I haven’t seen the whole video and don’t plan on doing so today, because it’s 4 AM in my time zone and I don’t want to commit myself to staying up past 6 just to watch one video. I probably will tomorrow. I’d also have to watch RocketJump’s original video too, it’s one of those videos that’s always been in my recommendations but I’ve never seen. But the first few minutes give me red flags, mainly the format of the video. It’s incredibly common for the “let the original play, and then pause and make some comment” format to be used downright dishonestly.

As far as I watched (not that far) I didn’t notice anything that seemed (to me) outright dishonest, but it also didn’t put my concerns to rest. For one, the first few minutes complaining about how RocketJump talked about the unfinished state of the early cut shown to Spielberg seems to try and make RocketJump look dishonest by intentionally missing the point of the segment in their video: That being most people in the audience aren’t exactly familiar with movie development and might need more information on what Star Wars was like in this stage. But to be fair to Nerdonymous, it isn’t strictly necessary and Nerdonymous is technically correct. It’s also possible that there’s context I’m missing where this segment is a lot worse than I think, but if that’s the case, Nerdonymous isn’t giving us that context.

I’ll watch this tomorrow with an open mind, because while George Lucas’s revisionism is pretty awful, it’s just as awful that a lot of fans in the late 2000s and early 2010s swung so hard in the other direction. Given that the idea that Star Wars was saved in the edit became common knowledge (or maybe, became incorrectly taken for granted) around that time, I’d rather hear him out and not be part of the problem.