I dont have time to write it, but is there a short summary of George Lucas's actions suppressing his films?
I want to include it in my handouts for "Intro to Film" I'm teaching. I'm looking for something 300-600 words.
Any ideas?
I think the summary on savestarwars.com is pretty good.
"Close the blast doors!"
Puggo’s website | Rescuing Star Wars
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
I think the summary on savestarwars.com is pretty good.
Me= "Duh".
So, two classes worth of High school students will no be exposed to the concepts of film preservation via George Lucas's bizarre obsessions.
In the context of film preservation, you could discuss what "our streaming future" means, if that grants the rightsholders the ability to alter their films on a whim, and consumers no longer have physical copies to fall back to.
i.e. imagine how much worse the Star Wars purge would have been if Lucas had the ability to overwrite all our private Laserdisc and VHS collections with the Special Editions.
I thought this would be a new TV series Lucas was producing.
"Today George will be snatching candy out of a toddler's hands. Let's go live to the scene, are you there, George?"
There's really only two main things I would emphasize.
First off, there was the major alteration of the movies through the use of technology that didn't exist when they were originally shot and released (something that, to the best of my knowledge, was unprecedented in 1997).
Going off of that, you could go into how Lucas stopped labeling the SE as the SE, first with the 2000 vhs set and then the 2004 dvd (which was technically a further altered version).
Secondly, I would bring up the release of the GOUT and all of the problems it entailed, not the least of which was George going back on his "This is it" stance regarding the SE.