May 4 is Star Wars Day, when nerds everywhere get to greet each other with a solemn “May the fourth be with you.”
But on this Star Wars Day, almost exactly 35 years after the original movie came out, it might be time to re-evaluate whether the franchise is even worth our admiration any longer. To be fair, the original trilogy is a very entertaining set of films. It set the bar for special effects for a generation and even today looks pretty damn good — although finding a copy that hasn’t been “digitally enhanced” to within an inch of its life can be pretty tough.
For Star Wars fans, George Lucas’s constant revisions to his creation are probably the most difficult part of fandom. Every edition has some new, seemingly arbitrary changes. Even though we all pretty much liked the films as they were, George Lucas has been on a quixotic, three-decade mission to make the perfect Star Wars. And so we get CGI Yoda and Jabba replacing their earlier puppet forms. Needlessly changed dialogue. Putting Hayden Christensen in Return of the Jedi. (That last one really stung.)
I didn’t watch my first Star Wars film until I was in grade seven, and even then it was The Phantom Menace. In time, I watched all the films, learned everything I could about them, came to love the characters — what every fan goes through when they first encounter Star Wars. But I now question whether I have ever really seen anything close to the same movies people fell in love with in the late ’70s and ’80s. Are we even fans of the same thing? How much can you change something without changing its spirit?
George Lucas has also abused the Star Wars almost beyond recognition with some really embarrassing merchandise. Kitchenware? A Christmas album? Fishing tackle?
Come on, George!
If future generations want to understand the Star Wars phenomenon as well as pinpoint the exact moment when it all just didn’t matter anymore, they might settle on the release of Kinect Star Wars for Xbox 360. The game uses Xbox’s motion-sensor technology to provide a few different game modes, including a dance-off mode in which players get to take part in the destruction of a once-great franchise.
It’s almost impossible to sit through a video game Princess Leia, dressed as a slave in Jabba’s palace, dancing to “I ain’t no hologram girl” and somehow still retain any warm feelings for the characters and for the story of the films.
Sure, even Lucas has said that they’re children’s movies, but there was once something special about them. At this point, though, after the prequels, the fiddling with the originals, the terrible cash grabs and everything else, let’s just move on and find something else to obsess over. How about Avatar? Is that still cool? Let’s all paint ourselves blue and climb some trees.