I posted this over in Ady's ESB:R thread but as it's kind of off on a tangent, I re-started it as its own thread.
It started with the mention of the Falcon cockpit shots being cropped in tighter on the '04 discs to make it looked more cramped.
doubleofive said:
Something about Kersh building a new cockpit that wasn't as cramped as Lucas wanted (I think it was in Rinzler's ESB), so he must have decided to make it look smaller in 2004.Ripplin said:
Why would they even do something like that in the first place?
More and more I think there are three reasons why Lucas has gone wild trying to "dumb down" the OT and why the PT came out the way it did...
his kids.
He built up a family in the intervening years between the trilogies and in raising them, he probably got himself into the habit of talking down to them, having to simplify everything and make everything they encounter glaringly obvious instead of challenging them to put some thought into things. This attitude carried over to the films starting with the SE's in 97 and only got more extreme as the PT came together and he futzed with the OT more for the DVDs.
Hence, we get all this justification for "wanting" to zoom in the cockpit shots to make them look more cramped, "wanting" to show the Wampa, "wanting" to show Vader's shuttle bringing him back to the Executor, "wanting" Greedo to shoot first, "wanting" to show Jabba in ANH, and so on. I think that he doesn't really "want" to make these changes, but somewhere in his head he thinks he "needs" to change things to make the films easier for kids to understand. "I always wanted it that way" is an excuse that nobody can argue with him about, so that's what he goes with when someone challenges him because he's afraid to admit the truth in public.