The Uber Nerd in me says the purchase was to secure rights to Star Wars: ANH and the fanfare.

This will also open up the doors for a complete unedited despecialized edition of the original trilogy, not some bad laserdisc scan.

Oh good. Surrendering the entire mythos of the English speaking world to a single, domineering company opposed to freedom of speech and information is totally worth a cleaner copy of Star Wars.

Aw, come now. All those public ___domain fairytales and legends were struggling to gain an audience in the contemporary media landscape without a company willing to take the risk of developing a new presentation and monetizing distribution - with the mere caveat of trapping all those dusty ideas in permanent copyright. We're lucky that our new shared stories will never be I in danger of fading into unpopularity due to copyright not being able to guarantee a framework for for-profit distribution.

Serious question: why do people want this so badly? Just nostalgia? (Too young to have see the OT movies in theaters, so I don't have that)

For me, sticking the cheesy fox logo and fanfare at the beginning of the movies would make them worse, not better.

Another interesting tidbit:

John Williams put the opening theme to star wars in the same key as the Fanfare (b-flat major)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Fox#Logo

He wrote the fanfare too (the one that comes before Star Wars, which was an adaptation of the original).

> cheesy

That's the point. Star Wars was/is an homage to Flash Gordon / Buck Rogers -type serial pulps, and the moviehouse feel of that 20th Century Fox fanfare can't be beat.

People want a re-release of the unaltered OT.

I don't know what you're referring to but I think people want the version where Han shoots first and less of the CGI enhancements that Lucas put into the film over the years.