Second Entry – Year 33 ABY:5:4
My research led me from one system to another, and I soon began to unravel a story that went deeper than I could have ever imagined. From Master Plinkett, I found my way to the world of fan edits, which are exactly what they sound like. Re-cuts of movies by fans, some just for fun, others attempting to correct egregious errors against humanity. In the case of Star Wars, there are two important fan edits.
The first is a version of Episode I known as The Phantom Edit, where the editor (once presumed to be Kevin Smith of Clerks fame, but later proven otherwise) attempted to eliminate as much of Jar Jar Binks’ screen time as well as the incredibly stupid and illogical programming of the battle droids. While vastly improved, it still doesn’t save the the movie of its idiocy. But it does make one wonder: Why isn’t this how it was in the first place? I will attempt to address this question in the future.
The other fan edit of note is an “enhanced” version of the original film titled A New Hope: Revisited, created by an other Jedi Master of unsurpassed patience and wisdom who goes by the name of Adywan. This fan-edit addresses another issue that runs parallel to the prequel trilogy, which is the Special Edition versions of the original 3. Some of the changes to which are seen by many as heinous acts of sacreligion that have caused some to throw themselves, without hesitation, into the Sarlacc pit at Carkoon; unable to cope with errors as infamous as Greedo shooting at Han first in the Mos Eisley cantina.
[NOTE: For those of you unversed in the finer points of Star Wars -- in the original version of the film, Han shoots Greedo just before Greedo gets the chance to do anything. No shots are fired from Greedo's gun. Lucas changed this to make Han seem like "not such a heartless guy", which effectively cheapens his character arc of growing from someone who is, in fact, kind of heartless and selfish to a man who cares about other people, and in the case of Empire, even more than he cares about himself. All of the wisest Jedi know this. And it makes them close their eyes and shake their heads in disappointment when they discuss this subject.]
The Adywan edit of Hope tries to find a middle ground between both the unmodified and Special Edition versions of the original film, and the level of dedication he showed, combing through every frame of the film to correct even the smallest continuity errors, is astounding. Many of his changes even breath new life into the film, such as in the aforementioned cantina scene, where he manipulated the faces of the various alien species, including Greedo, to emote and blink as if they were alive, and not just people in rubber masks.
[NOTE: Read a summary and check out the list of changes he made here. Like I said, it's astounding. Adywan is currently working on a fan-edit of The Empire Strikes Back and has been for the past 2 years since his Hope edit. It is scheduled to be released later this year.]
This begs the other question I hope to answer in due time:
How did one man alone, who spent 2 years on his computer in an apartment in the UK, with no chance of earning any money and every chance of being accused of delusions of grandeur, come out with a version of A New Hope that at best is far superior to the official Special Edition and at worst, an extremely impressive display of fan dedication?
My journey to figure out once and for all what, and more importantly, WHO made the original trilogy great while the prequels were made to suffer the same fate as Alderaan will continue in my next entry, where I will hope to begin to answer some of these questions.
But until then, may The Force be with you.