You all may be familiar with the famous RocketJump video of their discussion as how “Star Wars was saved in the Edit” which painted a very specific narrative about Lucas and his editors, and how the editors basically saved Stat Wars, which wasn’t actually the case and is more complicated than the narrative told in the video.
Furthermore most of the claims made by RocketJump seem to have vague basis to actual truth, and the video itself is not all that objective of the information.
Just recently, I watched a video by “Nerdonymous” debunking some of the claims from RocketJump, and although the overall tone of the video seems to be a bit “ad hominem” in making fun of RocketJump, he actually makes fair points and assumptions based from sources such as Rinzler’s ebooks, Making-Of books and other material.
I suggest you guys to give it a watch, its 2-hours long (mostly due to the editing of how Nerdonymous likes to hone in on RocketJump’s use of words) but its worth a watch:
EDIT: Upon further watching of this video, although Nerdnonymous did point out some inaccuracies and errors in the way RocketJump simplified certain event lines and general misinformation, they are few and far between the amount of actual ad hominem that he constantly does and the amount of contradiction he makes to the point of hypocrisy in terms of misrepresenting information, I think the video dives moreso on mocking the channel, rather than actually providing an objective, unbiased view of the video itself.
I shouldn’t have made this thread while watching the video, as I first made it within like 10 minutes of his 2-hour long rant when he actually brought up a point of the mix-up of RocketJump and J.W Rinzler’s information of Brian De Palma’s involvement in the creation of the crawl, and which crawl was which in the shooting script, third and fourth drafts and the final version. The further I went on in the video, the more confused I became, especially as he tried to convince the audience about how the “Rough Cut” was better than the Theatrical cut, because that was Lucas’ vision, but that isn’t the case apparently because it was edited wrong and the final version is Lucas’ Vision?
He also tries to defend the deleted scenes, and only apart from the conference scene, which only kinda vaguely works in introducing the Force first before Obi-Wan does it, the majority of his opinions are wrapped up in layers of contradiction solely to belittle RocketJump and make him look wrong at every turn.
On the topic of who “really saved Star Wars” it is a complicated question to answer in and of itself, as every producer, editor, propsman, could’ve helped in contributing in the success and/or failure of this experimental sci-fantasy film and was a combination of Lucas, the editors, the producers, and even the actors themselves on fixing the wooden dialogue on the script, that Star Wars became… Star Wars.