You know what’s fun? There’s now more time between when the Star Wars “Special Editions” came out than between them and the original films. The newfangled, CGI-graffitied versions of the original trilogy hit theaters in the spring of 1997, and they’re now the main versions people can watch. (Although the one on Disney+ is where you can see the curious “Maclunkey” addition.) Thing is, they almost didn’t happen.
/Film spoke with producer and longtime George Lucas collaborator Rick MacCallum, who shed some light on how those “Special Editions” came to be. Turns out, Lucas was reluctant to reissue that trio for the first one’s 20th anniversary. Some speculated that he did it to get cash to make the prequels. Others more cynically speculated that it was just to get more money. But according to MacCallum, it was super-fandom that pushed him over the edge.
“The driving force behind it at that particular time was a wonderful guy who ran the marketing division of Fox named Tom Sherak,” McCallum recalled. A “total Star Wars freak,” Sherak had been “bugging George for years” to re-release those films in theaters.
But one day, Sherak showed up at Lucasfilm with an actual truck filled with “literally hundreds of thousands of letters from parents saying, ‘Please can you re-release the film? I want my son and daughter to see and experience what I experienced as a young person in the cinema.’”
That, MacCallum remembered, “was just too overwhelming to say no.”
Of course, Lucas didn’t just dump the trilogy back in theaters as-is. MacCallum recalled:
“I’ll never forget, George had shown me his notebook… He used to write out of this high school notebook with a No. 2 unleaded pencil, and he had the original script of ‘Star Wars.’ And to the side were all the notes of the things that he couldn’t achieve.
There were issues and things that he didn’t like, that they didn’t have the money to do, and things he would love to do if he ever had the chance to go back and revisit the films. And that became kind of the benchmark of, “Okay, these are all the things that he saw in his mind’s eye. This is the film that he wanted it to be, but he didn’t have the money or the resources at the time or the technology to be able to do it.”
And suddenly, Fox gave us that opportunity.”
The rest is controversial history. Many, especially original Star Wars heads, have complained that the late ‘90s CGI ruined the original trio, and they really don’t like that those, with things like Han Solo awkwardly shooting second, are the ones you stream on Disney+. (Lucas has made the original versions available in some releases, though. Then there’s those “despecialized” editions.) On the other hand, Lucas has spent so much of his life, his reputation, and his own money lovingly restoring tons and tons of classic and experimental cinema. One could argue that more than atones for arguably screwing up his own work.
(Via /Film)