I had planned a slate of reviews including Inside Out, Sinbad, Shrek 2, and Shark Tale for you guys this July, but two things happened. One, I was horrifically sick. A chronically high fever, severe coughing fits and several trips to the local hospital had me unable to do much of anything for over a week (I had a friend uploading content for me). The other, was that I saw a film that deserved a look at from me a LOT earlier than I have seen it. I was unaware of this film's existence until I re-watched Mr. Plinkett's Star Wars reviews. This was a film that began to make me feel pity for someone I thought was devoid of pity. I actually began to take some of the criticisms I felt back of a man who had both created and ruined a masterful saga. But then I read up on and began to question some of the very "controversial" decisions George made and the disastrous circumstances he's wrought upon us. Now, with Star Wars and Indiana Jones out of his hands forever, I can take a good look at a time when the man who was once on top of the world, obliterated a large portion of his fanbase in the pursuit of making his films "better". Synopsis: This film takes fan perspectives of the career of filmmaker George Lucas from his lowly days as a rebellious teenager fixing engines in his garage, to the less than stellar early years of his career and following up with two of the biggest smash hits that this generation still gushes over: Star War: A New Hope and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It praised George and his innovations to both storytelling and technology while heavily drawing influences from outside works (such as fan fictions, fan films, and even South Park).
But most fans began to mistrust George when he began his extensive work "fixing" the films for their 1997 re-releases as "Special Editions". Most fans problems came from the pointless Jabba the Hutt scene in A New Hope (where all the information was given to us in that Greedo scene in the ORIGINAL FILM), and of course, the infamous edit where Greedo fires first in the cantina and misses.
But these fans couldn't stop watching and buying up the content and were overjoyed to wait hours in line for The Phantom Menace when that film came out in 1999. Any trust a majority of Star Wars fans had in Lucas was destroyed when the ruthless combination of Jake Lloyd, Jar Jar Binks, Midichlorians, and Senate Debates turned a film that was being deemed the savior of a generation into the most despised film of the saga (which is very unjustifiable IMO).
My Take: Where has this film been all my life? I have been fighting alongside thousands (maybe millions) of other Star Wars fans who have been begging for a film that had such a significant impact on me as a writer and a person to be treated with the same gloves that epics like The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, and Blade Runner have received. And I realize I have been kind of hard on George Lucas throughout my multiple reviews of Star Wars related content. It probably wasn't his fault entirely that the content in the Prequel Films and the Special Editions and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sucked so much. He had his vision, but was reluctant to allow others to dampen his vision with their ideas (Which is ironically what made The Empire Strikes Back the best film in the saga), but I understand I went a bit too far in my criticisms of a guy who was clearly not interested in this story as soon as he was scrutinized for Episode I.
With my apology to Lucas aside, I learned something in this film that I cannot allow to pass by my scrutiny. During his alterations of the Special Editions, apparently, George Lucas permanently altered the Original Negatives of the 1977 cut of A New Hope and has damaged them to such an extent that the film in it's original version cannot possibly be seen unless you transfer your VHS collection to DVD format or purchase the Laserdisc versions. And this came only 9 years or so after Lucas fought his crusade against Ted Turner and his desire to colorize black and white films of the 1920's and 1930's. In George's own words:
"In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to be lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten."
Wow. I mean...wow. How can anyone be this smart in 1988 and as STUPID as he was in the mid-90's? And George wasn't the only one editing and restoring their content at that time. Disney was restoring the original film versions of many films from 1988-1993, but Roy Disney swore up and down that he would never allow anything to happen to the negatives of any of the films made by Walt Disney and it seems he and the company have kept their words.
You guys need to understand this. The original negative of a film, is the film in it's most original and most pure form. If anything is altered in the negative, the negative can NEVER, and I mean NEVER be restored. If even one frame of the negative from a film like Snow White or Fantasia is destroyed, it's gone forever. This is why I think the restoration Disney has done for Fantasia is so noble, because so much of the content was destroyed and they were forced to redub over Deems Taylor's monologues before each musical piece. But George went and damaged the negative to such an extent, that:
"The negatives of the movies were permanently altered for the creation of the Special Editions, and all other existing prints of the first versions are in poor condition."
Not only that, but LucasFilm also sent this to Star Wars fans:
"...since these movies do not represent George's artistic vision, we could not put the extraordinary time and resources into this project as we did with the Special Editions."
So this means, that George could have done something about this, but was so set in his ways that he is the only one who could possibly understand this world that he flat out refused to do so, even though his company pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars each year in advertising and merchandising sales and movie releases. And people wonder why I hate this man so much...
It seems that all the fans want is the original films in their purest form, but George doesn't care what his fans do. That's like Justin Beiber going on the radio and saying all of his girl fans are sad and pathetic girls who are wasting time freaking out over a guy who would never be with them. Hopefully, now that Disney has captured the rights to these films, they can work with Fox to restore the Original Films as best as possible. Because the Original Trilogy is a work of art, and with A New Hope in the National Film Registry, I think it technically belongs to the public at this point. George had every physical right to do what he did, but absolutely no moral right to do what he did.
I was really surprised how many fans were so butthurt on both sides (the George supporters were especially comedic to listen to, but I digress). These people seem to have dedicated their lives to something that is just absorbing their money for their own narcissistic purposes. They are at this point no different than Democrats or Republicans in my eyes.
Final Thoughts: I could keep going and agree from top to bottom with the rants about Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear explosion in a refrigerator or all of my issues with The Phantom Menace, but I want to save my criticisms and such for the films themselves. The People Vs George Lucas is a film that I was very happy leaving as soon as I did, because it reminded me that he was just another human. Not a demon who tries to ruin good things, but also not a genius who revolutionized everything. He was just a guy with a plan and a dream. Nothing wrong with that. And nothing wrong with this flick :D
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