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Is There Such A Thing As A Final Cut?
heidi writes "There's an insightful article over at CNN's entertainment section about the tinkering of recent cultural history. Apparently, there is no such thing as a final draft any more, and author Todd Leopold does a great job of showing how this is revisionist history at its, well, oddest. Aside from the many examples he cites, such as the 'new' Capote novel and the changing of Star Wars to show that Greedo shot first, i can think of the 'new' Camus novel that i read a few years ago and the way that The Wizard of Oz had the 'ding dong the witch is dead' song edited out. In an era where our entertainment has come to define us and to fill, however (un)completely, the spiritual void that we inherited from the Boomers, messing with our stories isn't necessarily a positive thing, creative genius aside."
"Ding, dong, the witch is dead" was edited out of The Wizard of Oz? I don't get it. Why?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Well, there was that one Pink Floyd album released after The Wall...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
How prophetic Orwell was...
And there's the real victim of where we seem to be headed with intellectual property: our cultural history.
Picture the broadcast flag, coupled with on-demand movies. Toss in changes of the medium du jour crippled with mostly effective DRM, and you're losing history left and right. There's a new release of, say, E.T. on Blu-Ray. Everyone (not literally everyone, of course, but you get the idea) replaces their old, worn-out VHS (or Beta, in the case of my parents) tapes. Now there's very little evidence that there were ever guns in the movie.
Or pay-per-view/on demand becomes the common way of watching movies. The broadcast flag prevents keeping a copy, of course. So all you'll ever be able to see is the latest version of the movie. Hell, look at Dumbo: can you even buy a copy of the movie that still has the crows singing? They certainly don't show it on television.
Or how about Aladdin? I can't be the only person who remembers the opening song's lyric containing a line about cutting off your hand for stealing a loaf of bread. But good luck proving that it ever even existed - to the best of my knowledge, that didn't even make into the first release of the movie to stores, much less subsequent ones.
The more consumers lose control of the media they consume - not being able to make/keep copies, being forced into a subscription model of media delivery - the more this is going to happen. We've got the technical capacity right now to preserve a closer-to-perfect record of our culture than has ever existed in human history, and we're wasting it. It's being lost to political correctness, revisionist history, and George Lucas.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
And where should we stop? Should we reprint and remove or rewrite politically uncorrect sequences and dialog from Anne Frank, Huck Finn, and Uncle Tom's cabin? I think not. Such revisionism hides whatever insights we might gain into the attitudes and social mores and culture of the time.
And in the case of, say, SW (ANH), replacing scenes and effects MAY make the movie look better, but it's not as we remembered it, and we lose all appreciation of the techniques and the cinematic "state of the art" available at the time. I still cringe every time I see the new, improved Death Star "ring" explosion.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Should we reprint and remove or rewrite politically uncorrect sequences and dialog from Anne Frank, Huck Finn, and Uncle Tom's cabin?
As long as the original is still available, sure.
The problem is, people think the edited version is the original, if they've never been exposed to any other.
People need to suck it up. If they're fragile psyche's can't handle it the way it is, then they should just avoid it entirely, rather than corrupt the author's original intent.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"Sure, Lucas can go back and revise history so Greedo shoots first<snip>"
You bet, that is Lucas' prerogative. You know what really grinds my gears, though? The fact that after Lucas does his new cut, the old ones are never to see the light of day. Outside of bootlegs, we will never see Greedo shoot first on DVD, or E.T. chased by gun toting F.B.I. agents. They will be stuck on a crappy medium (VHS) until those tapes stop working. Who even knows if the original 35mm prints are still saved.
This leads to the lapses in history. I couldn't believe when I watched a show about how ground breaking the special effects in Star Wars were back in 1977 and all the clips were from the re-release! They even played the clip with the Death Star exploding with the new enegery ring! Ughhhh.... That wasn't 1977, that was a couple of years ago.
Plus, it is only going to get worse. As the lack of creativity increases in Hollywood, you'll see more re-releases and remakes where the original is left in a dusty back-lot room someplace.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Political correctness is the new McCarthyism. The prosecution of thought-crime under the banner of 'diversity'. No art is sacred.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan