When watching the new Blu-ray version of Star Wars: A New Hope I noticed C-3PO's half silver leg. I saw the original movie at the theater many times and do not recall seeing it before. Is this one of the alterations George Lucas made in converting the film to digital, or was his bottom right leg always silver?
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possible duplicate of: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/963/why-does-c3po-have-a-silver-lower-leg-in-some-scenes – OghmaOsiris Sep 24 '11 at 05:17
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8That question explains why it was that colour but not which version of the films it was in. – Tony Meyer Sep 24 '11 at 05:44
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I have a pretty old C-3PO toy with the half silver leg, but I couldn't tell you for sure whether or not it was that color in the original theatrical release. – Xantec Sep 24 '11 at 13:07
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@Xantec your C-3PO toy, could you fully extend it's arms? – DavRob60 Dec 20 '11 at 18:26
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The silver leg was definitely there in from the beginning:
On the cover of The Story of Star Wars, a 1977 record album presenting an abridged version of the events depicted in the film Star Wars, you could clearly see C-3PO's half silver leg.
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12If you look closely between C-3PO and R2-D2 (draw an imaginary line from just under 3PO's knee), you'll see a discarded cigarette butt in the sand. Anthony Daniels pointed this out to me when he signed my copy of this album :) – NKCampbell Dec 07 '15 at 22:15
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1@NathanK.Campbell R2 must have been smoking again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELPlgKB9n8E – Josh Dec 08 '15 at 02:31
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Yes, in the original Star Wars: A New Hope the lower part of C-3PO's right leg was always silver.
I think the reason many who saw the first film don't remember the silver leg can be attributed to two things:
Much of the desert scenes where we see him involve brown and golden backgrounds that the leg, being reflective, would naturally pick up tones from.
Since all but that portion of him is golden, and we tend to visually track faces and torsos first, our memory and our initial attention was held by the golden color.
DavidW
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as written, this is more of a comment, but i think you can flesh it out into a full answer with a bit of work. – phantom42 Jul 23 '15 at 18:42
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I like it. It strikes me as the most plausible answer given so far. – Wad Cheber Jul 24 '15 at 08:54
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2I actually never noticed the silver leg in the original movies. I first noticed it on the C-3P0 animatronic on the Star Tours ride at Disney World, before Lucas took to altering the movies. – John Sensebe May 02 '16 at 16:23
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1I think the reason many who saw the first film don't remember the silver leg can be attributed to two things Plus the Invisible Gorilla Effect. – David Tonhofer Apr 22 '21 at 06:22
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It was originally there, it's not a digital alteration. This has been debated by fans for a while, but if you can't trust Yahoo! Answers, who can you trust?
(To summarize my now-broken link: lots of people argued for hundreds of pages, and decided that the leg was ABSOLUTELY silver the whole time AND there was NO DOUBT it was gold originally, and everyone is really mad about it.)
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5I don't always trust Yahoo! Answers, but when I do, its because Stack Exchange sent me there – NKCampbell Dec 07 '15 at 22:18
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2“If you can’t trust Yahoo! Answers, who can you trust?” — My vote would be for ‘just about everything else in the universe’. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 02 '16 at 15:57
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Just watched the 4K77 version (from a '77 35mm technicolor print) and it's definitely silver there, too. – Wyatt Ward Sep 10 '18 at 22:19