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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The original, unaltered Star Wars trilogy is rumored to be re-released this year to mark the 40th anniversary of A New Hope. While fans have speculated for years that George Lucas will finally release the first edits of the iconic 1977, 1980 and 1983 films to the public in a variety of formats, a concrete announcement appears imminent. Numerous industry sources have informed fan site Making Star Wars that the original edits are on their way. This is a big deal for diehard fans, many of whom argue the versions they saw in cinemas during the late 70s and early 80s are far superior to the versions later released to the public.
[...] The 40th anniversary of A New Hope occurs on May 22.
Source: http://thathashtagshow.com/2017/02/unaltered-original-star-wars-trilogy-released-year/
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:00PM
Why alter the films in the first place? The most famous alteration was changing the scene with Han and Greedo to be "nicer": in the original, by having Han shoot only after being shot at. However, that's only one of many changes [wikipedia.org]. Most of those changes were pointless, a few add a bit of scenery, big deal... Better to get on with new projects, than to continually fiddle around with old ones. Maybe we could have gotten JarJar out of the way a couple of decades earlier...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @06:05PM
Some of the alterations like changing the sequencing on Han shooting Gredo, make no sense. But, a lot of them are fixes to things that probably should have been done correctly to begin with. For example, the cardboard cut outs at the end of Episode IV and the various scenes where the lightsaber effects weren't right.
The real issue more than anything else is that George didn't restrict himself to just fixing things, he also did things like having Gredo shoot first and adding sound effects to the storm trooper hitting his head that had the effect of changing the interpretation of the films.
Most of the lesser changes aren't ones that people generally notice unless they're ueber-nerds, but changing the structure of the film results in inconsistency between the memories that people have of watching the films and what they have available.
I'd be surprised if Disney doesn't put out both this version and the latest version that George had finished with and make both available on some sort of regular edition. Unfortunately, because so many people saw the newer versions first, we're likely stuck with them in the same way that we're also stuck with the theatrical versions even though they had warts that shouldn't have been there.