I pity Lucas. He was once a great and promosing filmmaker. SW was an excellent film, and watching it, you know the man behind the camera had that special something that all the great filmmakers have. Watching documentaries where we see a young Lucas shooting SW, we see a filmmaker that has a passion and an affinity for making movies, and telling stories, and he has lots and lots of potential. Skip ahead to ROTJ. A good ending to a great trilogy. Not an excellent ending, but satisfying, kind of like a McDonalds double cheeseburger. You know if you went to Burger King and got a double cheeseburger from them, it would be much better, the McDonalds cheeseburger is good enough. But how did the man who made the excellent Burger King Cheesburger end up making the McDonalds one...in six short years, he began losing his flair.

And then, in 1997, there's the Special Editions. We could tell Lucas was losing his heart of a filmmaker with ROTJ, but the special editions shown that he had really lost it. He obviously did what he thought best with those Special Editions, but its nothing the public, or Star Wars fans, really liked or enjoyed. A good filmmaker knows what the public loves, and delivers it. George Lucas made SW in 1977, and it was a film the public ate up, and made legions of fans. The SE got rid of many legions of fans. How? Lucas lost the heart of a filmmaker, and replaced it with something else. This was proved in concrete with the prequels. Yes, the public may be impressed with flashy visuals and lots of (cheesy) action, but give them something really fun, really good, like the original SW, and they will LOVE it. They won't just be entertained for a few hours, and forget the experiance the next day, it will stick with them, and they'll want to experiance it over and over. People wanted to experiance SW over and over, because it stuck with them, but few truly had that experiance with the prequels. Some may explain it with the old line "You can't strike gold twice," but a good filmmaker, a filmmaker with that filmmaker's heart, does. He doesn't strike gold twice. He strikes it over and over and over and over, until the end. Sometimes you miss, but in the end, those misses don't matter because of all the gold.

We're at the tenth anniversary of the SE. Of course, I think of 30th anniversary, but Lucas is probably thinking tenth, thinking that the SE is the true versions, that the original was just work in progress, yadda yadda yadda...and it makes me pitty him. Alot. For someone with so much potential to lose sight of that filmmaker's heart is sad. Like CO said, Lucas broke up Star Wars fans into a bunch of different sects. It's not just sad, it's funny, in a twisted sort of way.