Last month, George Lucas sat down with Grantland’s Bryan Curtis for the New York Times Magazine to plug Red Tails, and revealed some surprising personal details. Most pressingly: He knows exactly what the Star Wars fanboys are saying about him. "Why would I make any more [Star Wars movies]," Lucas complained, "when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?" And now that that particular cat is out of that particular bag, it looks as though Lucas is primed and ready to keep the shots coming. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter plugging the 3-D re-release of Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace, Lucas had all kinds of delightful things to say about the progressive bastardization of Star Wars.
We remember like it was yesterday. (In fact, it was yesterday.) There we were, soaking up some late-summer rays from the double sun, discussing our main problems with the Star Wars trilogy. You know, big-picture stuff like how Obi-Wan’s celebrated “Krayyt Call” in the first film wasn’t suitable to scare off a Jawa let alone a fearsome Tusken Raider and, most egregiously, how the absolute, consensus worst thing about the Ewoks wasn’t that they were cynical space Muppets made for toy sales, not plot advancement — it was that they never blinked. Thankfully, George Lucas must have been listening to our conversation because, if some leaked audio from China is to be believed (and when is it not?!?), the bearded one has once again shot first. Both of these changes have been made for the upcoming Blu-ray release of the original trilogy — you can check them out for yourself here or at io9.com — along with the not-at-all-crucial tweak of having Darth Vader dispatch the Emperor in Return of the Jedi with a bellowed, beefy cry of “Noooo!” This, at least, is a change we can all get behind, as this jokey meme video was long overdue for an update.
