20 years ago, for the 20th anniversary rerelease of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, director Steven Spielberg famously edited the scene where Elliott and E.T. are running from the police to replace the guns in the officers’ hands with radios. The decision makes sense on paper, since it’s weird to have cops waving their guns at a kid and his alien friend, but it always felt like a weird move for Spielberg—since it seems more like something his buddy George Lucas would do anyway.
Speaking at the Time 100 Summit (via Variety), Spielberg says it was “a mistake” to edit out the guns, adding, “I never should have done that.” Spielberg says that E.T. “is a product of its era” and “no films should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily or being forced, to peer through.” And while Steven Spielberg regrets messing with his own movie, he also went on to add that he doesn’t think anyone should ever be doing that to their movies (cough cough, George): “All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like, and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there.”
Spielberg’s comments come as the hot new trend in publishing has become reprinting old works with all of the prickly, poorly aged bits removed, like the books of Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie. (It’s tough to argue with it for the Fleming books if we’re being totally honest, since he had a habit of making James Bond comment on everyone’s race for some reason).
What this really means, though, is that we’ll probably have to wait a long time for some brave soul to make a Special Edition of Jaws where the crummy animatronic shark is replaced with a slick CG model. The soulless, dead-eyed nature of CG creations will actually work this time, because the shark is supposed to have lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… till he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’.
