So today George Lucas is celebrating the re-release of the beloved Star Wars franchise, in 3D, starting with...
Wait, this can’t be right... Really? The Phantom Menace? He thinks that is the movie to start off with? Not, say, Star Wars, which now we are all required to call Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope?
Um, okay. And if that is not enough to annoy the crap out of the fanboys, well, he now is trying to deny history. I mean this may be a generational thing, but remember when you were watching the original Star Wars and Greedo had the gun pointed at Han Solo and Solo keeps him distracted until he could pull out his gun and shoots the guy right then and there.
Well, sorry, you were wrong. Greedo always shot first. So says Lucas (via Hot Air):
THR: People can get fanatical about the movies — how does that make you feel? The puppet vs. CGI Yoda ruckus, and the who-shot-first, Han Solo or Greedo furor come to mind.
Lucas: Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.
It’s the same thing with Yoda. We tried to do Yoda in CGI in Episode I, but we just couldn’t get it done in time. We couldn’t get the technology to work, so we had to use the puppet, but the puppet really wasn’t as good as the CGI. So when we did the reissue, we had to put the CGI back in, which was what it was meant to be.
If you look at Blade Runner, it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday and there are all kinds of different versions of it. Star Wars, there’s basically one version — it just keeps getting improved a little bit as we move forward. … All art is technology and it improves every year. Whether it’s on the stage or in music or in painting, there are technological answers that happen, and because movies are so technological, the advances become more obvious.
Now, look I don’t get all worked up about the changes in the 1997 version. It’s annoying, but I guess I can happily ignore the whole thing, but this is just insulting to our intelligence. Yes, Han did shoot first, and we were not confused on this point, George. Watch for yourself:
You changed it in the re-release, George. Just admit that. You didn’t like how things would look to kids, so you changed it. Don’t insult our intelligence by saying it was this way all along. Because it is the B.S. involved that annoys me this morning, not the change itself.
