cafink
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Apr 19, 1999
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- 3,044
- Real Name
- Carl Fink
Persianimmortal said:I saw these movies in the theater when I was young, and as magical as they were at the time, I think nostalgia is blinding a lot of people as to the faults of the originals. For me, the original trilogy as it current stands is perfectly fine, and the changes also help to better blend it with the prequels. I have all six movies and I won't be rebuying any of them until they come out in a better format than Blu-ray.
I couldn't disagree more. Though I'd seen bits & pieces of the movies, the first time I sat down to watch Star Wars was the '97 Special Edition, so I have no particular nostalgia for the originals, but for my money, they are clearly better than any subsequent version. The various changes made to the movies range from innocuous to cringe-inducing, with only a handful registering as clear improvements in my opinion. The updates spoil the pacing of the movie (the "alert the star destroyer" scene in Empire), ruin the drama ("Noooo!" in Jedi), and just don't make a lot of sense in context (Han solo having almost the exact same conversation with both Greedo and Jabba). The changes may help the trilogy blend in better with the prequels, but that's is hardly an improvement to many fans of the originals, and it comes at the cost of incosistency within the films, which now have a distracting mix of '70s- and '80s-era effects work, and modern CGI.
I bought the '97 special editions when they were released on VHS, but I now have absolutely no interest in any release that does not include the originals. I waited for them on DVD (crummy as that release was), and I am perfectly content to do the same on Blu-ray.