Chen G.

That's a good point, though: The "Walking Song" doesn't play over Shore's score: rather, its Shore score that harmonises the diegetic singing, and is clearly trying to tie it to the music of the Hobbits in terms of colour and motivic language. And then when that song is reprised by Bilbo it has a kind of leitmotivic function, much like the rest of the score. And since Shore's scores contain a considerable amount of crossover from diegetic to mimetic music - the lament for Gandalf, the "Misty Mountains" praghiera, the dirge for Thorin, the clarient recapitulating Pippin's aria, Aragorn's arietta being reprised in the Symphony - it very much reinforces the case for keeping these diegetic pieces in their place.

Diegetic sound or not, it is music. These are albums for the music of the Lord of the Rings.

Removing cast performances over the music... I mean, that's like saying you want to remove the string line to better hear what the woodwinds are doing underneath, or whatever... These are albums of the music of The Lord of the Rings. Ergo, if its music, and its in The Lord of the Rings, it belongs on there. There are still contributions from Plan 9 and Vigo Mortensen and others that we're missing!

Yes.

So I assumed.

This is again where I feel it’s wrong to lump these up as trilogies, because story-wise Star Wars is pretty good, yes; The Empire Strikes Back splendid…and then we get to the Second-Death-Star-sized elephant in the room…

Oh, I agree completely! But, one, certain isolated aspects of it ARE better - or more impressively mounted - than the original. The acting comes to mind, for instance. AND, again, it doesn't have to be better to "overshadow" the original or take the novelty out of it.

That's all true. But its not true, particularly, of the one in the 1977 film. That one is totally unlike the ones in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, it seems to me (which again goes to show its wrong to lump these things into trilogies). And, again, it doesn't necessarily have to be a worst fight to be overshadowed by lightsabre fights that have come out since.

Not yet, but I do see some of this through the eyes of one of at least one of my younger cousins. I also see it through myself as an adult: I only saw Star Wars for the first time in 2015. Was I terribly impressed? Not really, no. Part of that was my age, but part of that was that I saw Episodes I and II (not III) and a lot of other films with similar elements BEFORE I saw it. Whereas The Empire Strikes Back did have some lustre for me.

I feel like even in that department, other films since Star Wars - both in that series and outside it - have at least done elements of the Star Wars story better. If you're a kid in 2023 and you've seen The Force Awakens, and then you go back and see "the original", its not going to feel as engrossing, and not because The Force Awakens is better. The Phantom Menace also uses quite a few story beats from the original (its based on one of its earlier drafts) and again, its not that its better, but it is going to cast a pall over seeing those same beats mounted "again" in seeing the original later. And, again, the "rescue the princess" premise had arguably been done better in stuff like Curse of the Black Pearl. The "unlikely hero" was done better in The Lord of the Rings. The bombing run was recently done better in Maverick, the desert planet was done WAY better not just in later Star Wars entries, but especially in both Dune and John Carter, etc...

Right. And I don't think we can hinge that issue entirely on philistinism on the part of kids. Its a combination of that fight being ho-hum, and some of the later fights not necessarily being better (although many of them are) but definitely being more dynamic. And that's without considering other films that have come out since which don't have lightsabres, but do have swordplay.

Its a difficult thing. Michael Kaminski makes the argument that, for instance, the early Tatooine scenes with the Droids only work if you don't know anything about Tatooine and so are with the Droids in their venture into this new alien world. After a prequel trilogy that spends way more time in Tattooine than it should (which is to say nothing of Obi Wan et al), that sense of the mystique is lost and the scenes drag. Also, the location spotting in the original film is not as good as in some other entries (whether they include Tatooine or an ersatz Tatooine like Geonosis, Jedha, Jakku et al), so it becomes harder to become as impressed with the footage of the Tunisian desert as people had in 1977. And I'm not even getting into the issue that - after we saw Tatooine's antecedents of Arrakis and Barsoom realised much, much better - it becomes even harder still to take the Tatooine of 1977 very seriously. Similar arguments can be made for just about every other part of the film. Certainly, the lightsaber fight from 1977 was never particularly impressive, but TODAY it seems all the quainter. And then there's the rhetorical side of it all. If one was unfortunate enough to hear or read a post-1980 interview of Lucas' and get a load of all his talk of Joseph Campbell and then go into the film expecting some serious meditation of mythopeia... its again going to seem all the quainter.

I feel like in the case of Star Wars, its more significant because the film got "buried" not just under its own popularity, but under the huge media series it spawned. Its the entry that feels the most out-of-step with the larger series, and while its better than most other entries in the series, next to them (especially taken together) it can seem a little...quaint. And really, that's a problem that also extents to kids because I feel like a kid in 2023 is much more likely to get into Star Wars by catching one of the later movies or one of the new shows on TV and only eventually making their way to the film that started it all, and the chance of them finding it...quaint, as I said, is not insignificant as a result.

Right. I believe Marcia also considered keeping the Jabba scene, because she liked (actually, quite rightly) Han's entrance into the shot. Her position as some sort of "saviour" of Star Wars is fallacious, and Marcia herself admits to this. Much the same is true of producer Gary Kurtz.

Debatable. And at any rates, he would like us to think those trilogies are homgenous, but they are anything but. I mean, even in the prequel trilogy, each of the three films barely look a thing alike. I never bought this argument, partially because nobody has ever been able to cite good examples of how the situation was any different on the set of the 1977 film. I've yet to see one documented example where Lucas wanted to do something a certain way, and his crew went rogue on him and did another way, or anything like that. Its just a simplistic way for people to explain why they like X and don't like Y. Its a stock excuse that goes back decades: one review of Doctor Zhivago suggested that David Lean needed Sam Spiegel to keep him in check, which is exactly the kind of argument being levelled at Lucas here. Bogus on both accounts, methinks.