Star Wars Sanitation

OK so Lucas needs to leave well enough alone. In 1977 he put out Star Wars as a one off. It was a big hit. So he went out and said that from the start he had planned it to be a nine episode series. In order to back up this claim, when he released Star Wars in 1981 he made a little addition, at the beginning of the film a new title that said "Episode IV A New Hope" scrolls by. He didn't make much fanfare about it and now most people believe it was there from the beginning. I even won a bet on this once.

OK so he goes and makes episodes 4, 5, and 6. With subsequent small changes on rereleases and VHS and Laserdisc and so forth. Fair enough. Then in 1997 for the twentieth anniversary he puts the three movies out again with new inserted CGI creatures and improved special effects. That would be fine but he also then goes to cover up more of the evidence that he really hadn't planned this whole thing out from the beginning as he claimed. So there are some real blatant manipulations, like dialogue snipped a little bit here and there, extra CGI footage of Currisant and so forth to try to get continuity going.

Now on the new DVD version that came out this week there is even more of this. Replacing the old actor who played the Emperor for the new one, changing the color of light sabers, changing Boba Fett's voice, adding a new Anakin ghost and so forth. So this is really like the fourth or fifth tinkering with these films he has done. Since Lucas refuses to release any older versions of the films, people who have not been watching closely may really think that Lucas was brilliant from the start and planned these things to a tee.

If you really want to do something to improve your films George, go back to episodes one and two and pull out Jar Jar Binks. Or maybe use your time a little better by thinking up a new idea for a film and working on that.