Opinion: George Lucas' Biggest Mistake With The Special Editions
With the Special Editions, George Lucas introduced countless changes to the original trilogy. Most of them were done to restore the degrading picture and sound quality or add special effect shots that were not possible in the late 70s and early 80s. But some of these changes were more controversial, like adding a digital Jabba the Hutt in A New Hope, whose appearance is, to say it kindly, leaves some room for improvements, or the infamous “Han didn’t shoot first” alteration.
Although I completely understand why fans prefer the original version of that duel (like the CGI Jabba has been altered several times since 1997), this change never bothered me that much. But among the changes that Lucas made to Return of the Jedi are two, which I am not that forgiving.
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The first one is replacing the Yub Nub Ewok celebration song for the piece of music released with the Special Edition version. And although Ewok Celebration and Finale (as Yub Nub was officially called) are far superior to the Victory Celebration/End Title track that has been on all soundtrack releases since 1997, I am still willing to let Lucas get away with this. But I will never forgive him for replacing Lapti Nek with an obscenity called Jedi Rocks.
Lapti Nek was the first “pop song” I ever owned. Maybe that’s why it will always have a special place in my heart. Like all the original trilogy music, Lapti Nek was written by John Williams. The song would be heard as background music in Jabba’s palace, performed in-universe by the Max Rebo Band, consisting of Rebo himself on the red ball jet organ, Droopy McCool on the chindinkalu flute, and Sy Snootles as the lead singer.
Williams arranged the song with his son Joseph and Hardware Wars director/producer Ernie Fosselius. Joseph William also wrote the English lyrics for the song, which was called Fancy Man, even though Lapti Nek translates to "Work it Out” in English.
During the rehearsals with the puppets, the English lyrics were used, as can be heard in the video below, but when it came to recording a temp track with the Huttese words, one of Lucasfilm’s sound engineers, Annie Arbogast, provided the voice of Snootles.
In her early 20s, when Episode VI was made, Arbogast, who later became a singer in a small punk band named Smear and then worked for Pixar, wrote the Huttese lyrics, randomly picking and arranging pieces of Scrabble and Perquacky on her kitchen table.
“They wanted a sound that was a cross between Captain Crunch and Olive Oyl and a parrot stuck in an elephant’s trunk. So I figured I could handle that.”
As a temp track, Lucas and Williams always intended to replace Arbogast’s voice, and so they hired professional session singer Michele Gruska (now a vocal coach) to record the song both in English and in Huttese, using Arbogast’s lyrics. Ultimately Arbogast’s version was kept in the movie when it was released as Lucas had gotten used to it, according to Gruska, because Lucas and Arbogast had become more the just boss and underling, though that was merely a rumor at the time.
Still, Gruska was the woman who had the contract, and her smoother and more polished version of Lapti Nek could be heard on the soundtrack album for Return of the Jedi.
When the movie came out, Lapti Nek was released as a single but never became a hit in the charts. In the same year, Italian disco producer Meco, who had done remixes of other Star Wars songs (including the main title), released his version of Lapti Nek, which wasn’t too different from the music Michele Gruska had recorded. This version wasn’t exactly a chartbuster, but it at least became one of the biggest hits in Thailand in 1983.
Again in 1983, Joseph Williams released his version of the song (called Lapti Nek Overture) under the pseudonym Urth for Warner Brothers. Williams mixed in some other Star Wars melodies written by his father, including samples of Yub Nub, which interestingly also included the voice of Michele Gruska.
But as with many other things in his movies, Lucas was not happy with how the scene in Jabba’s throne room had turned out. First, he was limited by the range of motion (or the lack thereof) that the puppeteers could perform, especially with Sy Snootles, and secondly, he wanted the musical number to be much bigger.
“Originally, George envisioned a large musical number at the very beginning at Jabba’s palace,” producer Rick McCullum said in a 1997 making-of documentary. However, when technology finally caught up to Lucas’s imagination, he used it to completely change the scene where Twi’lek dancer Oola met her fate.
Not only did he replace the puppet Snootles with an entirely CGI-generated version, which allowed much more movement and also synced her impressive lips to the lyrics, but he also turned the small Max Rebo Band into a 12-member ensemble, including 3 dancer girls. Rebo, Snootles, and McCool became mere background characters in this new version, while the main singer became a Yuzzum named Joh Yowza, an alien race originally intended to be the second native species of Endor.
Still, all this could be excused, hadn’t Lucas replaced the song, which exotic and at the same time brooding vibes were so fitting for a place of scum and villainy as Jabba’s palace with an up-tempo rhythm-and-blues number called Jedi Rocks, which might work fine for an upper-class club on Coruscant.
The absolute lowlight of this scene (which – to make matters worse - is also much longer than the original Lapti Nek) is a several-second-long and absolute cringe-worthy closeup inside Yowza’s wide-open mouth. Jedi Rocks is the only scene in the entire Skywalker saga where I’m tempted to push the fast-forward button.
I understand that George wanted to appeal to the MTV generation with the inclusion of Jedi Rocks into Episode VI, but just the fact that you are technically able to do something doesn’t also mean that you also should do it.
Lapti Nek forever!
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Source(s): Den of Geek, original trilogy