Monday, October 11, 2004

Digicrap

It seems I’ve struck a bit of a nerve with a recent post in which I mentioned my extreme dissatisfaction with George “I Suck, Now” Lucas and his sweeping CGI changes to the Star Wars trilogy—painstaking, cutting-edge changes which are technically known, in the film industry, as “stupid.”

We all know about my deep psychological issues concerning Greedo shooting first, and now comes the news that The Trilogy has been befouled yet again, this time in full glorious DVD digicrap remastering. Lucas has heard the hollering of the Dork Faithful and has backed away from the contentious Greedo issue by thoughtfully making him and Han shoot at the same time. Oh, that’s better. I can’t wait for the next version, in which Han will likely adopt fourteen starving Chinese babies and a manatee before finally getting around to business.

This tiny little laser blast, as previously discussed, has absolutely no regard for character development or plot cohesion or, in fact, sanity. Now I’m hearing all kinds of horrible rumors about Lucas replacing Luke’s Force-vision of an aged Darth Vader with some stupid shimmering version of Hayden Christensen, which is the most upsetting Star Wars-related injustice since the sanctioned post-saga novels also went completely round the bend by marrying Luke to a smuggler and killing off Chewbacca by making a planet fall on him.

Grave subjects such as these are so upsetting to the Dork Faithful that one of them actually wrote many, many paragraphs on the subject, which he emailed to me from Africa. His name is Jon. I like Jon, for I can see him now, there in Africa, surrounded by small children with bloated stomachs and warlords wandering around with machine guns, typing, typing, typing about the horrible injustice that is the insertion of Gungan celebratory footage in the last scenes of Return of the Jedi. Says Jon:

“Personally, I've decided that George Lucas underwent some sort of serious personality alteration during the
eighties that adversely affected his artistic judgment, even to the point of not being the same man. Obviously, the
man who invented Indiana Jones was, in some metaphysically substantive way, different from the one who thought
that it was a good idea to have Anakin Skywalker use The Force to feed his girlfriend a fakey orange.
Consequent to this belief, I refuse to accept any post-Jedi Star Wars stuff as canonical, no matter who made it. I
don't know if we'll ever get George back from wherever he's gone, but until we do, and as far as I'm concerned,
Greedo was an idiot who deserved the just punishment for not realizing what *click* - *sliiiiide* meant, and Han
was a seriously cool badass whose toughness and cynicism were gradually overcome by the essential goodness
and idealism of Luke and Princess Leia. And he DID shoot first.
“I'm hoping my brother's videotapes hold up for as many times as I will need to watch them, both for myself and
for my children, but I take comfort in the thought that there are probably those on the internet dedicated to
guarding the original Star Wars movies with the same zeal with which the Hebrew scribes preserved the ancient
scriptures. Someday I will buy a copy of whatever version Lucasfilm Ltd is hawking that week (just to make
everything nice and legal). This I will destroy. Then I will download the real thing so that my children may not be
corrupted.

“It all reminds me of a story about Michelangelo. One day in a fit of melancholia, he went into his studio, picked
up a hammer, and began smashing his works, crying, ‘Vanity!’ or something like that. When his assistants and
students realized what he was doing, they tackled him together and held him down until he came to his senses,
and some great art was saved. So what I want to know is, where were the assistants and students when George
Lucas said, ‘You know what? I want the next installment of Star Wars to have a fart joke, a nine-year-old, and
a character named Jar-Jar’? Why did no one stop him? Who could have held him down but did not? Who bears
that awful burden?”

Jon concludes: "Accursed be the man."

Then we have this striking, somewhat more succinct commentary from my main man Flip, currently hanging out
with crack whores in Gary, Indiana: "Nothing disappoints me more than Boss Nass."


This generation is going to rule the world at some point, and that day will be great

amongst men.

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