Jim Hill Media updates with a new article on a recent South Park episode which decries the increasing tendency nowadays for filmmakers to re-release their movies with previously cut footage added back in or altogether new footage and suggests that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas decided not to do any such thing to the Indiana Jones movies after seeing the South Park episode. My editorial opinion, which is not necessarily the opinion of the entire Animated News staff, follows.

To me the whole issue opens up a whole big philosophical can of worms. Star Wars and ET were not the only movies to have old footage added back in. It actually happened many times before that and since in cases where there has been no public uproar. Movies such as The Godfather and Dances With Wolves each had home video releases where nearly an hour of footage that had been cut for the theatrical release was added back in. Apocalypse Now and The Exorcist were recently re-released to theaters with substantial amounts of footage cut back in but to my knowledge there were no complaints, and I’m not citing every example (Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of the earliest examples). Why is it that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are blamed for all of society’s ills? It has been my observation that when you are the biggest and best in any field then you tend to be blamed for everything wrong that has anything to do with that field. The scene with Jabba the Hutt that was added back in for the 1997 Special Edition release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was supposed to have originally been in the movie in its 1977 release. But since time and budget constraints forced that scene out at that time is that the equivalent of fate sealing the lid on production and proclaiming, “Thou shalt not tinker anymore!”? When I saw ET: The Extra-Terrestrial last year it had been so long since I’d seen it last that I wouldn’t have known what any of the restored footage was except for having read about it in the paper earlier that day. But I have to admit that some of the CGI effects that were used in Star Wars were a little jarring in that they did not seem to match the effects that had been used twenty years earlier, and maybe this is partly why there were no complaints (to my recollection) about the extra footage for The Godfather, Dances With Wolves, Apocalypse Now and The Exorcist: because their extra footage did not involve newly created special effects that somehow seemed incongruous with the original visuals. Maybe the answer to the question of to revise or not to revise is this: revise if there’s a good reason for it and expend whatever effort is necessary to make the new footage blend in as good as possible with the old footage AND if you are going to release a revised version be kind and also provide the truly original version of the film.