A closer look
It takes a special kind of cinematic betrayal to make an English teacher from the Czech Republic spend years of his life digitally erasing terrible 1990s CGI aliens. Because George Lucas aggressively refused to release the original, unaltered 1977 theatrical cuts in high definition, fans had to take matters into their own hands. By painstakingly rotoscoping, color-correcting, and compositing multiple laserdisc and 35mm film sources, they managed to illegally preserve a foundational piece of cinema history that its own creator tried to bury.
