10 Most Pointless Changes To The Star Wars Movies You Never Even Noticed

6. The New Wampa - The Empire Strikes Back

Wampas were intended to play a much bigger part in the Hoth-set sequences of The Empire Strikes Back than they wound up in the finished product.

A whole subplot of Echo Base being plagued by the yeti-beasts, culminating in C-3PO using them to ward off Snowtroopers was cut, and due to a rather poor costume the opening run-in with Luke, was purposely shot to hide as much of the creature as possible.

With the time and money to do things properly in 1997, Lucas filmed some new shots of the wampa feasting on Luke's tauntaun to broaden the scope of the escape scene. In a practical sense this isn't that noticeable, although it did have a big impact on the saga - the version of the wampa that fans typically think of is the redesigned version, not the originally (very) different costume.

In all honesty, this is one of the few Special Edition changes where you feel it genuinely was a case of realising something impossible at the time, and it is more befittingly naturalistic to show the monster - the avoidance in the original version feels rather stylised - but given that the sequence works in its earlier form this is still totally unnecessary.