DuracellEnergizer said:

Because everything has to be constantly updated to stay "modern" and "kewl" so as to measure up to the ever-diminishing standards of whatever age happens to be "modern" and "kewl" at the moment.

I guess by 3415, the OT will have to receive ultraviolet colour grading ('cause we'll have genetically modified ourselves to see ultraviolet light), all the female characters will have to have digital mustaches painted onto their faces ('cause it will be fashionable for women to wear mustaches in the 3400s), and new scenes with Han and Chewie in an interspecies romance will have to be shot and inserted into the existing footage ('cause not only will we have made first contact with aliens by this time, we'll have taken to screwing them as well).

I didn't say everything has to be updated. But many of those changes work well, and if you're not hyper-nostalgic you can notice that.

towne32 said:

Slask and his TFN comrades are as much stuck in 1997 as we are in 1977, then. Unless you count a Jabba model constructed in ~1999 and a couple seconds of a Dug.

Nope. I don't like 1997 versions.