Filed by KOSU News in Art & Life.
August 31, 2011

The rumor showed up yesterday in places like the site Badass Digest. It’s been covered at io9. Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times wrote that he’s confirmed it with Lucasfilm. What is it? The new Blu-ray editions of the Star Wars trilogy on Blu-ray won’t be out until September 16, but the controversy has already begun.

What happened? Well, the claim is that Darth Vader got some new dialogue in a critical scene in Return Of The Jedi.

As you can imagine, the internet as a whole took this in stride.

No, I’m totally kidding. That is not what happened.

Okay. Spoiler alert, obviously.

What folks are claiming has been added — in addition to the Ewoks blinking, apparently? — is that Darth Vader yells, “NOOOOOO!” as he’s throwing the Emperor over to stop him from killing Luke. (I have a request in at Lucasfilm for comment; I’ll let you know what they say, but I have no reason to doubt Itzkoff, who’s very reliable.)

Cue the commenters! From the Badass Digest post:

“If this is real, it offends me more than any of the other changes [Lucas] made to the OT [original trilogy] up until this point.”

“Good God. What is wrong with that man?”

“I don’t have a Blu-ray, so I was never going to buy this, but now I wonder if there is a way to ANTI-buy something.” [That one is my favorite.]

“That smarmy bastard will get no more of my money.”

And so it goes, over and over, year upon year, as George Lucas makes everyone really mad, and then the new editions of the movies are purchased anyway, and the love-hate, push-pull, will-they-or-won’t-they (oh, they will) relationship that he has with his fans continues to be one of our weirdest cultural phenomena. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]