Listen up, George Lucas. Your buddy Steven Spielberg has realized that it’s wrong to alter your work.

E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark are both due for Blu Ray releases, and it looks like alterations made on the DVD will be rolled back. In E.T., guns were digitally removed in favor of walkie talkies while Raiders had a host of minor changes. Spielberg goes on to say:

This is the best I think it’s ever looked, because in preparation for the eventual release on blu-ray we had to correct the print again and get the original negative out of the salt mines, and then we had to do the separations, and basically the files, which are just amazing, with all the technology of today, without changing any of the movie materially, we haven’t removed anything, we haven’t added CGI, there’s no digital enhancements! It’s purely the movie you some of you may remember from 1981.

Yay! And now for the money shot, let it roll, Mr. Spielberg:

For myself, I tried [changing a film] once and lived to regret it. Not because of fan outrage, but because I was disappointed in myself. I got overly sensitive to [some of the reaction] to E.T., and I thought if technology evolved, [I might go in and change some things]…it was OK for a while, but I realized what I had done was I had robbed people who loved E.T. of their memories of E.T. [...] If I put just one cut of E.T. on Blu-ray and it was the 1982, would anyone object to that? [The crowd yells "NO!" in unison.] OK, so be it.

Yes, yes, yes. “Robbed people who loved E.T. of their memories.” That is exactly what George Lucas does anytime he alters a Star Wars print. Come on, please help your friend figure this out. Please? [AllThingsFanGirl via Slashfilm]

blu ray, e.t., george lucas, raiders of the lost ark, star wars, steven spielberg