You're also talking about three films which were hugely important to cinematic history, the development of special effects, the fabric of culture, and the lives of millions of people, including high profile filmmakers who regularly cite them as influences, not to mention the fact that they've been the template for 90% of what's come it of Hollywood in the years since. Lucas was the legal owner and was within his rights to do what he did, but I don't blame anyone who wasn't pleased with it. No other filmmaker has actively sought to repress history so blatantly, and gone as far as destroying the negatives and suppressing the versions of the films. I'd Lucas really felt the way he did, he should've put his money where his mouth was and put both versions out and let the audience decide.

But the Jabba gag was only the tip of the iceberg. I suspect most people's problems with the OT changes are that they were made by the guy that thought Jar Jar woudld be a beloved character rather than the guy that originally gave us C-3PO and R2-D2. The same guy that gave C-3PO lines like "this is such a drag"and felt the OT just wasn't done until he installed the same garbage in the OT.

NO.....

To be fair, he didn't destroy the negatives, he just severely altered them, and there's no evidence he destroyed the elements he removed & replaced. Saying "the original negatives no longer exist" was just an artful dodge Lucas could use to avoid releasing the originals, as it was technically true, if ultimately unimportant for the purposes of a digital restoration and home video release.

Either way, it still amounts to a type of revisionism which doesn't have a lot of precedents, and certainly not one on this scale. Even Kubrick tended to trash stuff after test screenings and such, not after the film had been out for two decades. I'm perfectly willing to accept that the condition of the negatives or any positive or IP prints is pretty bad and that the cost of the restoration isn't proportional to the potential profit, but if find I difficult to believe that isn't possible at all.

Actually Kubrick made two significantly different cuts of The Shining, both of which got theatrical releases.

They both got home video releases, with the US getting the original longer cut, and at least the UK getting the shorter European Cut:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shi...ropean_version

Kubrick also tried to suppress an entire film; his first feature film Fear and Desire:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_an...nd_restoration

I'm not defending what Kubrick did in any fashion, but I do still think the situation is slightly different. It's not like the film had been massively popular and culturally influential and he decided to change it two decades after the fact. Still absolutely disagree and was glad he didn't succeed.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/star-w...150000465.html

Factual Error in that article, Jeremy Bulloch is not the original voice of Boba Fett, he was only in the costume.

When was that article originally written? I never realized Harmy was so young.

It was published 3 hours ago. It is originally from the Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...to-see/379184/

If Harmy's 25 now, that means he was about 21 when he made his first versions.

This whole idea of home video as an archival medium is extremely recent, and it's heavily flawed too. For centuries people have viewed plays without being given a high-quality video recording to watch at home. People have visited museums and seen paintings without feeling entitled to a museum-quality print to take home with them. And for years people went to movies and expected to maybe be able to see them on television edited, cropped to 4x3 and interrupted by commercial breaks years later.

Lucas doesn't owe anyone a version of Star Wars that he no longer approves of. If I made a movie and charged people to see it my only concern would be that the projector didn't break down. If they sat and watched the movie from beginning to end that would be the beginning and the end of my obligation to them, and I'm sympathetic in regards to the resentment that could naturally come when people feel like paying a couple bucks for a movie ticket decades ago entitles them to a lifetime commitment. Everyone who bought a ticket to see Star Wars in 1977 got what they paid for and that's literally all they're entitled to, and if you fell in love with a VHS copy of The Empire Strikes Back from the 1980s you better hope your VCR doesn't chew it up.

And how do you feel about books? If all copies of the original Huckleberry Finn were destroyed, and the only copies available to the public were a condensed version that removed all references to the n-word or race, would you be perfectly fine with that? So long as the first readers in the 1880s got to read the original version, it doesn't matter what gets handed down to future generations? The publisher has no obligation to ever release or even acknowledge the existence of the original version again - is that right?

What if Jim was replaced with Jar Jar Binks?

I don't think anyone views home video as "archival." If the best copy available anywhere is the home video version, something has gone wrong. However, just because something's a relatively new experience doesn't mean it's not important. The internet has barely been around as long as home video, but if that went away the world would collapse.

Anyway, your comparisons are off. Home video is similar to published books, were people have expected to retain a copy for centuries at this point. But books benefited from actually being archival quality, since the complete text is available in every copy.

Legally, yes. Ethically, even Lucas himself had some choice words about who movies belong to and what those who alter them should be called:
http://savestarwars.com/lucasspeecha...aledition.html

Preserving film a wholly different thing. If there even a copy of book printed properly, it's fairly easy to make copies, not even counting the original manuscript. It's WAY harder to preserve film, especially when the negatives have been hacked to hell by the creator. Home video does not constitute archival purposes for something. Technically, of course, neither does a trade paperback, but it'd be easy to retype everything. Restoring film is a much more dicey issues, especially with Lucas' willful hacking up of the negatives and deliberate attempt to suppress it, not to mention the fact that film as a medium for anything except maybe archiving will probably be gone by the end of the year.

Lucas was the producer/copyright holder of Empire and Jedi. He didn't direct either one. So since WB produced and own Casablanca, The Wizard Of Oz and Gone With The Wind they should be able to alter each since the directors and writers were hired by the studio to work on them. I want CGI flying monkeys, replace Sam the piano player with Lady Gaga and in Gone With The Wind alter Rhett Butler's dialogue so he says "Frankly bitch, I don't give a mother fucking good god damn shit"

I'd feel like it Mark Twain regretted certain things and approved of a modified version and insisted that was the only version ever released I'd respect and understand that, and I'd also understand that my own natural desire to seek out the in censored version would now entail tracking down a now-rare book.

And that's the thing, there would be no Marl Twain SS tracking down this pre-censorship books. They'd still be out there. Just like how there are theatrical prints of Star Wars out in the wild, not to mention all the VHS, laserdisc and DVD copies.

But it's a flawed comparison because Twain is dead and his writings are in the public domain. A better comparison would be Stephen King writing a story and only printing 250 copies that are available at a single New England bookstore. Or Peter Buck of R.E.M. releasing a vinyl-only album with no digital release. Or a collectible company releasing a special edition of a print or an action figure that can only be purchased at Sam Diego Comic Con. They are entitled to do this and Lucas has been well within his right for years when it comes to choosing who sees the theatrical versions of Star Wars.

Stephen King did have Rage removed from all future printings and he also changed The Stand. Albums are remixed all the time and even J.R. Tokien changed The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings with edits to future printings. My favorite film of all time is Blade Runner The Final Cut.

I think the main problem people have with Lucas' add ons and changes is that they think they are shit. Just my personal opinion but the above mentioned changes are nowhere near as mind numbing stupid as Jedi Rocks.

Lucas doesn't technically owe anyone anything but when he wears a "Han Shot First" t-shirt and puts a pic of him wearin said t-shirt in the artwork to the Indiana Jones BD box set he deserves all the hate he gets.

This story has been getting picked up around the net here and there for the last week or two. It's funny how something that has been around for years (and has been reported on by legitimate sites in the past) just sort of picks up steam and gets spread around as though it's new news. The stories even seem to have coincided with his most recent revision of Empire and that's never even mentioned.

As far as Harmy's age goes, yah, he is a college/grad student. Newer versions have been consistently delayed due to his school responsibilities. What's even more amazing is that until very recently he was doing all of this work on an old laptop.

So the historical importance they have is of no significance at all? The countless filmmakers they've influenced, the groundbreaking special effects, the fact that cinema and culture as wee know it has been completely changed by them? Lucas is the legal owner of the films (in spite of the fact that much of what he's changing was directed by someone else, the FX work was done by others, he's recutting the editors' work, and more, so if he makes the decision to do what he has, he's within his legal rights. But NO ONE-not the fans, not the people who's work he's "improved," colleagues and other filmmakers-has to like it and it's perfectly justifiable to criticize him for his decisions. There's one Mona Lisa. The fact that I can Google pictures of it doesn't make those a replacement for a priceless work of art with huge cultural importance. What Lucas has done is without precedent in film history, it's not comparable to anything else. Is he legally obligated to Change his mind? No. But he can't just sit there and say "I want it this way, shut up." He's done something which opens him up to (justified) criticism. He's welcome to stand by his decision, but everyone who doesn't like it doesn't have to. Or he could have just restored both and let us pick. But I think he knows what most people would choose. So if my VCR eats it, yeah, there goes an important piece of history. Lucas is certainly entitled to do what he's doing, but NOBODY has to agree with him, like it, or decide not to call him out on it. I don't own the film. I'm not asking for any of the profits it makes.

And incidentally, film fans have fought against cropping, panning and scanning, and censorship too. It's hardly anything new.

Although the themes in Shakespeare's plays have been done to death and modernized when people start changing the lines in the plays I am sure there will be pissed off people.

The difference is that the rare OOP book would at least give you the full experience of reading the original book. Home video versions are only approximations, and have historically been of much lower quality visually. So suppressing a film is much worse, since most of the copies out there aren't good enough to serve as archival replacements.

Not all of his writings; his autobiography, first published in 2010, is still copyrighted:
http://bollier.org/mark-twains-final-copyright-crusade

These are poor examples, since the issue with Star Wars isn't that it originally was little seen, but that it was widely seen, by millions, for about 2 decades in one particular version, with multiple home video releases of them. Then, all of a sudden, the availability stopped, and the quality of the versions available was frozen at 90s laserdisc quality.

It'd be more like when Stephen King released an uncut version of The Stand, or revised his book The Gunslinger 20 years later to fit in more with the later books of The Dark Tower series he was writing. Except, again, the original editions still give the full experience, which isn't possible with home video.

It was widely seen and nothing Lucas has done had erased that filmgoing experience that everyone had. How does seeing a movie translate being entitled to recreate that experience in your home 37 years later? Yeah, it's nice when it happens but we aren't owed that.