How hard would it be to just take modern cuts of classic SW and remove all the bad CGI stuff added in the 90's special editions and some stuff added or changed later?
I can name like four different people/teams who have done it, but it's not quite so simple as it sounds. I recently looked into it because I was trying to find versions of the original cuts for my Plex server.
There are the negative scans, that have gone back to actual film prints of the movies from their original releases and scanned those, but they have generation loss and damage. There's also physical effects that mean that projecting an incandescent light through a film will look different from projecting a laser light through an electronic screen, which will look different from a stand-alone screen, and all the variations within those different types of presentation, so you'll have to decide how strong you want the color and contrast to be. Do you try to match your 47-year-old-memory, or the current state of the film that was scanned, or an old VHS release, or the latest official version? A lot of studios (or even the original filmmakers) will change how the color, brightness, focus, and grain look on a movie when preparing it for a new release format like 4K disc, unconsciously or consciously being influenced by later styles of filmmaking, and/or taking into account technical differences in the format (in 4K, the screen can be brighter or darker without clipping to black or white, so some filmmakers take advantage of that in ways they couldn't on older formats) so you'll get a lot of debate from fans about how it should look.
There was a good amount of debate over the new grading over the 4K release of the Lord of the Rings movies, for instance, as well as about the color grades for the original Star Wars movies (
here are comparisons of the 2011 and 2020 disc releases, which were noticeably different).
There's also apparently a missing/extra frame in some of the versions of the "original" cut of Star Wars that can throw off the audio timing, so that's a point of conflict between different restorers. They used a different vocal performance for Aunt Beru in the mono sound mix of the original release compared to the stereo and later releases, so some people think that's the original, while others find it off-putting and odd when reconstructions or fan-edits use it because they grew up with the VHS of the "original." That's not even getting into things like the Star Wars opening crawl being changed to add "EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE," or the extra spaceship shot added to the end of ESB a week after its initial release.
It's all a huge damn mess. Fans are left to be making highly technical and creative decisions that should be up to the filmmakers, but Lucas et al. have abdicated their preservationist responsiblilites, and now if you want to watch the "original" Star Wars as it was when it was released, you can choose between the grimey film-print scan (with or without grain reduction), or the 2003/2011/2020 version as a base with only the alterations removed (and then is it going to be all of the alterations, or will they leave "invisible" ones like the fixed perspective on the hallway of the Death Star prison level or the removed matte-boxes around spaceships?). There are semi-specialized versions that leave some additions but remove ones that are disliked by fandom, but do people dislike the same ones as you? Personally, I prefer the SE ending of RotJ to Yub-Nub, but others disagree.
Personally, I think you get exactly one (1) creator-authorized alternate cut; once you change the movie publicly more than that, people are going to start mixing-and-matching in their heads and wanting to make their own versions with just the changes they like. Do you think I like the fact that I need a flow-chart to describe my platonic ideal of the first Star Trek movie? I sound like a crazy person when I talk about it.
www.hollywoodreporter.com
