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Writer: Why Watching the Original Star Wars Again Was a Bad Idea (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: CNET's Michael Franco recently sat down and watched Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope again in preparation for the release of The Force Awakens later this week. His advice to anyone who's thinking of doing the same is to save your childhood memories and skip watching it again. Unlike wine, Franco doesn't think the movie gets better with age. He writes: " Since that first viewing, Luke, Vader and company have loomed large in my imagination, and clearly in the imaginations of many other adults introduced to the sci-fi franchise as kids. So have the rest of the characters, as well as the sounds of a lightsaber, a Wookiee and a TIE fighter and the idea that someday I would learn to control people through the power of suggestion and a wave of my hand. But it now seems that maybe all that got a little gilded in my memory."
The original has been completely ruined by Lucas with all his remakes and extra scenes.
Cutesy extra creatures _everywhere_, Han shooting second, that barf-worthy fake scene with Jabba The Hut... it completely changes the feel. And it's awful.
Take all those out and it's still quite good.
No sig today...
... and I didn't think it had aged too badly. It's more or less what I remembered. A lean, fast-paced space opera, with a handful of iconic scenes and an uncanny ability to raise a smile. It's not a deep or profound movie, which is in some ways part of its charm.
For me, the Star Wars I loved growing up was never really about the movies. It was about the 1990s games; in particular X-Wing and TIE Fighter, which unlike most other space combat games of the time weren't afraid to allow their starfighters to be complex, tricky beasts, and the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games. It was also about the early novels; the Timothy Zahn ones in particular, before the later degeneration into unreadability. Those games and books showed a very different Star Wars to the one you saw in the films; darker, more complex and more focussed on detailed world-building, compared to the light-touch magical space-opera of the films.
That Star Wars is gone now; it took a body blow when the prequels ignored it and since Disney took over the franchise it's been officially retired. But that's fine, I can live with that. I'll go and see the new movie and I hope I'll like it. I'm fairly confident it won't be a mess on a par with the prequels. But it won't be the Star Wars I grew up with.