Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman have been having a lot of fun with the story about Dan Rather. Your host having nothing unique to contribute to that discussion, we'll talk about that greatest doctoring of culturally significant texts to happen this year, the release today of DVDs purporting to contain the original Star Wars trilogy.
SC has taken shots at Episodes I and II before, both here and elsewhere. Let's take a few more before going on. How are Episodes I and II different from the collected oeuvre of Ed Wood? I count at least three ways. First, one body of work represents a filmmaker's serious attempts to muster all the creative and financial resources at his disposal to produce genuinely entertaining films, if not great art. The other group is the latest set of entries in the Star Wars universe. Second, even if Wood's movies were terrible, at least his life story resulted in a terrific film, something that will never be the case for George Lucas (unless the film pretends he died in 1985). Third, no matter how bad an actor Tor Johnson was, he showed a wider range of sincere emotions than Hayden Christensen. Vampira is similarly better than the utterly talentless Natalie Portman. It's enough to make SC want to throw in with the Empire.
That said, your host will probably see Episode III in its first week of release, same as the last two.
But as was hinted at the beginning of this post, SC considers Lucas' greatest artistic crime to be the new DVDs; the latest movies are dismissable as merely an exercise in toy sales, fast food marketing, etc. Of course, the reasonable reader might object that, since the movies weren't released until today, there's no way that SC has had a chance to see them, and this rant must be based on hearsay. That's not entirely off the mark, although the "Special Edition" films were a preview of the problems to come. But for a lot of other information, SC will be working off of this review, which agrees almost perfectly with his editorial stance.
Now, were the changes restricted to the original Special Edition cleanup of artifacts induced by '70s technology -- and the already-disturbing historical rewrites of that time -- SC would not be complaining. The original Star Wars was famous for introducing Dolby Surround as a viable format after quadraphonic sound had died; remixing the soundtrack to showcase Dolby Digital and THX is true to that spirit of innovation. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Truth Lucasfilm has chosen to engage in a wholesale erasure and rewriting of history that will be intolerable until everyone who knows better is dead (just 70 more years, George!).
One early -- and annoying -- revision of the plot of the original Star Wars had the simultaneous effects of both eliminating the maturation of Han Solo and making the movie even more implausible than it already was. This hasn't changed. What has changed is the relentless editing out of actors and voices from the originals to make the people from the new films appear to have been part of the entire history all along. Thus, Temuera Morrison's voice has been dubbed in as Boba Fett's, even though he wasn't cast as Fett's father until some 30 years after the first films were made. Ian MacDiarmid's face has been digitally substituted into places where it never was before (although, in fairnes, he actually was the Emperor in part of the first go-round). Gungans -- read: Jar Jar Binks -- have been inserted into the already overdone celebration at the end of Return of the Jedi. And most despicably, the insufferable Hayden Christensen's face has been placed where Sebastian Shaw's was as the ghost of Anakin Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi. This is wrong. Darth Vader is the scariest villain in the history of the universe. Hayden Christensen is a whiny little punk. SC knows Darth Vader, and Hayden Christensen is no Darth Vader.
This behavior can be defended as merely editing the films to conform to Lucas' original artistic vision. Darth George has made exactly this argument himself. But aside from updating the special effects, much of the tinkering is merely done for the sake of being different, not better, as the list of audio tweaks mentioned in Alexandra DuPont's review suggests. Worse, though, is the idea that continuity is represented by simply pasting in the last set of faces. It would be like going back and editing We Don't Want a Doctor (if you don't get the joke, click here and read the 7th bullet point) to show Pierce Brosnan everywhere that Sean Connery appeared. Bond fans have no difficulty seeing them both as James Bond; why, oh why, do we need to see Hayden's face everywhere to think Anakin Skywalker? (Then again, maybe SC should be thankful they didn't try to fit Jake Lloyd in instead.)
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