A load of 'MacClunkey': will George Lucas’s Star Wars tinkering never end?

Who’s that cackling maniacally, the puppet master we all thought had long ago left the Star Wars scene, suddenly revealed to have been pulling strings in the background all along? It’s not Emperor Palpatine, seemingly restored to life in trailers for the forthcoming Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker despite being killed by Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. The puppet master is creator George Lucas, whose departure from all things Star Wars seems to have been greatly exaggerated – appears to have yet again doctored the famous Greedo scene in 1977’s Star Wars.

The scene depicts the Mos Eisley cantina in which Harrison Ford’s Han Solo is confronted by an alien bounty hunter and winds up shooting him dead in a brief flurry of blaster fire. It has been much discussed over the years, largely because Solo shot Greedo in cold blood in the original, “Han shot first” 1977 cut, while in later versions Lucas re-edited the footage to depict Greedo as the aggressor, with Han returning fire in self-defence. Many fans have spectulated about what effect that subtle change had on Han’s transformation in the original trilogy from cold-hearted hustler to hero of the resistance. Now Lucas has tinkered all over again, to further muddy the waters.

As seen on new streaming service Disney+, the scene features Han and Greedo shooting at roughly the same moment – to be fair, this is a change introduced several years back. But now, Greedo appears to utter the phrase “MacClunkey!” before succumbing to his wounds.

Reports suggest Lucas made the changes some years ago, perhaps around the time he sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $4bn, in 2012. Celebrities such as Stephen King and Patton Oswalt have speculated about what the re-edit means for the future of Star Wars, though nobody seems to have much of a clue.

Perhaps the line is Lucas’s exhausted, irascible final word on the long-running space saga. Could “MacClunkey!” be Rodian for “screw all this jazz”? Is this Lucas’s surrealist shoulder shrug to a once-rapturous fanbase who appear to have deserted him? Or is he trolling us, while anticipating numerous fresh alterations in the future? What if Lucas or Disney were to totally revise the original trilogy after The Rise of Skywalker is completed, to resolve new plot holes introduced by JJ Abrams and co in the later films? Humanity might have invented real-life interstellar travel by the time we finally stop seeing unnecessary new versions of these decades-old movies.

Disney’s mixed attitude to Lucas and Star Wars should also be questioned. If executives don’t trust the film-maker to get involved creatively in new episodes of the franchise – as Lucas has reported – why has he been given permission to vandalise his older work?

And if Disney doesn’t actually care about upsetting Lucas, why has it failed to deliver the official “de-specialised” version of the original trilogy that many fans would sell their limited edition 1983 Rancor toy (with movable mandible) to view just once before they pass off this mortal coil?

Had Disney+ debuted with the original films in their unaltered state, the service would instantly have become an essential subscription. Instead, we have the pretty middling The Mandalorian and yet another pointless edit to Solo’s first action scene. What a load of MacClunkey.