Star Wars: The Complete Saga hits DVD and Blu-Ray on September 16th, and as always, “complete” seems to be a misnomer since the original (unmessed with) Star Wars Trilogy doesn’t make an appearance. But we expected that. What we didn’t necessarily expect was that Lucas was also doing “Special Edition” detail on the new prequel trilogy, like replacing the puppet Yoda from The Phantom Menace with a CGI version more in-keeping with his look from both Attack of the Clones and The Revenge of the Sith. You can see a preview of this version below (via Slash Film).
And… we’re almost okay with this. Yeah, we’re as surprised as you are. To start with, it’s not like any of the new Star Wars movies are some kind of cinematic holy grail, either too treasured or too good to screw with safely. Secondly, that puppet was kind of janky to begin with. They de-aged Yoda a bit too much for our tastes, giving him brownish hair that means that the 900-year-old green alien only lost his hair in the last 0.03% of his life cycle. Call us geeks, but that bothered us. This new version at least keeps the prequel movies looking consistent, and de-emphasizes that little nitpick which bugged us so.
Then again, we still run into the annoying trend of George Lucas not leaving well enough (or at least finished enough) alone. We can’t imagine too many people getting upset that the original version of The Phantom Menace won’t live on in high-definition, but the principle of the thing makes this development all the more frustrating. Bill Hunt at The Digital Bits recently put out a preview describing even more changes that Lucas has in store for the Star Wars Blu-Ray set, which we heartily recommend reading. Decide for yourself right now, however, if the Yoda thing is worth getting into a tizzy over.
The CGI version…
The original puppet version…
CraveOnline will be back with more Star Wars news as our fear leads to anger, our anger leads to hate, and our hate leads to whining on the internet.
