saying that when a character returns to the good side of the Force, it is their former persona that survives, not the Darth Vader persona.
In December 2025, Lucasfilm announced that a restoration of the unaltered original Star Wars film would return to theaters on the 19th of February 2027, in celebration of the film's 50th anniversary. Prior to that announcement, the British Film Institute screened the unaltered original at a film festival in June 2025.