I Hate You, George Lucas, or How Hollywood is Destroying My Childhood

Today, the LA Times reports that George Lucas, starting in 2012, will begin re-re-re-releasing the Star Wars saga. In 3-D. He will begin with The Phantom Menace, and work his way through the rest of the saga.

I can now officially say it: I hate you, George Lucas, and the Bantha you rode in on.

For years, Lucas has been feasting on the loyalty of fanboys (and girls) all over this galaxy by releasing a million different editions of the same set of films. He won't release the original cuts of the original trilogy, and he continues to shove the prequels down our throats in all their midichlorian glory. Now he is backtracking on his distate for 3-D because he has seen Avatar's success and, most likely, doesn't want to give up his position as highest grossing film series of all-time.

This is just another attack on my childhood memories. My fond memories of my Star Wars bedsheets, melted Chewbacca action figure, and wearing out my VHS copy of Empire Strikes Back are cheapened. Lucas and friends, in their parasitic need to keep sucking my wallet dry, have taken all the touchstones of my childhood and fucked with them like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

Here is my laundry list:

1) Steven Spielberg re-releasing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial with the cursings edited out and all the government goons' guns replaced with walkie-talkies. Heaven forbid a child have a legitimate reason to be afraid of a government agent.

2) The prequels. Everytime I think of them, I am reminded of the time my next door neighbor in the Cal State dorms took a massive shit in front of my door.

3) Re-making The Karate Kid. For about 9/10ths of Will Smith's crapfest, I was thinking: "this is all right, I can live with this." Until Jackie-fucking-Chan gave a fist-bump to Jaden Smith after winning the tournament. Then I remembered: this isn't The Karate Kid! Mr. Miyagi would NEVER have done something so retarded and American.

4) Michael Bay's abominable, inappropriate, racist Transformers franchise. I came up with better stories for the "Robots in Disguise" when I was 7. Bay, in his showboating need to be cool, decided that visuals were more important than story, and took all the joy out of fighting robots.

5) Recently, Perez Hilton released a story that Universal Pictures is considering re-making Back to the Future, starring none other than Justin Bieber as Marty McFly. If this happens, I will make a fucking Delorean of my own just so I can go back to July of this year and kill every damn Universal executive.

Over the last several years, most of my childhood touchstones have been turned into mediocre to down-right lame movies: Garfield, G.I. Joe, The Smurfs, The A-Team, Daredevil, Spider-Man 3. Soon the studio wizards in Burbank and Universal City are going to begin fucking around with Stephen King's The Dark Tower and Back to the Future. I get the feeling there is desire to do no more than cash-in on the nostalgia of Gen-Xers, like me, who want to share these "updates" with their Generation Text kiddos.

So, George Lucas, and all your Hollywood friends: FUCK YOU! You are making me hate the things I love, and I hope you rot in hell amongst your festering piles of money.