“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 [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] 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.”
– George Lucas, The Hollywood Reporter, Feb. 9, 2012
Like most American men of my generation, “Star Wars” was one of the formative events of my childhood. It might have been a long time ago in a galaxy far away, but in some ways, it was much more vivid and real and glorious than the cold cruelty of a real world where it was 20 degrees below zero and the good guys were always defeated by the black-clad bad guys in the Super Bowl.