Pirate Prince
This may only be interesting to people who like filmmaking/movies, but since I happen to like both filmmaking/movies and Star Wars, I'm gonna survey y'all's opinions on the matter.
For those of you who are unaware of what the Star Wars Special Editions are, a quick explanation: Ever since the 1997 re-release of the Original Trilogy, the Star Wars films have been subjected to various edits with every re-release to home video. These range from cleaning up the special effects and removing mistakes, to weird and/or pointless additions, to heavily altering the contents of a scene. The picture has been tinted with different colors, which in some shots made Vader's red lightsaber look magenta. Shots and lines of dialogue have been changed or re-recorded with a different actor, deleting the original actor's entire performance. Puppets, models, and miniatures have been replaced with CGI. Most infamously, the cantina scene in A New Hope was edited so that Greedo shoots first rather than Han, apparently because George Lucas thought it made Han seem too violent.
Anyway, there have been a lot of changes made over the years, so here's a few videos which go into detail on the edits:
And finally, here is the Wikipedia page dedicated to this topic.
Plenty of fans have done plenty of complaining about these changes over the years, and there's also been backlash from people calling said fans "entitled" and saying that it's George Lucas' movies and he gets to do whatever he wants with them. So for the sake of brevity, I'm only going to stress one thing here: none of this would matter if the theatrical cut of the films were readily available. As of right now, the only way a film collector can buy personal copies of the Original Trilogy without all the tampering is by getting a special box set that includes both the special editions and a "theatrical edition" of each film, the latter of which is taken from a crappy low-quality LaserDisc transfer. You might also be able to acquire VHS tapes of the movies at a thrift store, but it's more likely to be the 1997 special editions. What about streaming on Disney+? Those are based on the 2011 Blu-rays, which contain even more edits. The fact that Disney now owns Star Wars hasn't changed anything. In fact, some people believe that the original film negative of the films was somehow lost or destroyed during the process of making these edits, which effectively means that there is no Star Wars, lmao.
Alright, I better wrap this up, since I'm starting to sound a little hysterical here - I just can't believe that this is an actual problem with one of the most popular film franchises ever. It aggravates me all the more because I care about film preservation and I collect movies, so it's just... sad and frustrating. On a lighter note, there is hope in the form of the various "Despecialized Editions" out there on the Internet, which compile various sources together to create high definition version of the theatrical cut.
But anyway, please vote in the poll and give your opinions in this thread, if you like.
For those of you who are unaware of what the Star Wars Special Editions are, a quick explanation: Ever since the 1997 re-release of the Original Trilogy, the Star Wars films have been subjected to various edits with every re-release to home video. These range from cleaning up the special effects and removing mistakes, to weird and/or pointless additions, to heavily altering the contents of a scene. The picture has been tinted with different colors, which in some shots made Vader's red lightsaber look magenta. Shots and lines of dialogue have been changed or re-recorded with a different actor, deleting the original actor's entire performance. Puppets, models, and miniatures have been replaced with CGI. Most infamously, the cantina scene in A New Hope was edited so that Greedo shoots first rather than Han, apparently because George Lucas thought it made Han seem too violent.
Anyway, there have been a lot of changes made over the years, so here's a few videos which go into detail on the edits:
And finally, here is the Wikipedia page dedicated to this topic.
Plenty of fans have done plenty of complaining about these changes over the years, and there's also been backlash from people calling said fans "entitled" and saying that it's George Lucas' movies and he gets to do whatever he wants with them. So for the sake of brevity, I'm only going to stress one thing here: none of this would matter if the theatrical cut of the films were readily available. As of right now, the only way a film collector can buy personal copies of the Original Trilogy without all the tampering is by getting a special box set that includes both the special editions and a "theatrical edition" of each film, the latter of which is taken from a crappy low-quality LaserDisc transfer. You might also be able to acquire VHS tapes of the movies at a thrift store, but it's more likely to be the 1997 special editions. What about streaming on Disney+? Those are based on the 2011 Blu-rays, which contain even more edits. The fact that Disney now owns Star Wars hasn't changed anything. In fact, some people believe that the original film negative of the films was somehow lost or destroyed during the process of making these edits, which effectively means that there is no Star Wars, lmao.
Alright, I better wrap this up, since I'm starting to sound a little hysterical here - I just can't believe that this is an actual problem with one of the most popular film franchises ever. It aggravates me all the more because I care about film preservation and I collect movies, so it's just... sad and frustrating. On a lighter note, there is hope in the form of the various "Despecialized Editions" out there on the Internet, which compile various sources together to create high definition version of the theatrical cut.
But anyway, please vote in the poll and give your opinions in this thread, if you like.
