Alas, Poor Lucas
I saw Star Wars when I was six years old, and the next day I was a new man. It was on TV, broadcast on CBS, and we taped it to watch again, and we wound up watching it so many times I began to memorize the soon-dated commercials for Burger King and a TV-movie called Nairobi Affair. That's how much impact the experience had on me. I learned every crevice of the story on that tape, every cheap special effect and rubbery costume. I was deep in the throes of the love only the young know.
And George Lucas, you little pissant, you went and broke my heart.
The films were re-released in my later teen years with added special effects, digital creatures and places that howled anachronistically from their 1970s surroundings: imagine T-1000 ambling through the background of Gone With the Wind. The original stories weren't enhanced by the extra buildings or the ringed shockwave, so vogue in the 1990s, that emanated from the Death Star after Luke rightfully saved the day and flew home to flirt with his sister (we'll deal with Lucas's incestuous leanings another day). Instead, the stories I'd grown up loving were now shoved to the background, forced to play second fiddle to cheap light shows that felt designed by someone who'd just gotten his computer and was absolutely fascinated with the way he could make little animals walk around a landscape he'd only dreamed of until now.
That's Lucas's defense: the reissued versions of the films, the only ones that will be made available on DVD this fall, are the way he originally envisioned the story, and he only now has the technology to do what he's always wanted. This is all the evidence needed to prove Lucas has always been a cold, sterile filmmaker, interested more in pleasing himself than in serving the audience looking for a good yarn.
When I was little my parents had me fill in a Dr. Seussish book about myself: age, height, photo, where I lived, what I liked to do, my friends: another keepsake in the experiment of being the firstborn. A year or so later I erased some of my previous "answers" and updated them, figuring in my way that this would please my parents. Only it backfired. I was stopped before I could completely undo the past, and I don't remember the book after that. They didn't want an update; they wanted to be able and look back at what I had been like in the past. Different, yes, but that isn't bad. That's just the way things are.
So I'm done with you, George. I've got my VHS copies of the original films, and I'll stick with them until they wear out, and when they wear out I'll buy another set. I loved what you had made. Well, not so much Return of the Jedi, but the point is: you were doing so well. And now you've gone and tried to fix a past that was never broken, and all you've got to show for it is a disappointed audience that arrived too late to stop you.
