George Lucas defends the whole Greedo shooting first thing

See, I thought one of the benefits of the whole Disney buying Lucasfilm and George Lucas stepping away from the Star Wars franchise was that the big guy himself was going to stop piping up about stuff that riles up the fans. But here he is to remind us all over again about one of the biggest bones of contention from the Special Edition versions of the original films released in 1997: Greedo shooting first.

Lucas tells the Washington Post why he still thinks it was a good idea to digitally alter the original “Star Wars” so that Han Solo gets shot at before he takes down his green-skinned bounty hunter nemesis — complete with a terrible, jerky digital head move. “Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?'” Lucas says. “Because I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] — you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”

Harrison Ford, for his part, has made his feelings on the matter perfectly clear, saying in a 2014 Reddit AMA, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

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