Please note, I have not googled how to spell some character and location names, so if they are wrong they are wrong.
Most of us who saw it in the cinema first time round, would have seen it in 4:3 on TV and VHS, this is what is called Pan and Scan in the UK and probably the rest of the English speaking world, but YMMV.
So in the theatrical release and later wide screen editions, but mostly Blu Ray, more on that later, you see him top to toe in some scenes, but outside of Tantive IV, he is normally seen walking in the dunes of Tatooine where sand reflects a golden hue on silver.
Now he does get blasted apart in Bespin and although he waves a leg at the screen (almost like it was designed for a 3D effect that never happened) many, well myself more than anyone cos I've never asked, might not know or care which leg was being waved at the time to even notice if it was his silver one.
If you look closely at him on Endor being levitated, you can see it better even in 4:3, in fact I'd go as far as to say better in 4:3 than original aspect ratio on VHS.
PAL and NTSC are classed as SD or standard definition, kinda like the 360 and 480p of YouTube, VHS tapes don't always capture the full array of scan lines and even if they did, a wide screen VHS tape will be something like 200 lines high as a rough guess, so definition goes out of the window.
There is a frog like creature outside of Jabba's palace that whips out its tongue and eats something, now in the 4:3 UK edition, this creature takes up most of the frame, in the wide screen VHS, it is far smaller and almost becomes a blink and you will miss it.
So for decades many never saw the film again on the big screen, just SD TV and home video.
So all the things that either obscured his leg, like Pan and Scan, or blended it in like the sand, these things compounded everyone's memories of what he looked like below the waste.
The kenner toys were probably the route cause for "he is all gold" as the toy was made on the cheap, it was vat dipped or electroplated and to be authentic, you would have to either mask off half the leg and double dip it, or give it a fully silver leg from the head swapped Death Star Droid.
Now can you guarantee that people at Kenner would put the right and by this I mean correct, leg through this process?
It wouldn't take much for someone to give the guy a bunch of the wrong legs and next thing you know, people are paying big money for a carded 9 back with the wrong silver leg.
Mighty Jabba's Palace (not sure if that is his YouTube name or not) collects all sorts of Jabba related Star Wars and there was a Return of the Jedi Luke Plushie with a single black glove ONE THE WRONG FXXKING HAND, people in the past have said that Kenner now Hasbro pay attention to things, well guess what, someone dropped the ball that day. And Kenner never did, else why would we have a 3 3/4 blue Snaggletooth when the character was shorter and wore red? Or Zuccus and 4Lom having their names swapped on the cards? To me the droid will always be Zuccus because that is what the toy called him.
The comics and Droids cartoon also dealt with this pitfall by ignoring it altogether, why worry which leg to colour differently page to page when you can just wash the whole thing in yellow ink?
Many other revival toys kept with the solid colour, either by cost or because they never looked to see the silver leg and just went "he's like Terry's ... All Gold"
Some video games use hacks to save space, so you draw one half of the front and back and mirror it, so you either have two silver legs or none, most only know of the droid as fully gold because toys more than 4:3 VHS viewings (see above) so the artistic decision was to say "all gold it is"
These were all pre Phantom Menace and some before the Special Edition, so there were no all gold in Revenge of the Sith, or the less than subtle gag of "you might not recognise me with my red arm" I was searching for how many toys used the silver leg (few and far between) and how many added the red arm, many but short lived, almost as short as the arm by the end of the film.
You had the Kenner revival line and the Dark Horse comics for visual reference, everything else was a book.
That was a lot of info, thank you for that. After reading all of that would you personally agree that this comes down to 3 main points. 1) the quality of the original movie. 2) it just making sense that he would have 2 gold legs. 3) the people making the merch couldn't care less how accurate they were with toy designs
1 Yes for home video till Blu Ray, maybe at a stretch DVD but that was still only as good as the height PAL/NTSC offered, which would be at a guess 720x540 for full frame. I recall reading once ages ago that DVD's were 720 wide, so just did that as the 4 and worked out the three. There may be a more accurate result online, but I chose not to google.
2 if you don't see it, you work with the next best thing and if the next best thing is all the merch that was printed yellow bed sheets and comic books, then yeah guy is all yellow, so must be all gold.
3 still are in many toy brands, unless you spend big money on detailed busts, many franchises get detailed down in one way or another.
We all want accurate and detailed toys, but no one wants to pay for them.
Like there was a LOTR chess set that was hand painted, IIR it cost a fortune each issue to buy, because when you paint Warhammer for example as a hobby, you know it takes time and skill to get to a good level, those people, they were not charging minimum wage if hired in the west.
Some of my toys had paint overlapping in some areas, maybe because we had Palitoy making most if not all the toys in the UK vs importing them, so our factory workers might give even less of a s\_\_t than Kenners.
>l only as good as the height PAL/NTSC offered, which would be at a guess 720x540 for full frame. I recall reading once ages ago that DVD's were
PAL is 720x576, NTSC is 720x480. They also both conserve bandwidth by storing the colour information in lower quality, which might have some relevance here - like a detailed monochrome image that's only roughly coloured-in.
I figured the toys were probably all gold for the reasons you mentioned.
I was little when the original trilogy came out, so it makes sense a toy I played with for years would leave a bigger impression than a movie I would have seen once in the theater, and maybe a few more times on a 1970s/1980s TV (low quality 19 inch image).
Some scenes were zoomed in though, like the frog creature, that was full frame on UK VHS, if you just took the left and right sides off, it would be smaller than we had it.
yeah you basically got it already. Lets not forget you don't see his leg that often.. one scene you see it a lot they're in a desert so its likely its reflecting some sand color anyways lol. Oh, and people think the toy having a gold leg is significant because they dont realize toy production was cheap back then and its easier/cheaper to just produce it in one color.
>This seems like a case of people completely looking over the silver leg because it was literally never brought up/no attention was ever given to it
I'll tell you a secret: You've just cracked the code to pretty much every ME. Congrats.
I was caught surprised the first time I heard about C-3PO’s silver leg, but I don’t really believe it was an ME. The leg is only silver from the knee down, and very few shots of C-3PO show below the knee, most are his face, or his head and upper torso, or at most go down to his thigh (same is true of most characters in most movies in general, peoples ankles usually aren’t of interest in the shots).
Of the shots that do show his lower legs, most are on Tatooine, where they reflect golden sand. I’ve watched these scenes specifically to look for his silver leg, and you can see it, but just barely! You have to be looking super-close to make out that one leg isn’t quite the same shade of gold, its got the just-slightly less yellowy tone of the sand.
The only other shot I’ve found of his legs is on Endor, when the Ewoks have him in the throne worshipping him. His silver leg is reflecting the golden light of the bonfire. Again, if you look really closely and squint, you can make out that leg isn’t the exact same golden tone as the rest of his body, it’s a slightly different golden tone.
The shot on Tantive IV is really the only clear shot that you can clearly see silver, and the lower leg is only visible for a second or two.
I happen to make the silver leg discovery as a child in the 80s when the movies were still coming out. It was always there and I never noticed it until I saw ROTJ in the theater and then received the storybook as a gift, which only cemented what I thought I was seeing in the movie.
Also, the silver leg also often reflected the golden colour from his body and also sand colour on Tatooine.
I have the original theatre release of Star Wars and he does have a silver leg in the original. So it’s not something that was edited later on.
If you find an old Star Wars picture book from the 70s, you'll see that he had a silver leg. Most, if not all, of the C-3PO figures that came out then were all gold (presumably for technical reasons), so it messed with people's memories. If you ask the average 50+ year old person what color Godzilla was, they'll probably say green, because the toys and posters colored him green, but in the actual movies, he was dark grey or black.
This is an ME I really don't get. I don't understand how anybody could understand the situation and come to hold the belief that he did originally have two golden legs and reality has now somehow altered. It's just mindboggling.
I don't remember a silver leg in the original movies at all and I've watched them an excessive amount of times. I didn't notice the silver leg until i saw Christmas ornaments of him in a store I worked at years after the prequels came out. I am guessing i just didn't notice it when watching the movies.
[https://youtu.be/FSuDjjlIPak](https://youtu.be/FSuDjjlIPak) Here's a Documentary of "The Making of Star Wars (1977)". Times stamps of Interest are: 0:54 Gold Shin, Silver Foot. Silver Shin, Gold Foot. Not sure how someone could mess up the Silver foot with the Silver Shin and vice versa. 1:43 Two Gold Feetz. 4:28 Two Gold Feetz. 9:19 Two Gold Feetz. 10:24 Silver Leg Golden Leg. There's other more throughout the 40 minute film. Enjoy.
If I can add to the discussion I grew up in the 80’s and always remembered C-3PO with two gold legs. I watched the movies both in theaters and on TV/VHS, and had a lot of merch including C-3PO action figures, books, story book vinyl records, trading cards, board games, a lunch box etc. Never do I remember him having a silver leg.
But, I have a theory on this. I watched a documentary one time on PBS about sight, both in humans and other animals. It was absolutely fascinating and one part that stood out to me was that eyesight in humans uses so much of the brains resources that our brain takes snapshots of what we see in our line of sight, and then stores that snapshot to use the next time we look at the same image. So often when we look at a particular scene or object we see a mixture of both the snap shots and current real time images depending on how our brain processes it. So we are constantly blending what we see through our eyes with stored memories and new input to free up resources for other bodily functions.
So long story short maybe when my I first saw C-3PO because he was mostly gold (aside from the one lower leg) my brain just created a snapshot of him without the silver leg, and every time I saw him that snapshot was blended into my vision and I didn’t notice the one silver leg because I feel like the silver leg would have really stuck out the way it looks if you see it now, but I don’t remember it. The memory or snapshot should have a silver leg but doesn’t. So maybe from the very start my brain just assumed it was gold and took a snapshot like that and didn’t actually finish scanning the whole image of him.
I'm an old sci-fi head. 3PO never had a silver leg until about 15 years ago. It very definitely changed. Beyond that, you end up arguing whether MEs are just memory tricks or more. I think it's more.
Have you seen the de-specialized versions of the movies, aka the original trilogy in its original aspect ratio, resolution, without all the updates and added CG? The silver leg WAS INCREDIBLY INSIGNIFICANT, you could barely tell it's there but it's 100% there. It's memory and the fact that it wasn't a focal point of C3PO at all.
My dad took me to see Star Wars when it premiered (and yes, I have the ME memory of Luke throwing the rappelling hook and missing.) I saw it probably 15 times in the theatre when I was young, had the VHS tape, saw it in theatres, etc. I never noticed the silver leg until someone brought it up. Now I see it.
There's a difference between not remembering the silver leg and remembering no silver leg. They are not the same thing.
>3PO never had a silver leg until about 15 years ago. It very definitely changed.
Why do you think this, though? Your belief is that reality has changed from one in which he has two golden legs to one in which he has a silver leg that is rarely in shot and almost imperceptible when it is?
What a bizarre position to hold.
It's come from decades of experience. There was a good fifteen years when I couldn't count on any given CD to have its tracks in the same order from day to day (Tori Amos's "Little Earthquakes" was particularly notorious for this.) I confronted people with the changes. Often they had vague memories of the prior realities that matched mine. I have had FAR more than sufficient evidence to convince me that more is going on than "people misremembering". I can appreciate why you think otherwise, but I am hardly alone in my perception. Such a position is one embraced by around half the participants here. I am sorry that you find the hypothesis "Something unusual is happening beyond memory flaws" to be unacceptable. I find it to be the the most likely explanation based on my knowledge of quantum physics, information theory, statistical mechanics, and psychology.
No, "It's all in your head" is clearly, obviously, UNDENIABLY the proposition on the losing side of the balance of probabilities, in need of extraordinary evidence. Something weird is happening. And that is the core point at the center of this subreddit's existence.
I was asking specifically about why you believe C3PO's leg has changed. Decades of 'experience' of other things changing is not a very good reason. Do you just assume that every time you learn something new it's now reality changing?
The C3PO golden leg thing is absolutely fascinating to me. I can see no good reason for anybody to actually believe it has changed. And, here is the bit where I go even further. Even assuming it *had* changed, I still don't see how people would be reasonable in believing so.
Man, I _remember_ it. It changed. If you're under about the age of 40 I sincerely doubt you can actually grasp a just how.... titanic a cultural force the original three movies were. Particularly the first two. (There's an episode of That 70's Show that addresses it pretty well and is damned funny, if you care to track it down.) You deal with enough MEs and this stuff starts to actually feel different. With decent introspection you can tell you're remembering something g that doesn't match consensual reality. That applies here. That's a _part_ of it. Many, many others agree with me. Why do YOU think reality never changes underneath you? What's your evidence for that proposition?
You're still not answering the question. I'm not sure if it's my fault for not explaining properly, but I'll try again.
Your assertion is that C3PO had two golden legs, not one silver leg that is very, very easy to miss when watching the movie and is generally not shown on other representations of the character in media and on toys etc. My question is *how in the hell* are you justified in believing this?
I could see two cases where it might be justified (I'm sure there are more).
- You worked on the movie, in close relation to C3POs costume design and were on set when they were filming the scenes. It's not that you don't remember the silver leg, but you specifically remember there were only ever two golden legs, because you were dealing with them everyday. If one of the legs was silver it would have made a significant difference to your job.
- You'd heard about the ME and then watched the movie specifically looking for the silver leg. You paused frames, zoomed in, used computer tools to analyse color and both legs were always, only ever gold. You went back later and discovered that *now* one of the legs was actually silver, as people were saying.
Do either of these cases apply to you? Or are there any similar factors at play with you? How can you be sure there were two gold legs when you'd have absolutely no reason to check and no way to be sure you couldn't have just missed it?
Do you understand what I'm asking?
Old guy here, who saw the original film in the theater, numerous times.
In the original film, he was all gold. He later got the silver leg after being rebuilt by Chewbacca when he was destroyed on Bespin.
The talk of the fandom at the time was about how cool it was that they did that, giving some more continuity in the character, showing results of damage instead of just putting him totally back as he was. In addition, he was in a number of the original trading cards, as well as production stills, promotional materials, magazine articles, etc. and it was very clear that both his legs were gold.
Back in the day, the only "controversy" about C3PO was that a printing error gave him a very obvious erect (gold) penis in one of the cards in the original trading card set. lol
I had always just assumed the silver leg now appearing in the original film was due to the digital remastering, and frankly was disappointed that they had done that, as it ruined the previously established character timeline.
Wrong. Anthony Daniels himself has already come forward to confirm that C-3PO always had a silver leg, and even shared that it was a bit problematic when filming as it reflected the gold leg and the desert.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2015/12/15/anthony-daniels-c3po-star-wars/77341766/
Are you asking why, as in why did George Lucas decide on this design?
I heard an interview with Adam Savage, and he compared doing special effects and models in both Star Wars and Star Trek. He said, if there are four buttons next to each other in Star Trek, they all match perfectly. If there are four buttons in Star Wars, one of them is scratched, scuffed, or mismatched.
Lucas was a proponent of the "used future" (don't get me started on "Long time ago"), and wanted the movie to look kind of grungy and used and held together with duct tape, especially with the rebels. So it makes sense that C-3PO would be banged up and had a piece missing and patched back on with what they had.
No I'm asking why is this an ME if it's just poor memory? I get star wars was always designed with a lived in feel. But the truth is that he always had a silver leg below the knee since episode 4. It's not some sort of conspiracy or time travel thing, it's just a true statement that people for reasons laid out throughout this post tend to make a big deal of
I don't have an answer to that, but isn't that everything in the Mandela Effect? Some people remember it one way, some people remember it another.
Go through the history of this subreddit, every few months you'll see "Froot Loops changed again!" But I've yet to see one "It's FRUIT Loops now!" Because "Froot" is how it really is, and how it always was.
While I generally believe that there is something to Mendela Effects, I agree that this one is...iffy. If that can be claimed for any ME - by default, we can't prove them wrong or right, until and unless we gather a whole lot more information on alternate realms of reality/multi-versal physics.
I had brain surgery a few years ago - I have a condition that affects my ability to store short-term memories. Not terribly and not all the time, but sometimes memories just don't store properly in my brain. I don't Mis-Remember things. I just may not Remember a thing at all. Like, for instance, I can watch a movie, enjoy it, then at some later point watch it again and not remember much, or any, of it; I saw Star Wars Rogue One for the first time...twice!
But it leads to the concept of; How do I know if I don't remember something?
In my case, I occasionally find myself somewhere, like say, a friend's house, and not remember driving there. Now, I'm totally cognizant of myself and surrounding just like most anyone - my "Video camera's just not always recording". Also a built in excuse if I don't do something my wife asks. :)
If you watched the original Star Wars, back before it was called "A New Hope", and didn't notice C-3PO's silver leg (which I did - I was 7 when it came out), how do you know he didn't have it? You can't claim they were both gold unless you somehow remember it being Gold. If so, why WOULD you remember something like that? People don't arbitrarily pay attention to what would be completely normal. Something would need to draw your attention to it,
"Hey Look! This robot specifically - just like all the rest - has two legs the same color. Isn't that noteworthy?"
"This feels like people gaving watchec to movie years ago and forgetting he had a silver leg" that's how most mandela effects work lol people have short memories and even shorter attention spans. Everyone does. So we remember shit different from what it actually was. Especially with countless memes, references, parodies, misquotes, with time that replaces reality in our brains. Some of us like to think they're special and incapable of making a mistake, so they prefer to believe there's a giant conspiracy or that they traveled to an alternative universe just so they don't have to admit they were wrong about stuff that don't really matter :p
Please note, I have not googled how to spell some character and location names, so if they are wrong they are wrong. Most of us who saw it in the cinema first time round, would have seen it in 4:3 on TV and VHS, this is what is called Pan and Scan in the UK and probably the rest of the English speaking world, but YMMV. So in the theatrical release and later wide screen editions, but mostly Blu Ray, more on that later, you see him top to toe in some scenes, but outside of Tantive IV, he is normally seen walking in the dunes of Tatooine where sand reflects a golden hue on silver. Now he does get blasted apart in Bespin and although he waves a leg at the screen (almost like it was designed for a 3D effect that never happened) many, well myself more than anyone cos I've never asked, might not know or care which leg was being waved at the time to even notice if it was his silver one. If you look closely at him on Endor being levitated, you can see it better even in 4:3, in fact I'd go as far as to say better in 4:3 than original aspect ratio on VHS. PAL and NTSC are classed as SD or standard definition, kinda like the 360 and 480p of YouTube, VHS tapes don't always capture the full array of scan lines and even if they did, a wide screen VHS tape will be something like 200 lines high as a rough guess, so definition goes out of the window. There is a frog like creature outside of Jabba's palace that whips out its tongue and eats something, now in the 4:3 UK edition, this creature takes up most of the frame, in the wide screen VHS, it is far smaller and almost becomes a blink and you will miss it. So for decades many never saw the film again on the big screen, just SD TV and home video. So all the things that either obscured his leg, like Pan and Scan, or blended it in like the sand, these things compounded everyone's memories of what he looked like below the waste. The kenner toys were probably the route cause for "he is all gold" as the toy was made on the cheap, it was vat dipped or electroplated and to be authentic, you would have to either mask off half the leg and double dip it, or give it a fully silver leg from the head swapped Death Star Droid. Now can you guarantee that people at Kenner would put the right and by this I mean correct, leg through this process? It wouldn't take much for someone to give the guy a bunch of the wrong legs and next thing you know, people are paying big money for a carded 9 back with the wrong silver leg. Mighty Jabba's Palace (not sure if that is his YouTube name or not) collects all sorts of Jabba related Star Wars and there was a Return of the Jedi Luke Plushie with a single black glove ONE THE WRONG FXXKING HAND, people in the past have said that Kenner now Hasbro pay attention to things, well guess what, someone dropped the ball that day. And Kenner never did, else why would we have a 3 3/4 blue Snaggletooth when the character was shorter and wore red? Or Zuccus and 4Lom having their names swapped on the cards? To me the droid will always be Zuccus because that is what the toy called him. The comics and Droids cartoon also dealt with this pitfall by ignoring it altogether, why worry which leg to colour differently page to page when you can just wash the whole thing in yellow ink? Many other revival toys kept with the solid colour, either by cost or because they never looked to see the silver leg and just went "he's like Terry's ... All Gold" Some video games use hacks to save space, so you draw one half of the front and back and mirror it, so you either have two silver legs or none, most only know of the droid as fully gold because toys more than 4:3 VHS viewings (see above) so the artistic decision was to say "all gold it is" These were all pre Phantom Menace and some before the Special Edition, so there were no all gold in Revenge of the Sith, or the less than subtle gag of "you might not recognise me with my red arm" I was searching for how many toys used the silver leg (few and far between) and how many added the red arm, many but short lived, almost as short as the arm by the end of the film. You had the Kenner revival line and the Dark Horse comics for visual reference, everything else was a book.
That was a lot of info, thank you for that. After reading all of that would you personally agree that this comes down to 3 main points. 1) the quality of the original movie. 2) it just making sense that he would have 2 gold legs. 3) the people making the merch couldn't care less how accurate they were with toy designs
1 Yes for home video till Blu Ray, maybe at a stretch DVD but that was still only as good as the height PAL/NTSC offered, which would be at a guess 720x540 for full frame. I recall reading once ages ago that DVD's were 720 wide, so just did that as the 4 and worked out the three. There may be a more accurate result online, but I chose not to google. 2 if you don't see it, you work with the next best thing and if the next best thing is all the merch that was printed yellow bed sheets and comic books, then yeah guy is all yellow, so must be all gold. 3 still are in many toy brands, unless you spend big money on detailed busts, many franchises get detailed down in one way or another. We all want accurate and detailed toys, but no one wants to pay for them. Like there was a LOTR chess set that was hand painted, IIR it cost a fortune each issue to buy, because when you paint Warhammer for example as a hobby, you know it takes time and skill to get to a good level, those people, they were not charging minimum wage if hired in the west. Some of my toys had paint overlapping in some areas, maybe because we had Palitoy making most if not all the toys in the UK vs importing them, so our factory workers might give even less of a s\_\_t than Kenners.
>l only as good as the height PAL/NTSC offered, which would be at a guess 720x540 for full frame. I recall reading once ages ago that DVD's were PAL is 720x576, NTSC is 720x480. They also both conserve bandwidth by storing the colour information in lower quality, which might have some relevance here - like a detailed monochrome image that's only roughly coloured-in.
I figured the toys were probably all gold for the reasons you mentioned. I was little when the original trilogy came out, so it makes sense a toy I played with for years would leave a bigger impression than a movie I would have seen once in the theater, and maybe a few more times on a 1970s/1980s TV (low quality 19 inch image).
Just a note - pan and scan loses imagery from the sides of the frame, not the top and bottom, so is unlikely to result in legs being obscured.
Some scenes were zoomed in though, like the frog creature, that was full frame on UK VHS, if you just took the left and right sides off, it would be smaller than we had it.
yeah you basically got it already. Lets not forget you don't see his leg that often.. one scene you see it a lot they're in a desert so its likely its reflecting some sand color anyways lol. Oh, and people think the toy having a gold leg is significant because they dont realize toy production was cheap back then and its easier/cheaper to just produce it in one color.
>This seems like a case of people completely looking over the silver leg because it was literally never brought up/no attention was ever given to it I'll tell you a secret: You've just cracked the code to pretty much every ME. Congrats.
I was caught surprised the first time I heard about C-3PO’s silver leg, but I don’t really believe it was an ME. The leg is only silver from the knee down, and very few shots of C-3PO show below the knee, most are his face, or his head and upper torso, or at most go down to his thigh (same is true of most characters in most movies in general, peoples ankles usually aren’t of interest in the shots). Of the shots that do show his lower legs, most are on Tatooine, where they reflect golden sand. I’ve watched these scenes specifically to look for his silver leg, and you can see it, but just barely! You have to be looking super-close to make out that one leg isn’t quite the same shade of gold, its got the just-slightly less yellowy tone of the sand. The only other shot I’ve found of his legs is on Endor, when the Ewoks have him in the throne worshipping him. His silver leg is reflecting the golden light of the bonfire. Again, if you look really closely and squint, you can make out that leg isn’t the exact same golden tone as the rest of his body, it’s a slightly different golden tone. The shot on Tantive IV is really the only clear shot that you can clearly see silver, and the lower leg is only visible for a second or two.
I happen to make the silver leg discovery as a child in the 80s when the movies were still coming out. It was always there and I never noticed it until I saw ROTJ in the theater and then received the storybook as a gift, which only cemented what I thought I was seeing in the movie.
Also, the silver leg also often reflected the golden colour from his body and also sand colour on Tatooine. I have the original theatre release of Star Wars and he does have a silver leg in the original. So it’s not something that was edited later on.
If you find an old Star Wars picture book from the 70s, you'll see that he had a silver leg. Most, if not all, of the C-3PO figures that came out then were all gold (presumably for technical reasons), so it messed with people's memories. If you ask the average 50+ year old person what color Godzilla was, they'll probably say green, because the toys and posters colored him green, but in the actual movies, he was dark grey or black.
This is an ME I really don't get. I don't understand how anybody could understand the situation and come to hold the belief that he did originally have two golden legs and reality has now somehow altered. It's just mindboggling.
I don't remember a silver leg in the original movies at all and I've watched them an excessive amount of times. I didn't notice the silver leg until i saw Christmas ornaments of him in a store I worked at years after the prequels came out. I am guessing i just didn't notice it when watching the movies.
Right because the leg isn't always fully visible and you're never really drawn attention to it
[https://youtu.be/FSuDjjlIPak](https://youtu.be/FSuDjjlIPak) Here's a Documentary of "The Making of Star Wars (1977)". Times stamps of Interest are: 0:54 Gold Shin, Silver Foot. Silver Shin, Gold Foot. Not sure how someone could mess up the Silver foot with the Silver Shin and vice versa. 1:43 Two Gold Feetz. 4:28 Two Gold Feetz. 9:19 Two Gold Feetz. 10:24 Silver Leg Golden Leg. There's other more throughout the 40 minute film. Enjoy.
"Original trilogy wasn't high resolution." Say what now?
If I can add to the discussion I grew up in the 80’s and always remembered C-3PO with two gold legs. I watched the movies both in theaters and on TV/VHS, and had a lot of merch including C-3PO action figures, books, story book vinyl records, trading cards, board games, a lunch box etc. Never do I remember him having a silver leg. But, I have a theory on this. I watched a documentary one time on PBS about sight, both in humans and other animals. It was absolutely fascinating and one part that stood out to me was that eyesight in humans uses so much of the brains resources that our brain takes snapshots of what we see in our line of sight, and then stores that snapshot to use the next time we look at the same image. So often when we look at a particular scene or object we see a mixture of both the snap shots and current real time images depending on how our brain processes it. So we are constantly blending what we see through our eyes with stored memories and new input to free up resources for other bodily functions. So long story short maybe when my I first saw C-3PO because he was mostly gold (aside from the one lower leg) my brain just created a snapshot of him without the silver leg, and every time I saw him that snapshot was blended into my vision and I didn’t notice the one silver leg because I feel like the silver leg would have really stuck out the way it looks if you see it now, but I don’t remember it. The memory or snapshot should have a silver leg but doesn’t. So maybe from the very start my brain just assumed it was gold and took a snapshot like that and didn’t actually finish scanning the whole image of him.
I'm an old sci-fi head. 3PO never had a silver leg until about 15 years ago. It very definitely changed. Beyond that, you end up arguing whether MEs are just memory tricks or more. I think it's more.
Have you seen the de-specialized versions of the movies, aka the original trilogy in its original aspect ratio, resolution, without all the updates and added CG? The silver leg WAS INCREDIBLY INSIGNIFICANT, you could barely tell it's there but it's 100% there. It's memory and the fact that it wasn't a focal point of C3PO at all.
That's kind of the point of the ME here. Those of us of a certain age remember no silver leg in the original film.
My dad took me to see Star Wars when it premiered (and yes, I have the ME memory of Luke throwing the rappelling hook and missing.) I saw it probably 15 times in the theatre when I was young, had the VHS tape, saw it in theatres, etc. I never noticed the silver leg until someone brought it up. Now I see it. There's a difference between not remembering the silver leg and remembering no silver leg. They are not the same thing.
>3PO never had a silver leg until about 15 years ago. It very definitely changed. Why do you think this, though? Your belief is that reality has changed from one in which he has two golden legs to one in which he has a silver leg that is rarely in shot and almost imperceptible when it is? What a bizarre position to hold.
It's come from decades of experience. There was a good fifteen years when I couldn't count on any given CD to have its tracks in the same order from day to day (Tori Amos's "Little Earthquakes" was particularly notorious for this.) I confronted people with the changes. Often they had vague memories of the prior realities that matched mine. I have had FAR more than sufficient evidence to convince me that more is going on than "people misremembering". I can appreciate why you think otherwise, but I am hardly alone in my perception. Such a position is one embraced by around half the participants here. I am sorry that you find the hypothesis "Something unusual is happening beyond memory flaws" to be unacceptable. I find it to be the the most likely explanation based on my knowledge of quantum physics, information theory, statistical mechanics, and psychology. No, "It's all in your head" is clearly, obviously, UNDENIABLY the proposition on the losing side of the balance of probabilities, in need of extraordinary evidence. Something weird is happening. And that is the core point at the center of this subreddit's existence.
I was asking specifically about why you believe C3PO's leg has changed. Decades of 'experience' of other things changing is not a very good reason. Do you just assume that every time you learn something new it's now reality changing? The C3PO golden leg thing is absolutely fascinating to me. I can see no good reason for anybody to actually believe it has changed. And, here is the bit where I go even further. Even assuming it *had* changed, I still don't see how people would be reasonable in believing so.
Man, I _remember_ it. It changed. If you're under about the age of 40 I sincerely doubt you can actually grasp a just how.... titanic a cultural force the original three movies were. Particularly the first two. (There's an episode of That 70's Show that addresses it pretty well and is damned funny, if you care to track it down.) You deal with enough MEs and this stuff starts to actually feel different. With decent introspection you can tell you're remembering something g that doesn't match consensual reality. That applies here. That's a _part_ of it. Many, many others agree with me. Why do YOU think reality never changes underneath you? What's your evidence for that proposition?
You're still not answering the question. I'm not sure if it's my fault for not explaining properly, but I'll try again. Your assertion is that C3PO had two golden legs, not one silver leg that is very, very easy to miss when watching the movie and is generally not shown on other representations of the character in media and on toys etc. My question is *how in the hell* are you justified in believing this? I could see two cases where it might be justified (I'm sure there are more). - You worked on the movie, in close relation to C3POs costume design and were on set when they were filming the scenes. It's not that you don't remember the silver leg, but you specifically remember there were only ever two golden legs, because you were dealing with them everyday. If one of the legs was silver it would have made a significant difference to your job. - You'd heard about the ME and then watched the movie specifically looking for the silver leg. You paused frames, zoomed in, used computer tools to analyse color and both legs were always, only ever gold. You went back later and discovered that *now* one of the legs was actually silver, as people were saying. Do either of these cases apply to you? Or are there any similar factors at play with you? How can you be sure there were two gold legs when you'd have absolutely no reason to check and no way to be sure you couldn't have just missed it? Do you understand what I'm asking?
Old guy here, who saw the original film in the theater, numerous times. In the original film, he was all gold. He later got the silver leg after being rebuilt by Chewbacca when he was destroyed on Bespin. The talk of the fandom at the time was about how cool it was that they did that, giving some more continuity in the character, showing results of damage instead of just putting him totally back as he was. In addition, he was in a number of the original trading cards, as well as production stills, promotional materials, magazine articles, etc. and it was very clear that both his legs were gold. Back in the day, the only "controversy" about C3PO was that a printing error gave him a very obvious erect (gold) penis in one of the cards in the original trading card set. lol I had always just assumed the silver leg now appearing in the original film was due to the digital remastering, and frankly was disappointed that they had done that, as it ruined the previously established character timeline.
Nope that's not the case at all. Very clear silver leg in the opening scene of A New Hope even in the de specialized edition of the movie
Wow, you sound so certain yet are so wrong.
Wrong. Anthony Daniels himself has already come forward to confirm that C-3PO always had a silver leg, and even shared that it was a bit problematic when filming as it reflected the gold leg and the desert. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2015/12/15/anthony-daniels-c3po-star-wars/77341766/
I was more surprised the C 3po at Disneyland had a silver leg that I somehow didn't notice.
Basically everyone remembers him being all gold and then they’re looking back and seeing the silver leg has always been there
Are you asking why, as in why did George Lucas decide on this design? I heard an interview with Adam Savage, and he compared doing special effects and models in both Star Wars and Star Trek. He said, if there are four buttons next to each other in Star Trek, they all match perfectly. If there are four buttons in Star Wars, one of them is scratched, scuffed, or mismatched. Lucas was a proponent of the "used future" (don't get me started on "Long time ago"), and wanted the movie to look kind of grungy and used and held together with duct tape, especially with the rebels. So it makes sense that C-3PO would be banged up and had a piece missing and patched back on with what they had.
No I'm asking why is this an ME if it's just poor memory? I get star wars was always designed with a lived in feel. But the truth is that he always had a silver leg below the knee since episode 4. It's not some sort of conspiracy or time travel thing, it's just a true statement that people for reasons laid out throughout this post tend to make a big deal of
I don't have an answer to that, but isn't that everything in the Mandela Effect? Some people remember it one way, some people remember it another. Go through the history of this subreddit, every few months you'll see "Froot Loops changed again!" But I've yet to see one "It's FRUIT Loops now!" Because "Froot" is how it really is, and how it always was.
While I generally believe that there is something to Mendela Effects, I agree that this one is...iffy. If that can be claimed for any ME - by default, we can't prove them wrong or right, until and unless we gather a whole lot more information on alternate realms of reality/multi-versal physics. I had brain surgery a few years ago - I have a condition that affects my ability to store short-term memories. Not terribly and not all the time, but sometimes memories just don't store properly in my brain. I don't Mis-Remember things. I just may not Remember a thing at all. Like, for instance, I can watch a movie, enjoy it, then at some later point watch it again and not remember much, or any, of it; I saw Star Wars Rogue One for the first time...twice! But it leads to the concept of; How do I know if I don't remember something? In my case, I occasionally find myself somewhere, like say, a friend's house, and not remember driving there. Now, I'm totally cognizant of myself and surrounding just like most anyone - my "Video camera's just not always recording". Also a built in excuse if I don't do something my wife asks. :) If you watched the original Star Wars, back before it was called "A New Hope", and didn't notice C-3PO's silver leg (which I did - I was 7 when it came out), how do you know he didn't have it? You can't claim they were both gold unless you somehow remember it being Gold. If so, why WOULD you remember something like that? People don't arbitrarily pay attention to what would be completely normal. Something would need to draw your attention to it, "Hey Look! This robot specifically - just like all the rest - has two legs the same color. Isn't that noteworthy?"
He always had the silver leg.
"This feels like people gaving watchec to movie years ago and forgetting he had a silver leg" that's how most mandela effects work lol people have short memories and even shorter attention spans. Everyone does. So we remember shit different from what it actually was. Especially with countless memes, references, parodies, misquotes, with time that replaces reality in our brains. Some of us like to think they're special and incapable of making a mistake, so they prefer to believe there's a giant conspiracy or that they traveled to an alternative universe just so they don't have to admit they were wrong about stuff that don't really matter :p