Why Disney Can't Give Us High-Def Star Wars Where Han Shoots First

An anonymous reader writes "Lost amid the disappointment of the Star Wars prequels were the unfortunate edits George Lucas has made to the original trilogy when he re-released them. Lee Hutchinson points out a few of the worst: 'In Return of the Jedi, Jabba's palace gains an asinine CGI-filled song-and-dance interlude. Dialogue is butchered in Empire Strikes Back. And in the first movie, perhaps most famously, Han no longer shoots first.' Lucas flat-out refused to spend time and money remastering the original versions of the movies. But now Disney is in control of the franchise (and the business case for releasing different versions of the same films has been proven). So there's hope, right? According to Hutchinson: maybe, but not for a while. While technological advances have reduced the price tag for such an endeavour, lawyers will keep it expensive. It turns out 20th Century Fox still owns distribution rights to the Star Wars films. Because of complex and irritating legal reasons, Disney was not able to acquire those as well. Thus, Disney will have to get Fox's approval and probably cut Fox in for some of the profits, if they were to re-release the series."

At least there's hope . . .

[Kimomaru]

. . . because there was no reasonable chance of this happening with Lucas. Man, how do you mess up Star Wars?!

Get some diplomacy going then!

[Dega704]

I along with plenty of other people would gladly pay an obscene price for a blu-ray copy of the original, untainted trilogy. Star Wars fandom aside, this is really something that needs to be done for the sake of preserving history. Few films if any have had the kind of cultural impact that these movies did. George Lucas has astounded me with his level of selfishness and lack of empathy when it comes to this. Plenty of other films have created director's cuts and whatnot, some of which needed it because they were originally ruined by last-minute editing, but they also preserved the theatrical release along with them. I have no doubt that there are plenty of movies that Lucas loves and would be furious if their creators came along and started making ridiculous changes because they didn't turn out how they wanted. Everyone knows he protested against colorizing black and white films in the 80s. What a hypocrite. Nothing turns out just the way you originally plan. That is often how good things come about in the first place; by accident. The only thing he has proven is that if the original movies had turned out the way he wanted, they would have been awful.

Re:At least there's hope . . .

[TWX]

And that's why you can have my widescreen Laserdisc editions when you pry them from my cold, dead hands...

I don't understand why the initiative to do this doesn't come from FOX, there's got to be enough interest to make it profitable. All that I want them to do is to clean up the artifacts from the editing process (where one can obviously tell that it was multiple rolls of film layered through the machines like in the space battles) and to clean up any degradation in color or texture from the film grain itself. Hell, they could even remix the audio into AC3 or whatever surround sound system people like, but they don't need to do more than restoration-type work.

Re:Its time to move on

[Xel]

Well... It bothered him, and he changed it when he was able to. If bothers the rest of the internet, and all they can do it bitch about it, forever. So yeah, I do think you need to get over it. Go take a break, drink some blue milk, then come back and look at the anger in your own comment, and think about things you're allowing to get under your skin.

Re:At least there's hope . . .

[bitt3n]

Man, how do you mess up Star Wars?!

It must really annoy Lucas to hear people ask this even after he produced a detailed three-part instructional video on the subject.

Re:Despecialized Editions

[PRMan]

Han shooting first shows just what kind of a dangerous scoundrel the Rebels have to rely on. It's the beginning of his character journey from rogue to respectable.

If he starts out semi-respectable, it weakens his character development a great deal.