A New Despair: Musings on the Blu-ray Release of Star Wars

This piece was originally posted to the now-closed Castle Co-op on October 4, 2011.

Even if you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past month or so, beyond querying you on what kind of life situation has prompted you to go so far as to hide under a rock – and why the rock is large enough to hide you but hasn’t crushed you –  I’d still expect you to know that recently all six movies in the Star Wars Saga were released for the first time on Blu-ray Disc.

In Australia, September 14th 2011 was the day hundreds of thousands of voices cried out in terror and were expectedly and overwhelmingly ignored. Again.

There has been a lot of discussion and frustration expressed about George Lucas’s continued meddling with his, Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand’s films, often and in one recent example new to the Blu-ray set, altering the original intention and mood of beloved scenes. There is even a film about the love-hate relationship between Lucas and his fans called The People Vs. George Lucas.

But I would say, and this is certainly true for myself, the main frustration is not that changes are made, but that the original unaltered versions of these films are not made available along with their updated versions. Lucas is notoriously stubborn with regard to allowing the unaltered films to be released or seen, and even claimed at one point to have destroyed the films’ original negatives. (Which doesn’t actually mean that 35mm prints of the unaltered films don’t exist, by the way. Just go with it.)

However, the original and unaltered versions of the original trilogy of films were released on DVD in 2006 in individual sets coupled with the 2004 DVD release versions of each film, which everyone had already bought two years prior in a complete set with an extra bonus features disc. In the true childish spirit in which George Lucas must have felt forced to again release these versions of the films, they were non-anamorphic letterboxed widescreen for old 4:3 televisions (as opposed to anamorphic widescreen for 16:9 widescreen televisions) and were restored not one iota.

The image retained all manner of artifacts, dullness of colour and terrible black level consistent with Lucas’s apparent disdain for these versions of the films and his fans’ yearning for them, and the sound fared no better.

(I expect these were just sourced from the pre-1997 home video masters for VHS and/or laserdisc.)

So to celebrate the release of ‘The Complete Star Wars Saga’ on Blu-ray, I decided to sit down and watch this 2006 DVD release of the unaltered Star Wars.

It was, quite honestly, wonderful.

Despite crappy video quality and sound, this movie was comfortable. This movie was the classic. From beginning to end, I felt engrossed in Star Wars as I haven’t been since the mid-90s.

I discovered that the greatest damage to this film in recent versions is not actually altered intention such as when Han Solo, originally gunning down bounty hunter Greedo without giving the latter any chance to harm him and revealing a great deal about his character, instead kills Greedo in retaliation for firing first in an awkward display of computer-assisted tweaking. (Which isn’t to minimise this incredibly bothersome revision of a classic scene, nor any other examples sprinkled throughout the original trilogy of films.)

No, the greatest damage to this film is truly the random bursts of showy computer-generated imagery, often affecting the pacing of scenes and the flow of the movie.

These scenes break the movie. You are made acutely aware of the fact that this is a movie and that there are things happening that don’t belong in a movie that’s now thirty years old. It’s the antithesis of seamless.

I couldn’t even remember what it was like to not feel that subconsciously while watching Star Wars. I was able to just concentrate and let it take me where it was going. I got that feeling I used to have when I watched it as a child. I felt that connection to my childhood. Not because I was re-connecting with the film as I knew it years ago, but because I got the same feeling that I used to. Because the film worked. Because I wasn’t snapped out of it. Pulled out of it.

It’s difficult now, having resigned myself to no longer caring about the Star Wars Saga after purchasing the DVD set in 2004, to not get angry about the whole situation when for a while I was content with apathy.

This unaltered version of the film, with its crappy video and crappy sound, involved me way more than it has since that first “special edition” in 1997 and the 2004 revision with its pristine presentation and big, high-quality sound.

It makes me yearn for good restorations of the unaltered versions on Blu-ray, and it’s certainly solidified my decision to not buy the recent set.

Where Lucas’s head is at, I don’t know. He’s an extremely successful man surrounded now by a gaggle of awed employees who don’t know how to express a dissenting opinion. What that does to a person I’ll never know.

But I know that despite his feelings towards the unaltered films, he let them out again in 2006, relenting as lazily as he could to what must be great pressure from fans and film historians. Maybe he thought that’d get them off his back, but it didn’t. It most likely won’t, and maybe not even until his death.

I’ve seen pleas of reason, but maybe pressure, the kind of pressure that culminated in the 2006 releases, is really the only way to preserve this cultural icon.

That said, maybe it will just result in another low-quality throwaway release with next-to-no marketing, proving to Lucas again that no-one really cares about the theatrical versions.

But all of this has been said before. It’s a sentiment shared and echoed by a collective of people more numerous than seems reasonable. It’s not frustrating, it’s maddening. It defies any form of reason.

And now I care again.

God dammit.