In my memory, 1997 was a pretty fantastic year. Scientists in Scotland had successfully managed to clone a full-grown sheep. Bill Clinton had been inaugurated into his second term. IBM’s predecessor to Watson, Deep Blue, managed to beat the greatest chess player of all time, Gary Kasparov , at his own game. As we all know, this was the event that humbled the Russians enough to sign a peace treaty with the Chechens the same year.
But these aren’t the things I remember from 1997. I was seven years old and couldn’t care less about any of those things. I was too busy playing video games, hanging out with the neighborhood kids or watching television. What makes 1997 such a great year in my memory is it was the first year I was introduced to the greatest sci-fi epic of all time, George Lucas’ Star Wars: A New Hope.
In celebration of the 20th anniversary and as a way to garner more attention for the soon-to-come prequel trilogy, LucasArts re-released the original Star Wars trilogy in theaters across the nation. This event was no doubt a big deal to die-hard fans from to beginning of the series and to my generation that missed out on it the first time around.
As it turns out these re-releases were the first of George Lucas’ special editions of the films. Many fans were unhappy that Lucas took such liberties as to replace the original puppets of most of the aliens including Jaba the Hutt , the Sarlacc , the Banthas and the Rancor with CGI. Lucas also changed many of the scene wipes, dialogue and sounds. He even altered the famous scene between Han and Greedo , making it clear that Han shot first.
Later with the 2004 DVD release, more drastic alterations were made like replacing Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christenson as Anakin Skywalker. As a child watching the movies I didn’t notice any of this. But after watching the originals and the re-mastered versions, I think of the films as works of art and agree the alterations should not have been made.
Lucas claims he made these alterations because he wanted it to be this way originally, but was limited by the technology of the era. However, it is what he managed to do with the limited technology that made the films true works of art. The special effects demonstrated in the original Star Wars far outshone any of its contemporaries. Potatoes and tennis shoes were brilliantly disguised as asteroids and spaceships, cars were made to look like they were hovering, and space battles of epic proportions with lasers and explosions came to life in a way that wouldn’t be matched until years later.
However, Lucas was not happy with the realities of these effects. The tennis shoes were still tennis shoes, the hovering cars had a discoloration underneath them, and the space ships had a gray box around them as they flew through space. But there is no need to fix these things. Let them stand as monuments of success of doing great things within your limitations. The original movies in their unaltered forms are fantastic works of art by means of their own merit.
When a better type of paint was discovered, DaVinci didn’t go back and repaint his masterpieces– he left them alone because he knew they were already as perfect as they needed to be. Lucas needs to remember what made these films great instead of finding new ways to screw with art. George, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.