Though much less technically complex than the special effects that have made Star Wars famous, transition effects are another way in which George Lucas made Star Wars visually distinctive. In his use of them he reached back into neglected dimensions of cinematic history, where they had been gathering dust. With transition effects, as with the sheer thrilling adventure feel of Star Wars, Lucas was reactivating aspects of film-making that had been fun in decades past, but which by the mid-1970's had fallen into disuse.

A movie-maker's traditional repertoire of ways to get from one shot to the next consists of cuts, dissolves, fades, and wipes. Cuts simply replace one shot with the next with no transition, and are used as the standard approach in film and video editing. The other forms of transition therefore stand out as unusual, and so they carry an additional visual statement, a form of 'phrasing' the way the screen story is being told. Dissolves gradually blend one shot into the next, making for a smoother transition, and can be used to show the passage of time or the shifting of the scene to another place. Fades are dissolves to a single color, normally black or white, which are used to punctuate end of a scene or make a statement of closure or finality. All three of these transitions were still part of the standard filmmaker's tool kit when Lucas came to editing Star Wars in the mid-1970's, but wipes were very rarely used anymore.

Wipes are a more showy way to go from one scene to the next, and if used improperly can draw too much attention to the editing of the film, getting in the way of the story. A standard side-to-side wipe brings in a new shot as if a page is being turned, with an invisible line crossing the screen to reveal the next image. For a moment, parts of both the old and the new shot are on the screen together. Many other forms of wipe are possible, and Lucas invoked a variety of creative types for the editing of Star Wars. These transition effects played into the grand showmanship of the film, contributing to its feel as an exciting story being told with flair. In another context they would seem out of place, and in the mostly gritty and 'realistic' world of 1970's films like Dirty Harry, they were virtually never to be seen. But they were right at home in the more comic-book fun approach of Star Wars, and they once more linked the film to its inspiration origins in classic adventure serials like Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, which regularly employed creative wipes. Lucas was also influenced by the work of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, who was himself known to use transition effects.

Star Wars employed a variety of transition effects. Among them, an 'iris out' reveals the middle of the new shot in the center of the picture and expands the borders of the shot in a widening circle. Vertical wipes reveal the new shot from bottom to top or vice-versa. Lucas even employed growing interlocked diamonds and other creative patterns, one of which was the 'clockwise' which made the invisible transition line follow the path of a clock's hand around the screen. When the Special Edition of Star Wars was being put together, transition effects were just one of the ways in which the new footage had to blend with the old, as in the scene here with the Dewback patrol group, which is revealed by a clockwise wipe. The wipes were one more complexity to the editing, but one more aspect in which Star Wars was made a special form of visual storytelling.