Hello everyone, and welcome to my third entry in this series where I look at my hopes, dreams, and eventually some reviews, on Blu-Ray discs. In the first blog, I discussed my hopes for a future “Crow” box set, while blog #2 looks at my desire to see Marvel’s road to “The Avengers” feature immortalized in a box set. Today, I’m discussing the coming release of the “Star Wars” saga, and why I will not be purchasing it anytime soon.
For better or worse, I am a life-long “Star Wars” fan. Always have been, and always will be. It’s not really a popular admission to make in this day and time. Between George Lucas’s constant tinkering with the original trilogy, which started with 1997’s Special Edition, and the sub-par reception of the prequels, fans have been bitching and moaning about Lucas’s artistic evisceration of his magnum opus for going on 15 years. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been one of them more often than not.
And through it all, my fandom remains. Even the prequels, whose shortcomings in writing, story, and performance become more glaring with each viewing, still give me jolts of nerdiness that make those creative deficiencies tolerable. And yes, I can sit through the increasingly-painful “Special Editions” of the original three films without losing my lunch. Hell, even the ridiculous “Clone Wars” movie in 2008 has some good points, especially when you put it in the context of the enjoyable TV show it led into. “Star Wars” remains my favorite film franchise of all-time because from Episodes I-VI, Lucas created a rich mythology where the central spiritual journeys of the characters overcome the sometimes trite and immature quality of Lucas’s writing, all set to a John Williams symphony that is as emotional and exciting as anything the composer has ever written for film.
So why am I not getting this saga on Blu-Ray? Because George Lucas remains the most clueless and out-of-touch filmmaker when it comes to his core audience in Hollywood. While it has always been children of a certain age that have driven the “Star Wars” marketing machine, as evidence by the popularity of the “Clone Wars” TV series, it’s an older generation, now in their 30s and 40s, that cemented “Star Wars’s” place in pop culture history as one of the great fantasy adventures in modern times. It is this portion of his fan base Lucas is out of sync with. While the Blu-Rays promise fascinating, original documentaries and a first look at rare deleted scenes from the original trilogy, they will be missing three key ingredients that would make the set “definitive”: the original, theatrical versions of “A New Hope,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Return of the Jedi.” Lucas remains defiant in allowing the older fans of his space opera the opportunity to own these films, as we grew up with them, on the best possible medium and with the best possible picture and sound quality. Lucas’s reasons are selfish– he wants his “new and improved” Special Editions to be seen as the definitive versions of these films –and well within his rights as a filmmaker, and the main “author” of these films. But he is not simply robbing “Star Wars” fans of the films as they grew up loving them, but film history as well. True, as all three films are in the Library of Congress Registry for “historically important” cinema, there exists prints of the original, theatrical trilogy for posterity and preservation, and yes, in 2006, Lucas relented and released the “archive” editions of Episodes IV-VI on DVD to placate the fans who were unhappy with their exclusion from the much-anticipated 2004 release of the “original” trilogy on DVD, but the DVDs were thrown out to audiences without the care of proper remastering, meaning fans remain unable to watch the movies while taking full advantage of their home theatre setups. Of course, as evidence of Lucas’s eventual “double dip” on DVD, financial motivations are equally likely for his exlusion of the original films on Blu-Ray: after all, why offer a definitive collection the first time around when he knows he can wait a couple of years, and then bite the bullet, giving fans what they’ve wanted all along, forcing them to buy the set yet again? After all, “Star Wars” remains as repackaged and rereleased on home viewing medium as the classic Disney films (I, for one, own VHS releases from 1995 and 1997, as well as the 2006 DVD reissues).
Well, for once it seems that Lucas has lost his original audience. I know of many people who are, like me, boycotting the Blu-Ray releases of “Star Wars” until Lucas gives in, and I’ve read stories of people cancelling their pre-orders of the set. But it’s not just his exclusion of the original films that is irking fans– Lucas just can’t leave well enough alone. Since 1997, Lucas and his effects maestros at Industrial Light & Magic have been touching up and including scenes and moments that the “state of the art” was not able to realize at the time. So that’s meant a deeper look at Mos Eisley; a deleted scene featuring Jabba the Hutt in “A New Hope”; windows that open up the world of Cloud City; and a final sequence that shows the wider galaxy celebrating the downfall of the empire. Okay, I can get some of this…except the Jabba sequence is redundant after the Greedo sequence, which was changed up so that Greedo shot first, making Han less a loose cannon and more…”heroic?” And how was the Sarlaac, that teethy pit of death in “Return of the Jedi,” made more terrifying by a mouth that makes it seem like a cousin of Audrey II from “Little Shop of Horrors?” And what does it say to Sebastian Shaw, the actor who played Anakin Skywalker at the end of “Jedi,” that he gets replaced by prequel Anakin, Hayden Christensen, because you decide that audiences require such continuity? Well, that last part might be our fault, given all the flack we’ve given you for the continuity issues between the prequels and the original films. Still, why do the Ewoks have to blink? And after all the crap we gave you for Darth Vader’s “NNNNOOOOOO!!!” at the end of “Revenge of the Sith,” why did you think we needed one as Vader throws the Emperor down the shaft at the end of “Jedi?”
Of course, now I just sound like every other bitter fanboy who has been spending years bitching about Lucas changing his films. And yes, they are HIS films, but as soon as they were released, they also became OUR films. Yes, they are still his films in a legal sense, but they belong to us on a more emotional level. Whether it’s Obi-Wan Kenobi first teaching young Luke about the Force, or Jar Jar Binks leading a Gungan rebellion against the droid army that is less effective than Stormtroopers in combat, the audiences that have embraced “Star Wars” over the years are joint owners in this universe long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. I, for one, am proud to admit that, even if Lucas’s artistic impulses as he has expanded that universe over the past 15 years are ones I disagree with. I read my original reviews of the prequels, and wouldn’t change a word, even if my critical assessment has become more objective. That doesn’t mean I’m going to continue buying these films in versions that I don’t really want to own and show to my own children one day. I’m just too old for that shit.
Clearly, so are a lot of people.
Thanks for listening,
Brian Skutle
www.sonic-cinema.com
To learn more of my thoughts on the “Star Wars” saga, check out my print reviews and commentaries my friends and I recorded here.
