There's no other way to get a wedge into this than to just straight up start. God help me, I'm going to talk about Star Wars on the Internet. As of late, such things have become kind of a festering cesspool. I'm aware of that, but this is yet another attempt at an exorcism. I've been doing very good at un-fucking my personal headspace in 2023, thanks in part to how engaging with David Lynch and Criterion movies has kind of rewired me, but this is some shit that's been stuck swirling around in here for like a month. You see, I'm not going to complain so much about the films as I am their fandom. It's a specific part of their fandom, as even I'm smart enough to draw the line at pre-Disney. Just as well, anyway, because at the forefront of the discussion is the man who sold the films to Disney. I need to get out my thoughts on the legacy of George Lucas, interrogate a little the specific ways the bigger Star Wars fandom has reacted to it, and try to hypothesize why they react the way they do.
It's a lovely story, a story of a young kid just enjoying a bunch of space movies and getting to enjoy changes and new editions and new films as they come out and as that kid grows up. I can throw on any of those movies in the modern day to just relax and enjoy a nostalgic throwback space movie. As critical as I like being of media, I will admit that there's a bit of a biased blind spot when it comes to those films. This is not an essay about tearing down the prequels, because I can't do that. I can have fun with them, and enough of that fun is tied into my own nostalgia that its roots are intertwined deep within me and can't be separated. We all have our own biases and pet pieces of media, and this is where mine is. Notably, though, I'm doing my very best to be honest with you about that. At no point am I attempting to frame my subjective nostalgia as an objective truth that proves I'm right. This leads us nicely into what I would actually like to talk about, which is Generalized Star Wars Fandom doing just that. Here, then, are two viewpoints about everything I've just mentioned, which Generalized Star Wars Fandom holds as objective truths.
1) George Lucas made three Star Wars movies between 1977 and 1983, which fandom saw at a formative age and fell in love with.
2) George Lucas altered those three Star Wars movies for subsequent commercial release and made three Star Wars prequels between 1997 and 2005, which fandom does not like very much.
Again, it's fine to hold those two opinions. What's not fine, and what's been bugging me for a month now as it's stuck in my head, is the idea of trying to use those two subjective opinions to try and claim an objective truth. To try and use the subjective disappointment felt by point 2 to craft a narrative that proves it to be correct. The way some fans have gone about this is to try and downplay George Lucas's creative input during point 1 as much as possible, to build the narrative that once 1997 hit and his influence gave him full control over Star Wars, everything went to shit. The idea that the original trilogy's success happened in spite of George Lucas, and not because of him. Time to show you the heart of what inspired these swirling thoughts of mine. There's a video essay from about 5 years ago, called "How Star Wars Was Saved In The Edit". It posits a simple theory, presented with a level of grace and dignity, but one that shows this bias all the same.
The theory is that George Lucas's first cut of the original Star Wars was an out-and-out disaster, just a complete garbage fire, but that luckily there was a trio of editors on board the project. That under Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch, and Marcia Lucas's editing magic, Star Wars became the beloved film a generation grew to adore. That Star Wars was saved by them. Star Wars was good in spite of George Lucas, and not because of him. You can smell the implications from here. Maybe you'll remember that Irvin Kershner directed The Empire Strikes Back, another beloved film. Maybe you'll remember that on Return Of The Jedi, a less beloved film, George Lucas started to take more direct control. Hmm. Maybe they're right. Maybe Star Wars did succeed thanks to all those other people who were good at their jobs, unlike George. I mean, we've all seen what he does to Star Wars when he's in charge...
That's the massive chip on the shoulder of fandom folks that they don't say out loud. That's the insidious subjective opinion as objective truth essays like this are trying to work with. If we downplay George's creativity as much as we can, that just makes everything make that much more sense. Star Wars was good because of other people, and then when George got power and took charge, it went to shit. It's a nice little narrative to explain how you like one set of movies you saw when you were 6, but not the other set of movies you saw when you were in your 20s. All tied up in a nice neat little bow that calls George Lucas a hack. It's so nice and simple. It's also bullshit. Here's another video essay for you. It is a 2 hour rebuttal to "How Star Wars Was Saved In The Edit", which cites more than a few sources and digs more into the truth of what really happened during production of Star Wars. A bunch of the claims the earlier video made are debunked by evidence, either cited from making-of books or from actual scenes in the movie.
This video essay is proven for what it is: a disingenuous misreading of the movie and its production in order to prove a point about Star Wars being good not because of George's creativity, but because everyone else stopped him from making it shit. Listen, I can understand that mentality. Truly, I can. I had to stop myself from falling into it multiple times while writing about the Chris Chibnall era of Doctor Who. More than a few stories of those years had Chibnall with another co-writer, and those stories had both strong and weak points. It's tempting to sit there while writing it up and say "Well the good parts must have been from the new writer, all the bad bits are clearly that hack Chibnall doing his dumb bullshit again". One must constantly struggle against their own biases when being critical, and either own up to them or fight them back. I don't know what happened with the co-writing process on Doctor Who with Chibnall, but it isn't as easy and self-serving as "the person I don't like did all the bad parts". As convenient an explanation as it would be for Star Wars fans, it isn't that simple. "Everything good about the original trilogy was because of other people, and everything bad about Star Wars since was because of George Lucas" is just self-serving bullshit with no ground in reality.
It's when they dig deeper that I find a fault, when they honestly say that this one minute change ruins Han Solo's darker edge as a character. Before, he was shown as a man who would kill in cold blood, and now changing it so he fires in self-defense lessens his edge and lessens his face turn at the end of the film. I don't buy it, for the simple reason that they both shoot at practically the same time. At the end of the day, Han Solo still kills that alien threatening him in the bar. He's still shown as a man who can and will take a life... and, I mean, the Special Editions don't alter all the Stormtroopers that Han will shoot dead later in the movie. Again, my point here is that the subjective opinion of "I think this change is dumb" is masked as an objective "this change alters and ruins Han Solo's character arc in the movie". I have more respect for someone stating the former with honesty than someone stating the latter with an axe to grind. At that level, it starts to jump the border from subjective opinion to pointless nitpicking, and the same can be said for every other fan reaction to the Special Edition alterations. I have to be careful here, to not paint all Star Wars fans with the same brush. Maybe a lot of them think that with a genuine honesty, instead of thinking it to fit their narrative about George Lucas falling to the dark side and becoming a shitty moviemaker or whatever. Then again, the fandom seems all too eager to represent themselves like this, in a little documentary called The People Vs. George Lucas.
You may say that the filmmaker might have been intending to lampoon those more extreme fans by presenting them, to show just how unreasonable they were. Given that said filmmaker appeared on the RedLetterMedia Youtube channel to talk about his movie, spouting the same narrative about how Star Wars was successful in spite of George... yeah, no. I'm not buying it. The attempt at the movie to twist to a positive "well, at the end of the day, George gave us all so much joy" from the fans at the end rings hollow when you're calling him an abusive monster who traumatized you because he made a bunch of movies you didn't like. You don't get to do that after the bile you've spewed forth in the movie prior. There are cooler heads who speak on the films and give nuanced critique and insight, it must be said. For every one of them, though, you get five madmen yelling and screaming the worst shit about George Lucas. I'm only scratching the surface because this is legitimately awful, and you can see how such sentiments festered and got worse over the Disney years. Why am I even talking about this, other than to display the sheer horrific things these fans say? Well, I want to talk about some of the more reasonable-sounding things they have to say about the Special Editions.
Much is made about how altering the original trilogy, continuing to alter it, and then refusing to make the unaltered films commercially available is a threat to film preservation. The fans interviewed for this film worry that the versions they fell in love with when they were young will soon vanish into the ether, and that as a landmark piece of film history the movie should be preserved. Please, George. Please release the unaltered trilogy. You owe it not just to us diehard fans, but to culture itself. This exact sentiment, reasonable as it may seem on the surface, is what inspired this maelstrom of thought and feeling within me that I hope to exorcise. These fans are concerned that the versions of the space movies that they grew up with are locked to dead and dying media formats like Laserdisc and VHS; that without proper preservation on a more modern-day media format, these beloved copies will fall to digital entropy and be lost forever unless George Lucas (or Disney these days, I suppose) commercially releases the unaltered films.
It's a concern I can empathize with. I, too, have a set of beloved space movies stuck on VHS that will one day rot away to nothing. I told you about them above. It was the Star Was Trilogy Special Edition VHS box set I got for my 12th birthday. Something that's not mentioned so often is that George didn't stop changing the films in 1997. The DVD release in 2004 and the Blu-Ray release in 2011 were also slightly reworked and unique cuts of the film with some alterations each time. Even the streaming version on Disney+ currently is its own beast, reworking the Han and Greedo scene one more time to have Greedo say "Maclunky" for some reason. I bring this up not as some sort of gotcha to advance the narrative of George Lucas being a Sith Lord, endlessly tinkering about with film history. Film history is exactly the thing I want to focus on with these Star Wars fans and their pleas for the unaltered trilogy to be released, in the name of "culture" and "film preservation".
Here is where I grind a bit of an axe at the hypocrisy of using subjective opinion as objective truth. For all that you can complain about the changes of these iterations of the trilogy being unneeded, here's the truth. They are still a part of the film history of Star Wars. I'll grant that they're not as impactful a part of cinematic history as the first release of the film in 1977, but that's just it. If the fans suddenly want to bring the notion of film preservation into the discussion over what George has done with these movies? You don't get to pick and choose. Every cut of the movie, even the ones the fans don't like, are a part of the history of Star Wars and should be preserved. I share a common ground with these fans in that aspect. Both of our versions of the films are locked away on dying media formats, and need preservation in order to keep them from fading away. The difference is that, for all the stink and fuss these fans are raising over their childhood versions rotting away... not a one of them is saying a peep about keeping my Star Wars, my unique cut of the film, from dissolving away into nothing. A film preservation buff would not say that, but we know the truth. My version has Greedo shooting first, so as long as those fans get their version, they wouldn't blink an eye if every copy of my version were lit on fire in a second.
My concern is not that the version of a space movie I liked is rotting away on VHS. My concern is the double standard at play here, the care only given to a specific version of the film that the oldheads saw back in 1977. All the other iterations are abominations in their eyes, and no care is given to their future. No care given to the kids of my generation who grew up on the special edition, or those Gen Z kids who would have grown up with the DVD copies. Did you know that there are actually like, three or four technical "versions" of the original Star Wars, with minute differences in the sound mix or other minor things? Even if you commercially released one version of unaltered Star Wars, that still leaves two other versions that people would have seen and aren't available. At what point do you draw the line here? It's not an easy question to answer, and I don't have the answer for it. It's not as simple as "just give me the unaltered version from when I was 6", and I won't pretend it's not.
There's another issue at play here, a simple question which popped into my mind at the heart of this maelstrom and would not leave me. For the time being, all those old Laserdiscs and VHS tapes of the unaltered trilogy still work. In addition, some talented and dedicated fans have gone in and crafted their own release of the unaltered Star Wars, using lots of sources and technical know-how to remaster and restore their version in gorgeous HD. That's genuinely lovely, and shows a real passion for this movie that I don't want to diminish. With all that said though, the question. The simple little question I have for those fans pleading with Disney to commercially release the unaltered trilogy.
Why do you need Disney to SELL THEM to you?
That's the other angle to approach the question of why we'd need Disney to sell the unaltered trilogy to us: the film preservation angle. Look, the original unaltered Star Wars is in the Library of Congress. George is not going to break in and replace the film reel with a Blu-Ray copy where the X-Wings are CGI now. The movie is, by literal official distinction, preserved by the US Government. That in itself should be enough to satisfy the "film preservation" argument, but perhaps you want copies you can actually watch. The tapes and files are out there. Hell, all the aforementioned nerds who restored the film in HD and spread the files? They're preserving it as well, albeit digitally and illegally. Also, like I said, if we're suddenly film preservationists with the added distinction that just saving it in a library isn't enough and we need a commercially released copy to save this original film? Well, by that logic, the other cuts get to come along too! How about that, the History Of Star Wars box set, with all four or five distinct cuts of the movie? Ah, but again, the type of Star Wars fan I'm talking about no likely seethes at the thought of Hayden Christensen's ghost in the end of Return Of The Jedi. All jokes aside, though... Are Star Wars fans and culture owed a commercially available HD remaster of the unaltered trilogy? It's a tricky question to answer beyond the scope of this increasingly lengthy screed, but the devoted fans have kind of made it moot. It's out there. Take it, if you must have it.
That still does not answer the burning question: what do we need Disney to sell us the movies for, if it's not for sole availability or for film preservation? You could answer that question in many ways, but I have one I'd like to close on. Is it fair to this fandom? Not really. Was this fandom fair to George when it called him all those heinous things and thus deserving of my mercy now? Beyond a shadow of a doubt, no. Here's where I think it stands, and it's entirely a subjective opinion: it's a need to win against George Lucas. George, who they so loved and whom they felt so betrayed by with the Special Editions and prequels. George, with whom they waged cultural war upon and slung unholy slurs at. To a fan like this, a commercially released unaltered trilogy, in crisp HD just as they remember it from when they were a child, would be the equivalent of a concession from George Lucas. It would be akin to stating that he was wrong for altering the movies, and that these fans were right all along in how they should be seen: in their original glory, just as the winners of the Star Culture War saw them when they were 6.
It's not fair of me to say that, but then, it's not fair to call George Lucas a fucking Holocaust denier for releasing a cut of the movie that you don't like, so pardon me if my sympathy has worn out near the end of this shit. I can tie all this back to Star Wars fans, though, in an objective manner of speaking. There's a clear-cut example of famous Star Wars fandom using this sort of logic, the idea of "winning" or "outsmarting" George Lucas by pointing out all his little flaws in his bad movies. That would be Red Letter Media and the Mr. Plinkett reviews. Like, for all that people held them up as this formative bit of criticism, finally expressing just what was wrong with those movies? Have you gone back and looked at one? It's just a string of pointing out narrative contrivances in a mumbling voice. That's not revolutionary cutting-edge critique to once and for all take George Lucas down a peg. That's goddamn CinemaSins level of obtuse nitpicking for the sake of smug superiority.
In the end, those fans didn't get what they wanted. In fact, they only got worse after George Lucas finally sold his franchise to Disney. There is a terrible blood-soaked path of fan entitlement and sheer toxicity that follows on from that decision in 2012 to the modern day. I cannot and will not walk it here. Not only is it outside the scope of my swirling maelstrom, but it's legitimately horrific. Horrific enough to drive one Star Wars fan I know away from the franchise for good. No fun space movie can be worth associating with this. I will, however, mention one terrible peek between my fingers that I discovered in doing this. I had to look up that video about Star Wars being saved in the edit, and its rebuttal. I discovered another video while doing this, I refuse to link it here, but I will tell you the title of the video. It is called "George Lucas Ex Wife DESTROYS Disney Star Wars & DEBUNKS Saved In the Edit". I admit I find the contradiction strange. On the one hand, the latter half of the title does what I and the rebuttal video essay have done, arguing against the narrative of Star Wars succeeding in spite of George Lucas. On the other, you have the clickbait dig against the Disney era, which has the same energy of trying to win at Star Wars opinions that I just made a theory about. You can find videos titled like that with one terrible cursory glance, and the smug superiority of their declaration is clear. "THIS PERSON DESTROYS DISNEY STAR WARS! THAT MEANS THAT I AM RIGHT FOR NOT LIKING IT! THAT MEANS THAT I WIN!!!".
I have tried to, pardon the pun, take the high ground and not stoop to the level of these fans. At the same time, I don't want to excuse them. A bunch of what I've written is just theory and scribbling, but at the heart of it is this horrible sense of fan entitlement. I do not want to excuse that in any way, so let it be known. I refuse to give any quarter to it. I refuse to let it stand without judgement. This is an exorcism, and so we're now faced with the beast itself, a putrefied slime in the shape of Star Wars' biggest fan. The scary thing is, there's a little of me in there too. Not in the sense of yelling at Star Wars, but of yelling in general. Of going hyperbolic about a bad Doctor Who, or when a utopian cartoon doesn't live up to its full potential. Mixing subjective opinion with objective truth is so easy to fall into, and I've done it a few times before and probably will again. On the other hand, I can say that I was never a bully, and never made such terrible claims as some of these fans do. All I can do is try to banish that part of myself into the past, to try and learn from it, and move on. I genuinely hope that, one day, the people up in arms about Star Wars can do the same. As it stands, though, I wash my hands of them and of these space movies... but part of their inspiration will always be a part of me.
Their Force will be with me. Always.
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