- Post
- #632997
- Topic
- Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
- Link
- https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/632997/action/topic#632997
- Time
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
davextreme said:
Just to play devil's advocate slightly, I think the whole thing would not be an issue if the SE had been done tastefully from the start. If all it had been was cleaning up some continuity errors and doing some touch ups I doubt anyone would have gotten worked up.You may be right, but to not preserve and make available the originals would still be wrong, regardless of whether or not a lot of people notice.
But allow me to play a different devil's advocate... I think that one of the reasons that so many people are concerned, is rooted in the fact that the changes were made 20 years later. Had the changes been made 2 or 3 years later (say, in 1979), they would have been viewed by most as creative tweaks. The fact that they were made 20 years later is what is so unprecedented and what also makes the changes so glaringly out of place.
It is hard to imagine any change made 20 years after-the-fact that could possibly be appropriate or relevant. 1997 is a very different time and place in moviedom than 1977. To wit, if George had made tweaks in 1979, they would likely have been very different tweaks than the ones he made in 1997... even if the technology of the late 1990s were available to him. This is evidenced by the change to Han's character with respect to him shooting first -- acceptable in 1977, not acceptable in 1997. This is why it is so dangerous to change movies: in so doing you lose your window to the past.
I don't disagree with any of this and this thread derailment has probably gone on long enough. Clearly there's no scenario where the original shouldn't have also been restored properly and released, even in a world with a less outrageous SE. The problem was never that George shouldn't be allowed to mess with the movie, just his attempts to suppress the original.