Over the weekend, George Lucas announced at the Star Wars Celebration V convention in Orlando that the entire series of ‘Star Wars’ films will be released on Blu-ray late next year. Fans from across the galaxy erupted in joyous frenzy… until the realization set in that he’s still only releasing the craptastic “Special Edition” versions of the original trilogy with Greedo shooting at Han Solo first and the stupid CGI Jabba making googly eyes at the camera. To make up for this, supplements on the ‘Return of the Jedi’ disc will include a never-before-seen deleted scene… that looks totally fake. This guy really just hates his fans, doesn’t he?
Here’s some crummy cellphone video footage from the convention of Lucas making the announcement and Mark Hamill pretending that he actually shot the deleted scene. (Warning: the audio in this clip is terrible. You’ll want to ride the volume control or the screaming fans will blow your eardrums out.)
And here’s a better look at that so-called deleted scene, which allegedly is supposed to take place near the beginning of ‘Return of the Jedi’ and shows Luke building his green lightsaber.
Notice how all of the footage of Vader appears to be recycled from ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, the audio was all sampled from dialogue spoken elsewhere in the trilogy, and Luke Skywalker’s mostly-obscured face looks nothing like Mark Hamill.
[Lucasfilm keeps yanking these video clips off YouTube. Sorry.]
Also, in an interview at last year’s Comic-Con, Hamill explicitly said that he never shot such a scene.
Whoops.
Prior to the official announcement, Lucas gave an interview to the ‘New York Times’ pre-announcing the Blu-ray announcement, in which he confirmed the following:
Mr. Lucas said the versions of the first three “Star Wars” films – “Star Wars,” “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” – included in the Blu-ray boxed set will be the special-edition releases that were shown theatrically in 1997 and digitally restored for a 2004 standard-definition DVD boxed set.
Perhaps bracing for the reactions of fans who decried some of the changes made to the special-edition films – like, say, an exchange of gunfire between Han Solo and a certain green-skinned bounty hunter – Mr. Lucas said that to release the original versions of these films on Blu-ray was “kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good.”
“You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” he added. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.”
So now his excuse for not restoring the original versions of the trilogy is that doing so would be too expensive. This from the guy who keeps $1 billion in walking-around cash in his wallet at any given moment.
I call bullshit on this. The diamond-encrusted toilet in Lucas’ solid gold bathroom cost more than it would take to properly restore the original ‘Star Wars’ movies. And he would absolutely make that money back in sales. Plain and simple, he doesn’t want to restore those versions because he hates them, and he holds any fans who prefer them in contempt.
In related news, producer Gary Kurtz recently gave an interview to the ‘L.A. Times’ where he explains why he left the ‘Star Wars’ franchise after ‘Empire Strikes Back’. As he tells it, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the series as he witnessed George Lucas shift priorities from good storytelling to marketing and toy sales. While I don’t personally think that his description of plans for a dark and downbeat ‘Return of the Jedi’ in which Han Solo dies and the Rebels lose to the Empire sounds like a great idea either, the interview is a good read and helps to shed some light on how and why the series eventually came to its current state.
EM
In 1988, a filmmaker testified to Congress, “In the future it will become easier for old negatives to become lost and be ‘replaced’ by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.” This is precisely why the original cuts of the “Star Wars” films should be preserved and made available. Even if one concludes that the revisions *are* superior to the originals, there is great value in allowing the public to make the comparisons and to understand the films’ place in their original cultural context by understanding what those films actually were. I just wish George Lucas agreed with the filmmaker I quoted, who also happens to be George Lucas.
Kenny Kraly Jr
I agree but their is no sense of complaning and moning about it.
EM
What, should we just clap our hands gleefully? So, this is how democracy dies: with thunderous applause…
Dick Ward
EM, I laughed my ass off at that. 🙂
Charles Caughill
I think he should just reshoot 4,5,and 6. leave the old ones as classics. And update everything in its awesome splendor that is HD.
Dax Cushman
Here comes a long-winded rant. Apologies in advance. I don’t dislike everything about the Special Editions. For example, I prefer the new music at the very end of “Return of the Jedi” as opposed to that “Sesame Street” sounding music that was there in ’83. But even if I greatly preferred the Special Editions, I would still believe that the originals should be preserved and released in the best manner possible on whatever the current home video format is.
I mostly agree with Josh Zyber, save for the part about a darker version of “Jedi,” which could have been interesting. At least make the victory seem like a genuine struggle, as opposed to “Ewoks to the Rescue.”
Something that really bothers me about the SEs are how inconsistent the special effects are. The movies keep shifting gears between clean looking CGI and old-fashioned effects. Take, for example, that weird chess-like game from “A New Hope,” the creatures on the board are clearly stop-motion, or the Rancor scene from “Jedi.” This tends to makes the updates look fairly half-assed, and it doesn’t matter how many times Lucas chooses to update Star Wars, as there are still going to be some old-fashioned looking effects in there. As Josh said, Lucas may as well remake the original trilogy (Hell, do all six movies) with “Clone Wars” CGI animation and be done with it.
There’s also the fact that the SEs are actually censored. I read about this somewhere some years ago and had to check this out for myself, but the action scenes are actually trimmed slightly. So when Luke, Han, or whoever shoots storm troopers, the movie cuts away faster than it did in the original versions. I can’t help but wonder if this was done to make the sure these movies remained “PG” in ’97. Nowadays, I’m pretty sure that the original “Star Wars” would get a PG-13. I mean, if Schumacher’s Batman movies are PG-13, you get the idea.
Of course, Kurtz was right about Greedo shooting first. I can understand (but not necessarily agree with) updating some of the effects in ways that weren’t possible in the ’70s, but that thing between Han and Greedo could have easily been done back then, and ironically, it would have looked better too because they would have been able to choreograph the scene correctly. The whole “Greedo shoots first” thing reminds me of the time a prologue was filmed and placed at the beginning of “Fistful of Dollars” in order to moralize Eastwood’s character so the movie could be shown on television in the ’70s.
I definitely agree with Josh’s opinion that Lucas holds fans that prefer the originals over the SEs in contempt, and it almost feels like he’s not releasing respectable versions of the originals out of spite. I can’t believe Lucas would have a hard time shelling out the money needed to clean up the originals for a proper Blu-ray release. Considering how much it must have cost him in the ’90s to do the SEs in the first place, and then again in ’04 for the DVDs, I also highly doubt money is the issue here. And frankly, it pisses me off. I know I’m getting way too old to care about this kind of nonsense, but I do. I like movies, and I grew up liking Star Wars. Lucas wouldn’t have the money or fame he currently enjoys if it weren’t for the fans shelling out time and again for these movies, and as Josh rightly said, Lucas’s refusal to restore the original versions “is a desecration of film history.” I don’t think I’ll be buying these Blu-rays in the immediate future.
Josh Zyber
AuthorDax, paragraph breaks are your friends. 🙂
I added some to your comment for you. (Didn’t change anything else.) You make some good points, and I’d hate for them to get buried in a big block of text.
Dax Cushman
Yeah, thanks for that. I suck at paragraph breaks. 🙂
JimmyZappa
I don’t like the special editions much either since I also grew up with the originals, but I really dug the lightsaber scene. That was in the graphic novel for Shadows of the Empire that I loved as a kid.
If it isn’t Mark in it (I don’t remember the scene saw it awhile ago), then that kind of cheapens the scene a little.