I read your article on WIRED and since I’m not sure where else to post this I thought I may as well do this here.
Most of your article is actually good and informative. However, one thing from it honestly rubs me the wrong way: “Then, when the film does return to Jedi’s main heroes and their celebration, their scenes together are cut to ribbons, shifting focus to the main characters of the prequels: Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Yoda. Shots of the protagonists of this trilogy hugging and smiling at one another are gone, replaced by ghosts from other movies.”
What?
Which version of the special edition did you watch? Certainly not one that actually exists. I’m curious to see whatever alternate universe version of the end of Return of the Jedi you watched. None of the main characters of the original trilogy had their scenes cut in the ending. A couple shots were shortened by a couple seconds to fit with the new music and nothing more. It’s not even noticeable at all. They literally ADDED a shot with Wedge, an original trilogy character, so there is no way you can actually say they tried to remove the original trilogy characters from the ending. They were not “cut to ribbons” at all. And what do you mean “shifting the focus to the prequel characters” and “replaced by the ghosts”? The ghosts literally had more screen time in the original version of the movie then in the special edition. You’re acting like they gave the force ghosts a ton of new screen time when they didn’t. They still only appear for a grand total of three shots. What you’re saying would be like if they cut the shot of Luke and Leia reuniting and replaced it with one of Anakin and Obi-Wan reconciling, which didn’t actually happen. Most of the scene still focuses on the original trilogy characters. I seriously don’t understand how you got this impression. Your point was already very well made, you didn’t need to exaggerate anything to support it even more.
Also it seems that you don’t ever acknowledge that the changes could have multiple purposes. You say everything was just for the sole purpose of practice for the prequels while not realizing that maybe it was killing two birds with one stone: making changes George wanted to make while also allowing to test new techniques. If they actually didn’t care about the original films at all, why would they fix up some of the garbage mattes, redo the wipes, revamp the sound mix, and do every other change that objectively improved the films?
