Come on now, get a grip. It’s all good fun in the “Space Patrol” tradition, just as Star Wars is Flash Gordon crossed with mythical westerns. But lets not go overboard. They aren’t real science fiction. They are not in the same class as 2001, or the Andromeda Strain.

For example, making Mos Eisley bigger and busier was okay, adding new scenes of the landspeeder cruising through the city wasn’t bad, but in the scene where Luke and Obi-wan are first confronted by Stormtroopers, the new edition clutters the street so they are obscured from the camera.

Another awkward insertion was the scene between Han and Jabba. This was restored film that would have been fine, except the original edit had an actor in funny clothes as Jabba, and I think the original reason Lucas cut it was he wasn’t able to make Jabba the way he wanted. This edition digitally inserts Jabba, which would be okay, except the blocking on the scene had Solo walk around Jabba. Given that Jabba is a huge slug with a long tail and not a man, the scene was difficult to adapt. The option chosen was to have Solo walk across Jabba’s back. That is not believable, and disrupts the flow of the scene.

And that doesn’t touch the ultimate in film rewriting – the cantina scene. Greedo shoots first?!?!? Greedo misses? UGH! That scene was a quintessential scene in establishing Solo’s character, and even as a ~10 yr old I totally understood the importance of the scene. I had conversations with my friends about it. Now Lucas feels it portrays Solo poorly and establishes a bad precedent, so he makes Solo “nicer” by having Greedo shoot first! UGH! That’s not making the effects prettier, that’s changing story content. Might as well have Obi-wan warn Luke, “She’s your sister, you schmuck.”

Yah, so was Return of the Jedi. I always thought that George should have given Mr Kasdan a call about the prequel trilogy, but I think he has gone into shameful hiding after Dreamcatcher.

Ruprect

That’s the syndication market. Nothing to do with the folks doing the remastering and new effects.

More SW: Stop the “parsecs” debate. It was a dumb error. End of story. Move along. Nothing to be seen here.

Also note that Empire Strikes Back, generally recognized as the best film, was written by Lawrence Kasdan (finishing up for Leigh Brackett, an actual SF author) and not Lucas.

Lucas lost the formula after Empire. As for it being Space Opera (or science fantasy) and not SF, I hate to break it to you but pretty much 98% of “SF” films are space opera. Even 2001 turns into space opera at the end.

And the space opera generally isn’t even good space opera. Hell, as far as I’m concerned, the best science fantasy “film” in the past two years was the video game Mass Effect, with Bioshock in second place.

Name a real SF film, something that posits a possible future and explores the issues there. I’d say Gattaca, The Children of Men, Fahrenheit 451, Destination Moon, and THX-1138. Can’t really think of another off the top of my head. Maybe Logan’s Run and Silent Running. Colussus: The Forbin Project possibly.

If you allow a single MacGuffin, you can include things like Minority Report (the precogs) and Sunshine (the Sun Bomb).

And, Sean, the new effects were deliberately made not fancy to blend in better with the show. They are on the level of what was state of the art at the time (see the movie 2001).

It’s completely different from colorizing because [A] The colorizing was never that good and [B] black and white films were made with the recognition of the medium. The directors and cinematographers worked the B&W to their artistic advantage.

That’s because this was an episode of TOS, not DS9.

There’s no reason for them to go THAT far into altering episodes.

What we see are the syndicated versions of the episodes.

The full length, “unbutchered” episodes are coming out on DVD. Season 1 is available, IIRC.