Originally posted by: Sokudo Ningyou
I'm just laughing at the fact they felt the need to re-edit the bloody crawl to look "more like a block" and to not end a paragraph with one word. Honestly. That's just effing petty in comparison to the other changes.

Seriously, the single word last lines is what I hate most about the crawls, it isn't petty at all, it is just a very basic graphic design and typography principle. Removing them meant the crawls were actually easier to read, lines weren't wasted and it removes a distraction for the viewer (while it is a huge distraction to me, it is still a distraction to people who have no design sense at all, they just aren't aware of it). I work as a graphic designer on an international magazine and the most time I spend on the articles is to remove those lines (either by modifying the spacing in large paragraphs to take away the line or add words to the line to even it out or in small paragraphs getting the editor to actually modify the text).

Even with that change though the crawl is still a terrible example of good typography, spacing is all over the place and the new right justified ellipsis on the last defies logic.

But, most importantly, you need to know that this change wasn't made because someone decided it had to be done (and that this wasn't a Special Edition change). The entire crawl had to be remade by hand for the 1981 re-release just to add the Episode IV - A New Hope lines, they couldn't just paste that onto their existed elements at the time. So, since it all had to be done by scratch again anyway maybe whoever re-did it thought they could space it out better this time; plus, as has already been pointed out, since they added lines, they had to also remove them to keep the crawl in time with the music. Well, they didn't have to, they could have sped it up, but considering most young children have enough trouble keeping up with it at the moment (especially on non-widescreen versions) it wouldn't have been the smartest thing to do (and it would have added another inconsistency between the two movies at the time.