A new hope?

Tonight at the gym I watched the last half hour of A New Hope while I did cardio.

Someplace/somehow/sometime I stumbled across a digital copy of the original cut, a kind of geek trophy, posted on some thief’s fileshare paradise in a shadowy corner of the Internet.

This is the perfect version, the magical version, a stand-alone Joseph Campbell Hero With A Thousand Faces space opera fantasy tale, heroes, villains, scoundrels, princesses, wizards, quests, victories, sacrifices, all indifferent to matte lines and parsecs, where Han knows he has to shoot first and a farm boy falls in love with a princess, the version that George Lucas made without any plans for the future, constructed before he lost his confidence and started obsessively rethinking and reworking the trilogy.

Since then, millions and millions of pages and frames and words have been added to the Star Wars story, folding it in on itself over and over again, like forging a Japanese sword, layer upon layer upon layer of plot and character.  But the result has become a peculiar failure, the elaborate construction and multiple changes making the result brittle and dull, losing the razor sharp brilliance of the original.

Wouldn’t it be funny if, after all the comments and criticisms and jokes about their Lucasfilm purchase, Walt Disney™ brought back the magic?

- Sid