I recently watched the first Star Wars movie and was sorely disappointed.
The story is great and timeless.
So why, Mr. Lucas did you muck with it?
Countless fans have already bemoaned the changed scenes, so I don’t need to rehash that. Especially the who shot first scene of Han Solo. But I also was unhappy with the stupid looking creatures added and the times the words did not match peoples mouths (the words had been changed).
As a writer, I know the temptation to go back and improve something created a long while ago, believing I know better now.
But I look at my old work as standing on their own and being the best I could do at that stage in my life. And what was true decades ago may no longer be true, may even be offensive today. How could I know that then?
But if someone loves my past work I am not ever going to change it. If they hate it and it is out of synch with the current times, I’ll delete it completely.
I have watched movies that have so many deleted scenes the story no longer makes sense. Why do they do that? Even the Muppet movie, of all things, deleted an entire scene from their version of the Christmas Carol. How crazy is that? And The World According to Garp removed the beginning scene, that although yes, some might find offensive, was the defining thing to the whole story. There were other parts removed from that movie that also made things a bit weird. Erik the Viking is another movie that got hacked up. But gee whiz. Modern movies are so full of graphic violence and sex and foul language that I find are a thousand times more offensive than any old movie or book.
I don’t care if the special effects of an old movie are dated, are not state of the art CGI. What matters is the story. If the story is terrific I can overlook the rest. You need to consider the time when things were produced. In the time period something was created there may be things that are politically and otherwise incorrect or offensive today. A Hitchcock movie made in the 1950’s is still very good. A book written decades ago is still thrilling. You can’t update them, they lose their magic. I think people are smart enough to realize that it is a product of the times, or if something is deliberately being offensive.
So please, give us the originals and let us decide for ourselves if we like it or not.