GROWING UP WITH STAR WARS
I have seen the original STAR WARS trilogy roughly eighty or ninety times since my birth oh-so-many years ago in 1980. I know that eighty or ninety times is nothing compared to some of the hard-core fans out there who live and breath the trilogy much the same way we normal folk derive sustenance from food and air. However, we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about me and my point is, growing up, STAR WARS, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI were a big part of my life. Hell, I even had the JEDI sheets, which made me totally cool, no matter what you say. Through the years, as I’ve reached my adulthood, the trilogy was always there, a safety if you will, that I could pop on at any time and immediately feel better about things. The story, the characters, the wicked special effects that even today look better than a lot of CGI junk… they were all so perfect. When I was sixteen, I heard that they were going to release the trilogy back into the theaters, all cleaned up and with new scenes. New scenes!!! More STAR WARS!!! I was on cloud nine. Until I got to the theaters…
LUCAS LOSES HIS DAMN MIND
Why did Lucas feel the need to make Greedo shoot first? Why did we need an awkward, clunky scene of Jabba the Hut visiting Han Solo? Why did Lucas cram every exterior shot with computer-generated buildings and people and animals and more buildings and flying ships? To all of these questions, I can find no satisfactory answer. All that George Lucas did was take what was an amazing movie and piss all over it under the guise of “completing his masterpiece.” The thing that bothers me the most about this is the fact that everyone, from ninety percent of the fans all the way up to the studio people just LET him do this! There was no protesting! They all said, “Well, he knows what’s best. Let’s all just bend over while he dismantles one of America’s classics.” There would be a bigger outcry now if James Cameron decided to monkey around with TITANIC.
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