When George Lucas created the Star Wars: Special Edition (which soon became Star Wars: The Only Edition) he re-introduced two major deleted scenes into the film. The first was the awful Jabba scene early in the film, and the second was Luke’s reunion with Biggs, his old friend from Tatooine, just before the final battle. While fans mostly dislike the Jabba scene, generally the Biggs scene has been accepted as a good addition to the film. Biggs’ death in the final battle now has a little more weight, and incongruity in the original cut of Luke fighting alongside his friend (or someone with the same name) with no explanation is eliminated.
However, a much longer scene with Biggs was left on the cutting room floor, and it’s easily the most interesting of the various deleted scenes from the Star Wars trilogy.
<Edit, 2021: In a Disney Star Wars era, this is no longer on the web, but you can find this scene pretty easily now>
There are all sorts of good reasons the scene was cut. It’s long and pretty dry, and couldn’t really be shortened because Lucas has played it in a series of long takes, without intercutting. (Although I suppose it’s possible that only the master take has survived, and that other shots were filmed as well). It repeats a lot of exposition that is dealt with more succinctly elsewhere. And frankly, both the script and the performances feel a little off: the dialogue doesn’t flow at all well, and Biggs feels like he’s wandered in from some other film. (His costuming, in particular, seems all wrong).
So while I don’t think the movie would be better with it in, it remains really interesting. I like the setting of the conversation, an apparently isolated cluster of huts in the middle of nowhere, which reinforces the feel of Tatooine as a really remote western frontier that you get in the original cut. (Lucas would spoil this in the new versions by making the town of Mos Eisley seem much bigger). More importantly, though, the scene gives us lots of interesting information about what life is like for regular people under the Empire. One disappointment in the Star Wars films is that you never really get much sense of what the general society is like. After the early scenes on Tatooine in the first film, you don’t ever really meet average citizens again: it’s all freedom fighters (terrorists?), smugglers, military generals, politicians, and so on.
In this scene, though, we learn quite a bit more. The Empire is much more explicitly a communist dictatorship, progressively centralising / “nationalising” commerce, and enslaving its citizens. The cold war overtones are also strengthened by the paranoia Biggs exhibits about talking about the Rebellion. And you get a clearer sense that the Empire is in some respects still being set up: it seems to have a tight control in the “central systems” but is only progressively starting to enforce its rule elsewhere.
The scene also helps to dispel the vague idea created in the final cut that Luke was hoping to join the Imperial forces before he met Obi-Wan. In the film as released, Luke talks of joining the “Academy,” which sounds suspiciously like the recruiting / training arm of the Imperial forces. The deleted scene makes it explicit that there is some sort of training school that is not affiliated with the Empire, and that the Empire then draft people from its graduates. Which puts Luke in the clear – but does mean that the Imperial forces slaughtered guilt-free throughout the original trilogy may consist largely of unwilling draftees.
The rebels look more like a dodgy terrorist operation the more we learn.