I’ve had a couple of people ask me when I intend to pick up the new Star Wars Trilogy DVDs that came out last week. Honestly, I’m not sure I’m going to, for a number of reasons. That surprises a lot of people, especially those who have known me for a long time and know that my basement is full of all kinds of fascinating junk that bears the SW logo. It surprises me, too, actually. I never thought there’d come a day when I wouldn’t be the first in line for any new Star Wars product. But then a lot has happened in the SW scene during the last seven years, and I now find, to my great surprise, that I’m more excited about buying the new collector’s edition of Footloose than I am the Trilogy box set. (I’ll discuss my reasons for loving that silly little ’80s relic some other time.)

Basically my hesitation boils down to three issues:

1. The Fan-boy Holy Wars, as I like to call them, have drained much of my enthusiasm for the whole pop-culture obsessive-fan scene in general. I’m talking about the non-stop arguing and flaming and disparagement and general snarkiness that has infested inter-fan relations since the rise of the World Wide Web. I leaped wholeheartedly into the online fan community when I first gained access to the Internet, but the anonymity of message boards and blogs have made it very easy for people to behave very badly, and it’s gotten tiring. Basically, it’s just no damn fun to talk about this stuff anymore because you’re always afraid you’re going to get into a fight. And the fights, of course, revolve around what you think of the latest Star Wars products, Episodes I and II. And even though I try to maintain some degree of rationality about the prequels…
2. Disappointment over the inferior (but not totally awful) prequels has colored my perspective on the original films, as much as I’ve struggled not to let that happen. It doesn’t help that Uncle George is continuing to tinker with the originals in an effort to make them fit with prequels visually and thematically. Which leads me to the biggest issue…
3. I am angry with George Lucas for not giving consumers a choice about which Star Wars we buy.

To explain, there are now three distinct versions of the original trilogy (well, technically there are a couple more versions as well, at least of the original film — I refuse to call it Episode IV: A New Hope, by the way — but as far as what’s been released on home video, we’ve got three.) There’s the original theatrical version of the films, the ones that we’ve all seen a million times, which I like to think of as the Unf**ked-With Editions. Then there’s the 1997 “Special Editions” (known in my home as the Not-So-Special Editions). And now we’ve got the 2004 DVD Editions, which have been altered over and above the work that was done in ’97. If you don’t know the films well enough to tell what’s changed, just hop on over to TheForce.Net; it won’t take you long to find a detailed list.

Now, the argument has been boiling since ’97 over who should control these films, G. Lucas or the fans. Lucas and his defenders contend that he created them, he literally owns them (he bought the copyrights from 20th Century Fox years ago), and he should be free to modify them if they no longer please him. Many artistic and literary precedents are cited to defend this argument and I concede that there is a good point to be made there.

However, I think you can make an equally strong case that certain films, books, songs, or other artworks transcend the ownership of any one person (or corporation) when they achieve such a degree of popularity that they become an integral part of our culture. The original Star Wars trilogy has become, in many respects, the mythology of an entire generation. We drop bits of its dialogue into our everyday conversation, everyone of a certain age can tell the story of when they first saw the films, and even non-fans can easily identify characters or ideas from the Trilogy. Hell, Ronald Reagan even appropriated the name for his Strategic Defense Initiative, and he never had to explain what he meant. I think any kind of art work deserves to be preserved in the form that most people remember it.

Ironically, Lucas himself agrees with me… at least when it comes to the movies he grew up on. He has spoken out against the unutterable vileness that is colorization, and he, along with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and others, has sank a lot of money into preserving and restoring historic films.

But not his own films. Not American Graffiti, which now boasts a digitally-enhanced and entirely unnatural-looking sunset. Not the little-seen THX-1138, just released on DVD in a new “George Lucas Director’s Cut.” And not the original Star Wars Trilogy, for which George (in interviews) often seems to feel nothing but contempt. And I simply cannot understand his attitude. Where did he acquire this boneheaded double standard that lets him say, with a straight face, that it’s a crime to colorize The Three Stooges but the fanboys should just shut up and let him continue to mangle Star Wars with modern visual effects that do not fit in with what he did thirty years ago?

It’s not that I’m opposed to “director’s cuts,” at least not in principle. But I very rarely like them as well as the original version. I will admit that I prefer the Extended DVD Editions of the Lord of the Rings films, but this is the only example I can think of where I actually like the altered version more. More frequently, my reaction is mixed, as with the director’s cut of Blade Runner, which improves on the original in some ways, but is worse in others. Same with the recent DC of Alien.

Most of the time, I absolutely hate the DC. For example, Apocalypse Now Redux is a bloated monstrosity that should be burned. (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning… smells like… revisionism…”) I’m glad I bought the DVD of the original cut before ANR bumped it off store-shelves.

And that is the crux of my problem with DCs in general, and with the Star Wars situation in particular: the new revised version almost always replaces the original version. That’s just not right, especially now when technology allows you to easily provide the consumer with both. Once in a while, the directors and film studios recognize that fact, as with the above-mentioned Lord of the Rings trilogy. I prefer the extended versions, yes, but the theatrical cuts are also available, and between Anne and myself, I’ve got easy access to both. Even better is when multiple versions are offered in one convenient package, such as James Cameron’s The Abyss, which offers two versions of the film through a technology called “seamless branching” (unfortunately this technique isn’t used much, especially since DVD went mainstream and demand drove the prices down) or Spielberg’s E.T., which gives us the original, undigitally-enhanced version on one disc and the ’02 tinkered version on a second disc. That’s how Star Wars should be, too.

I’d love to sit down with George at a Starbucks and say, “Look, man, it’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do with this digital revolution and all. I get that digital is the future, and that you’re the ultimate independent filmmaker who only wants to ‘perfect’ your vision. I’m cool with you tinkering all you want on your old films, for as long as you want. Churn out as many different versions of the same old films as you’d like to produce. I’ll be more than happy to give them a spin and see what you’ve come up with. But look, I love the old, too. I, and thousands of ‘old school’ fans like me, will always love the films we saw as kids more than any modernized, digitized, enhanced, massaged, extended edition. There’s a principle here, and it’s one your buddy Steve recognized with E.T. He saw that us fans have made both of you guys unbelievably wealthy, given you the opportunity to do the things you’re trying to do, bought and re-bought the same damn films, over and over again, as each new home video format has emerged. We’ll buy the new stuff, too. You know we will. But we’d like to ask in return that you throw in an extra disc with our shabby, old, unenhanced, state-of-the-1970s-art FX, Han-shoots-first, no-Jabba-scene, no-plasma-ring-around-the-Death-Star, low-grade, low-budget version that we’ve always loved. I know you’re an artist and you think you didn’t get it right back in ’77. But you did, man, you freakin’ did.”

Based on recent interviews I’ve read, George would probably tell me to blow it out my exhaust port. No doubt he’s gotten a lot of crap from rabid fanboys over the past few years, and no doubt that’s gotten really old for him. But his response to that criticism has been… unfortunate. He seems to have decided that purists like myself are misguided, and he appears to feel more contempt for us than he does for the films he made in his youth. When he says that he’s sorry I and everyone who agrees with me fell in love with an “unfinished version” of the film, he’s basically giving us the finger and telling us to go sit down and be quiet. And that, as much as anything, is why I’m in no big hurry to give him fifty more of my hard-earned dollars.

And anyway, there’s every reason to believe that The Great Flanneled One isn’t done tinkering yet. There is a new home video format in the works that will replace DVD, a high-definition, high-capacity optical disc technology called Blu-Ray, and already there are rumors floating about that there will be a so-called “Ultimate Edition” or even an “Archival Edition,” whatever that may be, once the Blu-Ray format goes mainstream. This means that George will be expecting all you loyal fan-boys who just bought the current DVDs to shell out yet again. And like the dutiful little clonetroopers that we are, we’ll no doubt go ahead and do it. It might actually be worth it if this “Archival Edition” includes all four major versions of the films — Unf**ked-with, ’97 Special, 2004 “More Special,” and Ultimate. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t eventually give in, of course. DVDs are cool, and the films reportedly look the best they’ve ever been seen. Anne has bet me a buck that I will eventually cave and buy the new set. I refused to take her bet, because there is the possibility that I’ll lose. But I’m really not sure. There seems to be an equally good possibility that she’ll lose. We’ll see, I suppose.

I’ll end this long rant with a very funny (and very true) cartoon, courtesy of Wil Wheaton. It sums up the experience of just about every Star Wars fan I know. We’re not happy… but we keep on buying the stuff anyway…