I like how south park put it. You made them, gave them to us, released them out. We watched them over and over, they became part of our lives, who we are, core memories. In essence Lucas may own the rights, but in a different way the public owns the movies now, they've become a core part of our society.

I forget the original quote from them, but essentially Lucas should be happy we've taken public ownership of them, happy something he created has a literal impact on society. Instead we have a petulant child who is upset his fans did something amazing

they really aren't very good films

Depends on the measuring stick, I'd say.

On some, sure, might fall short. On others, it blows most other movies out of the water.

I agree with the sentiment of your last sentence.

Franklin Veaux (author) said words to this effect on Quora: Your book and your characters may be your baby, but when you release them to the world, they are now no longer under your control. They are subject to whatever interpretation your readers use and assign to them. You may have created them, but now they've grown up and moved out. Let it go.

Personally, I think it's because he wants to erase the contribution of his ex-wife Marcia Lucas. He's just that petty.

you can't understand that people like your movie as it was originally created

George Lucas has said in the past that he had bigger plans for the original film(s), but the technology to pull it off didn't exist yet. So he had to make do with what effects he could. He even invented many film effects for the original trilogy, creating his own visual effects studio to pull it off.

In the '90s, he realized CG technology had advanced enough that he could finally fill in the gaps that he couldn't do back in the '70s, and so he released the Special Edition trilogy, which he considered the final and complete masterpiece.

Of course, a lot of people had experienced 2 decades of the original Star Wars trilogy by that point, so adding changes now seemed like inappropriately extending what was already considered a masterpiece.

George Lucas was never satisfied with his films anyway. He kept changing the story, even as they were filming, and it was purely by accident that they ended up being a massive hit. (Which is probably why his prequel trilogy was so hated by fans) I remember reading once that his original plot starred Luke Starkiller, and Leia was supposed to be General Organa and not related to Luke. Also, Luke was originally supposed to fall to the dark side and become the new villain, replacing Darth Vader. Mark Hamill was excited about that twist, until it was changed for a happier ending. He would later go on to play villains in other films, being famously known as the voice of Joker from Batman The Animated Series.

Also, I watched a documentary on VHS back in the early '90s where George Lucas laid out his plan for a 9-movie series. The first trilogy would be about the crumbling of the Galactic Republic, then the second trilogy would be about rebel forces fighting against the new Empire, then the final trilogy would be about rebuilding the Galactic Republic.

But George Lucas thought it would be boring watching 3 whole films about a government slowly collapsing, so he decided to jump into the meat of the conflict and start with the middle trilogy. It was a wild success, even if the plot kept changing as he was filming, and so when he got to the prequel trilogy, he decided to make it about one of the biggest characters from his original trilogy - Vader. Which changed the focus of the prequel films and made them less boring than just a series about space politics, but not nearly as interesting as his original trilogy.

Star Wars fans are a pretty contentious bunch, and the hate for the prequel series caused George Lucas to give up his dream of making 9 films. He eventually sold the franchise to Disney, who immediately started up their own sequel trilogy, plus a ton of spinoff TV series. And it's been pretty strange since then. Episode 7 was basically a modern remake of episode 4, to draw back the fans of the original trilogy. Then Rian Johnson was given the reins for Episode 8, and he hated seeing the same cast of characters in every Star Wars film, so he tried to branch out away from familiar faces. It didn't go well, so Episode 9 shoe-horned in as many familiar characters and stories as it could, to win back fans. The whiplash between films made for a pretty awful and disjointed series.

Personally, I'm on board with the idea that the original trilogy (in it's unedited state) is the ONLY Star Wars series. The rest, I just consider to be non-canon fan films. There's so much that could've been done to add onto the original series. And even the official book series (before Disney marked them as non-canon) had great additions to the plot. But then we got a prequel series about the biggest badass in the galaxy... and it turns out he's just a whiny brat who's manipulated into being a bad guy. Then the sequel series was all over the place. And the spinoff TV shows have been hit-or-miss. So yeah, I consider them all non-canon, including George's Special Edition. And I look forward to seeing the original unedited trilogy in 4K one day.

Hell I’m sure a lot of those people would buy both versions.

My wallet is ready!

Do you have a source? Because I can't really find anything that has not been posted in the last day. People making 4k copies in 2010 sounds ambitious.

That weird walk Han does around Jabba in the additional scene kills me.

That's it - I'd not watch the original edition exclusively but I'd like the option of watching the films I saw in the cinema when I was a kid. I won't be buying the OT on Blu-ray until then.

Imagine Jackson Pollock making his art unavailable and replacing it with polka dots and pinstripes and expecting the same respect. Or Picasso embarrassed of his cubism phase and making his art unavailable and replacing it with realism and saying "these are my paintings, get over it".

This is perhaps the best analogy for what he’s doing that I’ve seen. The only thing I could add is that for creative projects like movies (or books, paintings, sculptures, etc.), especially ones you are trying to release and get paid for, at some point you have to stop yourself from making tweaks or adjustments to the product and decide it’s good enough to release, because there will probably always be something you think can be better or you just aren’t sure you’ve chosen the best option. In fact, the longer you look at it, the more likely you are to second-guess even correct choices you’ve made because you’ve stared at it for so long.

The other thing a creative person needs to do once it’s released is to let it go. You can’t go back and keep second-guessing yourself. You also can’t look back 20 or 30 years later and think with all the experience you’ve gained in the intervening years or the new tools that are now available you could do it so much better. Accept it for what it is, a product of that era and that stage of your career. And there’s no guarantee that the new tools or experience will actually yield a better product. Sometimes the limitations force us to be more creative and the solutions end up being better than if we had no challenges.

I was initially unsure of your analogy, ready to disagree. But continued reading to see where you were going.

As a car buff, yea, it's a great comparison. I really do prefer the original modified version of a car... Sometimes the re-do of a mod is too perfect, lacks something, part of it's character is gone.

There's something about the older, imperfect version. Where the shifter didn't work perfectly, so grabbing third had to be done "just so".

It leaves room for me, the human element - just like "imperfect" special effects leaves room for human imagination to fill the gaps.

Adding more ships to the space combat scenes was a good thing. As for the rest, yeah, could do without it.

as a writer/artist/performer - I disagree with Lucas. There are many parts at which each artist - whether actor, scene painter, LX, director or producer has to relinquish their control over their work and let it be.

It's more commonly heard in theatre: the tradition of opening night being the point where the director relinquished control and now it's the actors show is very passionately held. If things go wrong and need fixing then the Stage Manager steps in, but otherwise it's no longer the directors purview.

In film the director over sees editing and may even have a hand in distribution- but once an audience sees it - it's now the directors work (past tense) and - regardless of capitalistic machinations w/r/t copyright, licensing, distribution- the art (present tense) now only exists in the reception of the audience, as you can't experience a movie without watching it - therefore the act of watching the movie is the experience of the movie - therefore it is the audience's domain.

They'll be in the public domain for infinity years, which is more than creator lifetime + xxx years. Works wanting copyright protection must be forced to submit copies to a permanent archive.

The DVDs are niceish, I bought them when they came out too. But they're the same copy from when they made the LaserDiscs a decade before and not super great quality, even for DVD.

It's.... odd, that a movie with as much cultural impact as Star Wars you can't view the version that created that impact in high quality.