Star Wars addicts will soon be able to download the master's long-unseen student films, thanks to a pioneering pact between the University of Southern California and online entertainment company AtomFilms.
AtomFilms launched the "USC Cinema Yearbook" -- a Web collection of 100 short works from USC film school alumni including Lucas, Robert Zemeckis and Ron Howard -- on Tuesday.
The site will be the exclusive online source for the shorts for 18 months.
"Licensing the rights to AtomFilms allows us to expedite archiving our 75-year-old film collection," said Larry Auerbach, associate dean of student-industry relations at the USC School of Cinema-Television. "That should make film historians and fans alike very happy."
In particular, Lucas' 1967 short film "Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138" is likely to interest science fiction fans.
The 15-minute short served as a sketch for Lucas' feature-length debut, 1970's THX-1138.
Both are claustrophobic dystopian epics of forbidden love and personal revolt. Still, some noteworthy differences emerge -- the budget constraints of student filmmaking kept the short's cast down to only five characters, who had no names, only numbers.
By contrast, the fully-realized film luxuriated in bald, listless crowds milling about spotless white corridors, and the characters were delineated by both numbers -- 1138, 5241 -- and three-letter codes -- THX, CAM, OMM.
While the short is not yet on the AtomFilms site for fans to compare to the full-length film, the company promised that it would be "coming soon."
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