Of my generation, I can't think of anyone who has lost more love than George Lucas. At least, not without doing something drastic, like spouting a string of racial slurs in public, or at a police officer, or punching out their spouse, or - you get the idea. Let me get my personal grievances with Lucas out of the way. At this point I couldn't care less about the prequels. Yes, they suck. You know what? So does damn near every summer blockbuster. I swear to God, every summer it's like The Phantom Menace times three or four, but that's for another post. No, I can easily live with the prequels because I can choose not to bother with them. Also, their presence allowed the existence of Genndy Tartakovsky's terrific Clone Wars cartoons, all of which put together is about the length of one of the prequels, and at least ten times better than all three of them. Yeah, I can easily choose not to watch the prequels. But that leads into my specific problem with George Lucas: choice.
It's a really old story at this point, but if I want to watch the original Star Wars movies, I have to pull out old VHS tapes or find less legal ways to see them. No, I didn't buy the 2006 DVDs, because, stupid me, I had actually thought that Lucas had learned his lesson, was ready to give fans what they wanted, and by the time either Blu-ray or HD-DVD had won the format war, the original Star Wars trilogy would be released on that format, Han shooting Greedo and all. Of course, this never happened.
Lucas has taken that choice away from fans. What's more, is that apparently DVDs of Tartakovsky's Clone Wars are now discontinued. I think you can still buy the DVDs, but they're going up in price. In Canada, where I live, Amazon.ca was selling the first volume for a whopping 77 dollars as I typed this. I pulled out my old DVDs of Clone Wars to re-watch them for the first time in years, only to fall in love all over again with this microseries. I would have easily been willing to buy one or more prequel on Blu-ray if it meant that they carried Clone Wars in HD as a bonus. I looked it up and they don't. Considering Lucas is all too willing to force consumers to only buy the Special Editions of the first trilogy, assuming they want to buy anything at all, I would think he could have easily included Clone Wars as an extra somewhere in the Blu-ray package. Then, of course, not too long after Revenge of the Sith, Lucas commissioned a brand new CGI animated redo of the story, adding "The" to the title. It seems to me that Lucas has decided to erase Tartakovsky's work in favour of the new computer animated version. If Lucas doesn't like the work of Tartakovsky and company, fine, but like with the original trilogy, he seems to be going out of his way to deny us a choice in the matter. And that's my problem with George Lucas.
Okay, that's the bitching session out of the way. Up next: How He Challenged Us.
No comments:
Post a Comment