Friday, April 22, 2011

Staking Out a Bold Position

It's Star Wars. It's just Star Wars, people. Yes, it was re-released as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, but 28 Days Later was re-released as 29 Days Later when they put it back in theaters with the alternate endings and nobody calls it that. The standard naming convention for motion pictures is to call them by the title they were originally released under, then mention any alternate titles below that for means of convenience (such as Braindead, also released under the title Dead Alive.) Obsessively correcting everyone with, "Actually, it's A New Hope" isn't just pedantic and obnoxious, it's incorrect.

Star Wars. Ask for it by name.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm known to refer to it as "Episode 4", but only if I'm rapidly comparing the various Star Wars films or something where it would otherwise be unclear. Otherwise, yes, it's just Star Wars.

Michael Buntag said...

Amen to that.

A.J. said...

I argued this for the other movies on Wikipedia, whose own naming conventions state that an article should be file under its most common, widely-accepted name. It was the hardcore Star Wars fans/editors who thought otherwise, and won through sheer force of numbers.

Face it, most everyone in the world calls it Star Wars, because that's what it is.