Star Wars fans have a lot to put up with from George Lucas with these movies. Hes notorious for fiddling about with them in re-releases of the original holy trilogy: he originally started doing this with a cinematic re-release of Star Wars in 1981, which included the retitling of the film to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope from the original Star Wars. Changing and updating the sound mix, remastering, adding back deleted scenes these are more or less par for the course when movies get the re-release treatment. But constantly going back to re-edit scenes to change the emphasis, shoring up older special effects with modern CGI that simply doesnt fit properly, adding new alien song and dance numbers to replace old musical cuts, adding the goddamn Gungans into Return Of The Jedi, changing the redeemed ghost of Anakin Skywalker in the coda of Return Of The Jedi to a badly composited shot of Haydn Christiansen from Sebastian Shaw, who actually plays the character in the film The man cant leave well enough alone all the more bizarre, considering that he testified to Congress in 1988 about the artistic demerits in screwing with classic examples of American cinema:
People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society These current defacements are just the beginning. Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with fresher faces, or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actors lips to match. It will soon be possible to create a new original negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires.
Lucas was asserting the right of the author of a cinematic work over commercial interests, but its curious that the phrasing of his vehement, passionate protests seems to attack his own creativity-free tinkering with his own films in the years since this speech. Tinkering like
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