Star Wars reimagined as a gritty grindhouse exploitation film

Things could have been so much different

(YouTube)

If you re-watched George Lucas' original Star Wars trilogy ahead of The Force Awakens, you may have thought that the effects had dated somewhat over the decades. Well, it could have been a lot worse.

The folks over at Mashable Watercooler have put together a Trailer Mix depicting 1977's A New Hope - not as the science-fiction behemoth it was - but as a gritty grindhouse exploitation film it definitely wasn't.

For those who aren't familiar with the term 'grindhouse', it refers to cinemas in the US - popular in the Seventies - that were renowned for showing multiple films, usually exploitation movies synonymous with disreputability.

So now you can see what the film universe's most beloved sci-fi of all time would have looked like as a shoddily concocted B-movie.

A champion of this kind of cinema, unsurprisingly, is Quentin Tarantino whose 2007 film Death Proof was originally intended to be shown in cinemas as part of a double bill with Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, akin to the grindhouse films of old. The two were released individually outside of the US.