auraloffalwaffle said:
No... and I hate the thing with Han walking over his tail... that was a terrible idea...

Yeah it was. It came from Han walking around him in the original footage, which would only have been possible with a human Jabba, not with a huge monster, proof that they originally planned to put Jabba on screen as human. Zombie84's Secret History of Star Wars site has an article about Jabba originally being meant to be human in the finished film despite official accounts claiming he was intended to be alien. But the walking around bit is my own observation.

auraloffalwaffle said:
TPM on the other hand... only 10 years down the line and it looks even more like a painfully average bit of sub-Disney-live-action-kids-movie-fluff than it did originally... the sporadic flashes of po-faced lightsabre weilding look all the more out of place now... adrift, as they are, in a sea of twee... SW77 was smart enough to inject a bit of fun and cynicism into the mix, in the form of Han Solo... he was the character everybody admired... not Luke or Obi-Wan... it's been said many times... the PT needed the smartness of a Han Solo in there for the 'straight' characters to work off... someone to cut through the pomposity with a well-delivered quip or flirtatious one-liner...

TPM is pretty fluffy. It's very lightweight. But despite that it still has more to it than the later two prequels, which just goes to show how bad they are.

Han was great. A definite contender for best Star Wars character. I once thought Darth Vader was the best, but the best are really Han and Leia, because the actors do such a great job bringing those characters to life.