Re: How Soon Before Everything Worth Watching is On A DVD

"Tabernacle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> You know I betcha what Lucas is waiting for is to see if enough people
> want the original versions at which point he will bring them out on
> dvds and will make another pile of $$$!

Are 46,000+ internet geeks enough?  ;)

http://www.originaltrilogy.com/

> BTW I do not have a problem so much with the retouched version of Star
> Wars(IV) as I do with the extra crap he put in V + VI because as I
> understand much of what was added to IV was what he had intended to
> put in the movie at the time.

The Jabba scene aside, this is largely a myth.  I'd go over it all again,
but I've done it too many times already, so you could Google it up if you
really want to.  Maybe I should just make a page on the subject and refer
folks to that instead.  :)  But the simple fact is, most of the changes in
all the Special Editions are revisionism, nothing more.

But even the Jabba scene...look, when you make a movie, you simply don't
include every scene that you film.  Some scenes don't work for one reason or
another, and for efficiency's sake if nothing else, you cut stuff.  Every
film has deleted scenes, and for the most part are better films for it.
When you leave everything in, the film gets self-indulgent and bloated
(think Titanic or Meet Joe Black, 2-hour films that run for 3 hours).  The
Jabba scene was wanted, but he didn't have the budget, time or technique to
pull it off, so it got cut.  Since the scene is entirely unnecessary anyway
(that Jabba had a price on Solo's head was already established through
dialogue elsewhere in the film) and comes at a point when the action is
picking up, it's a good cut.  With the scene added in, the film slows down
at a crucial moment and the exposition gets bloated.  This is a problem we
see extensively in the new films, where Lucas has the budget to do whatever
he wants - 2/3rds of the new films are simply boring.  It's pretty clear
that Lucas' sense of pacing is off, and it seems that having limits on the
earlier films was actually a benefit, not a detraction.

> But it seems he could not because he had
> a tight budget, and on top of that the Special Effects Technology was
> not up to the level of what he had available to him in Empire and
> Jedi, so I can understand why he wanted to restore those cut scenes he
> had wanted to be in the first movie at the time of its original
> release!

Even if that were the case, so what?  All art is a product of its time.
Lucas should accept this and move on.

Mike