It’s Friday afternoon so I’m taking a mid-afternoon break from politics to write about Star Wars.

Mike Verta is a composer and visual effects artist. For the past 20 years he has been working privately on a labor of love. He is single-handedly trying to restore the original Star Wars into a 4K version he calls the Legacy Edition. He won’t say exactly how much of his own money he has spent on the project but it’s a lot.

“A f**k-ton of money has been spent on this,” he said in a recent You Tube video. He continued with a bit of laughter as he said, “Way more just in the R&D. Nobody would do this. It’s crazy. It’s fiscally—it is logistically irresponsible of me to have spent this much money and as many years of my life on this stupid restoration that makes no sense. It’s crazy. It’s silly. It’s also fantastic.”

So what has all the money been spent on? Verta has done 4k scans of five separate 35mm prints of Star Wars and then spent years creating custom software to help him restore it in addition to the high-end, off-the-shelf software he uses.

In a video posted on YouTube in May he described the process he uses. Using custom software, he stacks individual frames from each of the five prints. The software then compares each pixel in the stack. The idea is to literally take the best pixel from every frame of every print. In the process, his software winds up removing hundreds of tiny flaws that could be the result of wear and tear from having been run through a projector too many times.

But as he worked out this process he realized it also did something else unexpected. By combining the best of five prints, his process effectively grabbed the maximum possible detail from each frame. In effect, he created frames and shots that had more detail than any single print of Star Wars ever shown in a theater in 1977.

All of that can sound like hyperbole but once you see the results of his process pulling detail from the stacked frames, cleaning the frames and correcting the color, the result can be pretty dramatic.

Verta said he’s about 85 percent finished with the Legacy edition but he has vowed he will never release it to the public. There are other fan edits of the original Star Wars film out there. One called “Harmy’s Despecialized Edition” has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. A more recent effort called 4K77 is based on just one 4K scan of an original print of the film. That one is available on usenet. But again, the Legacy edition which is by far the most detailed restoration, will never be released by Verta.

In part he said that’s because the powers that be have warned him specifically that they would likely sue him into oblivion if he did so. But he said even before receiving those warnings he’d decided he wouldn’t do it. “It’s not the right thing to do for a film that meant that much to me,” he said. “I want everybody to see it. Of course I do. But I wouldn’t kill all of its karma and all of its…I just wouldn’t do that.” So for now the film sits on a hard drive in his personal safe.

But Verta said he remains optimistic that things will change one day. He recently had a meeting with film executives to present the results of his process and to suggest the idea of releasing a 4K restoration of the original film. At the time Disney was in the midst of buying Fox and people said it wasn’t the right moment, but he said the reaction to his work was universally positive. So one day, eventually, Disney may finally give the fans back the movie that so many kids cared about in 1977.

As for why he’s doing all of this with no guarantee it’ll ever see the light of day (much less that he’ll be paid for decades of work), Verta said ultimately he’d be happy to see the restoration happen even if someone else does it and his effort is forgotten. He said he’d buy ten copies if he believed the result was better than what he could do. “I’ve just never seen those images,” he said. In other words he’s doing it because no one else has.

“Star Wars is gone. Except it’s not. It’s still so present we’re making Star Wars films and making Star Wars lands [at Disney] and yet the film that started it all, the original film, is completely gone. It’s nowhere,” he said. He added, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Here’s his YouTube clip containing a bunch more restored scenes and a more detailed explanation of how he did it.