“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.”
– George Lucas, 1988
In the years since he’s done a very good job of showing us why that’s a prospect to be feared.
Not that the Lucas of 1988 is inconsistent with the Lucas of 1997 and onward. Far from it. It’s more like an angel and a devil making the same point. (A bit like Palpatine masterminding both sides of a war, one might say.)