Star Wars: The Control Freak Strikes Back
Sigh. As I imagine most of you who care have heard by now, George Lucas is finally issuing the original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy on DVD. As you may also have heard, the versions he’s issuing are actually not the originals but (I thought) the ‘special editions’ of a few years back. Known to those of us who grew up with the series as the “Greedo gets off the first shot” versions.
Well, it turns out it’s not those special editions he’ll be issuing on DVD, it’s even-more special editions to which he’s done even-more tinkering and fiddling. So that now:
Hayden Christensen appears as the blue ghost at the end of “Return of the Jedi”.
Ian McDiarmid plays the Emperor in “Empire Strikes Back.”
And, Han and Greedo now fire “almost simultaneously.”
On a completely unrelated matter, in a Slate article from early this year about the best movies of 2003, we find the following paragraphs:
“I was writing a story on all this for the New York Times and was lucky enough to talk to a young woman named Miriam Kriss, who put down her Tolkien book long enough to explain that she was here in tribute to Jackson, “a fan who understood.” Then she delivered a rather stunning testament to the fan aesthetic. “The problem with the last George Lucas Star Wars movies is that he’s not a fan of his own work,” she told me. “You can’t be if it’s your work. He doesn’t understand anymore why we loved Star Wars; he just sits and stares at special effects on his computers. I’d rather see Star Wars movies by people who grew up with Star Wars. A fan would get it.”
I’m not sure I buy as a general rule the idea that fans have more insight than artists who create the work in the first place. But in the case of Star Wars, who can contradict her?”
