As a longtime Star Wars fan, I came to the conclusion while analyzing the Special Editions that George Lucas intended them to be deliberately bad.
Their origins lie in 1977, when Lucas was preparing a director’s cut of THX 1138 in the wake of Star Wars’ massive success.
He told Warner Brothers to destroy their prints of the 1971 theatrical version, which had been massively recut from his original intent by the studio. They complied. Only later did Lucas realize that in doing so, Warner Bros. had destroyed all surviving prints of the 1971 version.
This was the impetus for the Star Wars Special Editions 20 years later. It was, in practice, a warning to future generations not to let that sort of cultural erasure happen, even if a work of art’s own creator gave it his blessing. A concrete illustration of the perils of the very thing he warned the US Congress about in 1988.
Lucas created Darth Sidious, after all; he’s perfectly capable of saying one thing and meaning another. “Reverse psychology,” in the words of Princess Yuki from The Hidden Fortress.
This intentional will toward hypocrisy informs many of the worst changes to Star Wars. It explains why Lucas added the Emperor’s scream to Luke’s fall in The Empire Strikes Back in 1997 and then removed it. It explains why he put Anakin’s much-maligned NOOOOO from the prequels in one of the most powerful scenes of Return of the Jedi. It explains why he added CGI to a TV airing of Raiders of the Lost Ark to replace a shot that he himself originally approved.
But how does this relate to Star Trek?
The original theatrical cuts of the Star Wars films aren't the only thing languishing in the Lucasfilm vaults. Starting in the 1980s, Lucas built up an entire time capsule there of unreleased media: first from his own films, and then from others. Among the earliest entries were an R-rated animated film version of Willow with art by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, and the Eric Stoltz footage from Back to the Future.
Additionally, since Lucas ran a computer game company, LucasArts, he naturally introduced them to what became known as the Secret Library Archive Project (as former LucasArts developer Tim Schafer calls it). Among the games LucasArts added to the Archive were sequels to its acclaimed 1990 game Loom, and a game that revealed The Secret of Monkey Island.
From LucasArts the idea of contributing to this time capsule caught the imagination of other developers at Sierra On-Line, and Interplay... which was making Star Trek games at the time.
Interplay contributed several alpha versions of its Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgment Rites adventure games to the Archive. Eventually, it contributed an entire unreleased game: Secret of Vulcan Fury, written by DC Fontana and designed by Sierra veteran Ken Allen.
The regular Trek productions eventually got in on the act too. For First Contact, several alternate scenes were filmed, with a different layout for Picard's ready room, more like that on the 1701-D (complete with fish tank), and different bridge consoles (Defiant-style armrests for the Captain's chair, and Riker and Troi's consoles removed as in Insurrection).
In fact, the First Contact writers got into the idea so much, they created an alternate universe where the Enterprise-E was actually the USS Endeavour! What's in a name, after all?
Their origins lie in 1977, when Lucas was preparing a director’s cut of THX 1138 in the wake of Star Wars’ massive success.
He told Warner Brothers to destroy their prints of the 1971 theatrical version, which had been massively recut from his original intent by the studio. They complied. Only later did Lucas realize that in doing so, Warner Bros. had destroyed all surviving prints of the 1971 version.
This was the impetus for the Star Wars Special Editions 20 years later. It was, in practice, a warning to future generations not to let that sort of cultural erasure happen, even if a work of art’s own creator gave it his blessing. A concrete illustration of the perils of the very thing he warned the US Congress about in 1988.
Lucas created Darth Sidious, after all; he’s perfectly capable of saying one thing and meaning another. “Reverse psychology,” in the words of Princess Yuki from The Hidden Fortress.
This intentional will toward hypocrisy informs many of the worst changes to Star Wars. It explains why Lucas added the Emperor’s scream to Luke’s fall in The Empire Strikes Back in 1997 and then removed it. It explains why he put Anakin’s much-maligned NOOOOO from the prequels in one of the most powerful scenes of Return of the Jedi. It explains why he added CGI to a TV airing of Raiders of the Lost Ark to replace a shot that he himself originally approved.
But how does this relate to Star Trek?
The original theatrical cuts of the Star Wars films aren't the only thing languishing in the Lucasfilm vaults. Starting in the 1980s, Lucas built up an entire time capsule there of unreleased media: first from his own films, and then from others. Among the earliest entries were an R-rated animated film version of Willow with art by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, and the Eric Stoltz footage from Back to the Future.
Additionally, since Lucas ran a computer game company, LucasArts, he naturally introduced them to what became known as the Secret Library Archive Project (as former LucasArts developer Tim Schafer calls it). Among the games LucasArts added to the Archive were sequels to its acclaimed 1990 game Loom, and a game that revealed The Secret of Monkey Island.
From LucasArts the idea of contributing to this time capsule caught the imagination of other developers at Sierra On-Line, and Interplay... which was making Star Trek games at the time.
Interplay contributed several alpha versions of its Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgment Rites adventure games to the Archive. Eventually, it contributed an entire unreleased game: Secret of Vulcan Fury, written by DC Fontana and designed by Sierra veteran Ken Allen.
The regular Trek productions eventually got in on the act too. For First Contact, several alternate scenes were filmed, with a different layout for Picard's ready room, more like that on the 1701-D (complete with fish tank), and different bridge consoles (Defiant-style armrests for the Captain's chair, and Riker and Troi's consoles removed as in Insurrection).
In fact, the First Contact writers got into the idea so much, they created an alternate universe where the Enterprise-E was actually the USS Endeavour! What's in a name, after all?
