The Definitive Guide To George Lucas’ Insanity

4. The Star Wars Special Editions (1997)

George Lucas’ Role: Writer/Director

Addition of digitally-rendered dinosaur monsters? Check. Added CGI Jabba the Hutt scene? Check. Changing character motives to make them appear less badass? Check. Yes, this where the whole “Han Shot First” debacle first emerged, when George Lucas – with a whole bunch of time on his hands, presumably – decided to go back to the Star Wars trilogy and add and change and mess around with it for no reason.

Lucas’ rationale was that he wanted to make it clear to children that Han had no choice but to shoot Greedo. Who cares? Greedo was a douche, and he threatened Han a whole bunch of times. The man had good enough reason and besides, he’s the long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away equivalent of a drug dealer. Not exactly the most moral-obliged character ever.

Many people will say that since George Lucas owns and invented Star Wars he can do whatever the hell he likes with it, and that’s true to some extent. It’s his own property, at least, and the characters came out of his brain. But once you send a film out into the world and people pay money to see it, it’s not just your property anymore: it’s everyone’s. Messing with things that people adore is just wrong, something that master filmmaker Steven Spielberg later admitted to after CGI-ing E.T. up for a bit and swapping out FBI shotguns for walkie talkies:

“For myself, I tried [changing a film] once and lived to regret it. Not because of fan outrage, but because I was disappointed in myself. I got overly sensitive to [some of the reaction] to E.T., and I thought if technology evolved, [I might go in and change some things]…it was OK for a while, but I realized what I had done was I had robbed people who loved E.T. of their memories of E.T. […] If I put just one cut of E.T. on Blu-ray and it was the 1982, would anyone object to that? OK, so be it.”