Because there apparently hasn’t been enough controversy in Star Wars the last few years, Disney decided to ramp it up with the launch of its streaming service, Disney+. What now, you ask? I almost feel ashamed on behalf of Disney and Lucasfilm to say, but… They’ve changed the cantina scene between Han and Greedo from the original Star Wars. You know, the “Han shot first” scene. Yup. They altered it. Again. (You can see it in the tweet below.)
When Star Wars first came out in 1977 the scene played out much differently. Greedo, a bounty hunter in the employ of Jabba the Hutt, tracked Han Solo to Mos Eisley. In the now-infamous cantina scene, Greedo confronts Han Solo at gunpoint. Greedo threatens to kill Han, and is about to do so, when Han shoots from the hip and kills Greedo instead. Solo gets up, pays for the mess, and leaves. End scene.
Why can’t they leave the cantina scene alone?
Now, according to George Lucas, Greedo was always supposed to have shot first. As Vox notes, Lucas *tried* to clear up the controversy in a Hollywood Reporter interview back in 2012. This is how the scene originally ended in the original film:
Lucas had this to say about it:
The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.”
Seriously, George?
Let’s get something straight: Greedo was hunting Han Solo and was about to kill him in the original cantina scene. No one, and I mean nooooo one, thought Han Solo was a cold-blooded killer, George. He didn’t just “gun him down.” He defended himself from imminent redrum by Rodian. It was a great scene that that helped to establish Han Solo as everyone’s favorite scoundrel. Now? Now there’s “maclunkey.”
The Disney+ version of Star Wars: A New Hope now has a cut scene in which there’s a close-up of Greedo. This time, just before the cantina scene shooting, Greedo utters something unintelligible that sounds like “maclunkey.” Then they both shoot at the same time. Not Han first, not Greedo first, at the same time. And that, my friends, is the new, Disney+, canon version of “Han shot first.”
Maclunkey.
*bangs head on desk*
Source: Vox; Hollywood Reporter
