Why Star Wars Should be Left to the Fans

Aguazul writes "The BBC has an interesting take on George Lucas's meddling with our memories: 'Fans of Star Wars are not happy. Someone has been tampering with their movie history.' They speculate on who really owns a piece of art. Even the artist doesn't really know what he's created, and a work doesn't become 'something' until given value by an audience: 'the artist is merely the medium for his or her work.' Many people contributed to the Star Wars trilogy. Is Lucas' over-inflated idea of his own importance in the process the reason he is stopping people seeing the unmodified originals?"

Comments

Someone else who agrees

[Daetrin]

Rob Bricken of Topless Robot found someone else who agrees that artists should stop trying to meddle with their art after releasing it... George Lucas from 1988. He gave a speech to Congress about the issue in which he said, among other things,

"The public's interest is ultimately dominant over all other interests."

and

"Attention should be paid to the interest of those who are yet unborn, who should be able to see this generation as it saw itself, and the past generation as it saw itself."

Saving Star Wars: The Special Edition Restoration

[farnsworth]

There is an exellent article outlining what Lucas has done to the original negative. tl;dr: in the 90's Lucas restored the negative of the original release, and then subsequently nearly completely butchered it while at the same time destroying all copies of the theatrical release (except privately owned vhs and laserdisks, of course). At this point the only thing that exists is a 1080p scan of the film. All of the restored negative does still exist, though. It's just not assembled into something that could produce anything. It is possible to re-assemble that restoration, which by all accounts is stunning.

Re:Artists rule, but there's a limit

[fyonn]

I think an interesting parallel is the BBC TV series Red Dwarf. It was originally was made on a shoestring budget where you could see the 100W light bulb in the back of the model ship in shots. later, after the show had been well received and the budget had gone up considerably, they went back and "remastered" the first three seasons. They cleaned up the footage nicely, but then they also went and CGI'd it, edited some of the dialogue and generally messed about with it.

the reaction to this version was generally pretty negative and fans weren't happy with the changes made. Now if you go and buy the show on DVD, it's the original version you'll find. The remastered is pretty hard to find. The BBC took in board the criticism and gave the fans (you know, the ones paying) what they wanted, which was the original show they fell in love with.

david