"Maclunky"


Fuck you, George. Absolutely insane that we have to have fans doing film scans and time-consuming restorations themselves just to get the original films that made Lucas a success. We don't even have a proper anamorphic DVD release of the originals, and he was still fucking around and adding inane trollish bullshit up until the point he sold Lucasfilm. We thought that Vader's "no.... NOOO!!!" and other Blu-ray changes were the final insults, until we got yet ANOTHER version of Han vs. Greedo from beyond the proverbial grave.

Disney Star Wars is trash, but Lucas deserves a giant eternal fuck you for forcing his horrible, damaging, and ever-changing Special Editions on us (that we're still suffering from). He even claims that the original non-SE reels were destroyed in the making of the SE... which would mean that he destroyed them, because film reels don't just magically puff up in smoke after being digitally scanned. The fact that the National Film Registry was unable to receive original prints of the films, points to it being true. Whether it is or not though, what an absolutely disgraceful shit-show.

Also, in the 80s George was all for film preservation, saying things like, "To me, film is historical document and therefore it has practical value... People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society...

A copyright is held in trust by its owner until it ultimately reverts to public domain. American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history...

Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tommorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with "fresher faces," or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor's lips to match. It will soon be possible to create a new "original" negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires...

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten."


Insanely hypocritical.

All he had to do was offer both versions, like many other films have done. But no, George had to try to rewrite history and literally destroy classic creations. All for his own ego and stubbornness.

I would recommend the fan scanned and restored 4k77 v1.4 and 4k83 v1.3 to anyone who wants to view the actual OT in 4k. 4k77 is a little rough but 4k83 is superb all the way through. With the SE Empire being the least-damaged, it can be used in the middle for the time being. Or get the 1080p Despecialized Edition. They're working on 4k80 as we speak, hopefully it'll be released sooner rather than later.

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Lucas started shitting on Star Wars while making Return of the Jedi. Gary Kurtz disagreed with him on the direction the film was going, by making the Ewoks major characters, not having the balls to kill off Han Solo, and changing the original spaghetti western ending for the teddy bears dancing around a campfire. Which is why Kurtz split from the project. By the early 80s, Lucas only cared about merchandising and how many toys he could sell from the movies. The artist that he was in the 70s no longer existed.

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