Saturday, August 21, 2010

You cheered for garbage.

So I saw this new clip from a deleted scene from a Star Wars movie (okay, it's Return of the Jedi; I'm just trying to seem too cool for Star Wars) where we see Luke ("Luuuuuke") use a sonic screwdriver to tighten the thingies on his lightsaber, like it needed new D batteries or something. (I would have linkyed to the clip, but it done been taken down already.)

And the audience is cheering, "Oh, Yeah!" "Woo!" as they watch the hooded figure appear to jiggle this and twist on that.

They're cheering over a deleted scene. Deleted. Cut. Unfit to be in the initial release of the film. Garbage.

Directors cut scenes from movies for different reasons, for time, for pacing, because they don't reveal any new information, whatever. But it was cut and thrown away. When they were editing this in 1982 nobody thought, "Hey, I'll save this for the Laserdisc."

Remember, Return of the Jedi is the movie with Ewoks.

So if Ewoks are considered Good for the final cut of Return of the Jedi, then this deleted scene must really be crap.

But it just goes to show the hold that "new" has over people. We want everything first, before anyone else. So we celebrate crap because we got it first. It doesn't matter that the creator thought it wasn't worthy of the final product and threw it away.

MY GENERATION: You know, I saw Return of the Jedi in the theater during its original run.

THIS GENERATION: But we saw the scene that Lucas held back because he thought you sucked too much to deserve seeing it. He gave you Ewoks, but he saved this for us.

MY GENERATION: Touché. He gave us Princess Leia in a metal bikini, but Ewoks, yeah, George Lucas really must have hated us.