What got me was the release of the SE on DVD, without an original version being available on DVD. As an archivist, I thought this was beyond disappointing. When I saw how much better a lot of the restored footage is on DVD vs on laserdisc (the detail is stunning) it made me even more sad.
It would have been so easy to also include the original scenes as they were, even just from a documentary perspective (This is the original scene, and this is how we changed it).
Now of course they are his films and he can do what he likes. But like it or not, they became part of a public conciousness and changed a lot of people's lives and burned themselves into a lot of peoples memories.
Just like a particular song becomes entwined with important moments in your life, so do some films. The difference is that all those songs got released and mostly remastered onto CD for you still to enjoy and tweak your memory etc. A lot of those old songs got remade, r covered by other artists, and are arguably better than the originals, and in some cases are probably closer to what the artist intended than what they released originally.
That doesn't change the fact though that you probably still love the original tune, with all its faults, because *that* version is what was playing when you fell in love, won the game, saw your child walk for the first time.
The star wars movies are the only case I can think of where the 'cover version' or 'improved' version is the only version available, and the original is not available on the same medium. It doesn't happen in music, in print or anything else I can think of.
The big tragedy is it wouldn't have cost a lot of extra time or effort to do, and would've been a nice reward to the hard core fan base that filled his pockets when he needed it most.
/begin rant/
But its our fault, we put up with it, and (sorry) lame online petitions aren't going to change anything.
Organising 2000 people to march for it in San Rafael at the outskirts of the ranch might change it: - if all 67,000 people on the online petition wrote a REAL PAPER LETTER each and posted it, *in the same month* - it might change things (one complaint letter = about 1,000 emails in the real world, they know you are serious when it is in writing and arrives in the mail en masse).
If we got 100 people to line up at each and every EPIII premiere with identical protest t-shirts on and then refuse to enter the cinema when they open the doors... who knows.... it would get media coverage, journalists would try to ask Gerogie boy about it, the message may even get through.....
But we are all too lethargic to take a *serious* amount of time out and take real action. So we complain to each other, make ourselves feel better and take action in the least likely to succeed ways, and just make our own versions.
*SIGH*
/end rant/