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The news broke late yesterday. Such an unpalatable bit of information, you wonder why they didn't wait until late on Friday night. Is anyone going to cheer? Was there pent up demand? Was there an overwhelming geek fanbase letter-writing campaign flooding the mail room? We all expected it, and most awaited the inevitable announcement with dread. It would happen one day. The only question was when. Yet, when the announcement came, it wasn't any less painful, any less maddening. And the Internet responded, "as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror." The entire Star Wars series is going to be released to theaters -- beginning with "The Phantom Menace" -- in 2012, one per year, ending with "Return of the Jedi" in 2017... in 3-D! George Lucas has gone back to the well, just like we knew he would.

The increasingly loud voice of criticism is falling on deaf ears. He is magically impervious to our pleading, blind to our lamentations. Lucas, as a man with a basement flooded in money is apt to do, moves to his own drumbeat. In his traditional caution -- always waiting for a new technology to fully insinuate itself -- the announcement comes on the heels of not only a spate of films that have been given the illusory treatment (often when not necessary, and seldom to any great effect), as well as Sony and Samsung launching their 3D-capable televisions, which are undoubtedly the ultimate end market Lucas is aiming toward. A bid, surely, to maximize revenues from mass audiences rather than reward early adopters.

One of the more memorable lines from "Men in Black" is when Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) shows off a collection of up-and-coming alien technology. Holding up a tiny cube, he says, "This is gonna replace CDs soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again."

That's sort of my feeling about Blu-rays in general. I've already purged the domicile of VHS tapes (well, almost all of them) in favor of the DVD format, and now here come the Blu-ray releases en masse, the population having deemed it the newest superformat to prevail in the home entertainment wars. Now, I could bitch and moan about how companies greedily (and let's face it, there's really no other explanation for it) release "bare bones" discs of movies that already exist with bonus features, only to later release the film again with said features -- or even different features -- but we've all felt that pain before. (Some of you may remember, or even took part in, the backlash against New Line when they released "Lord of the Rings" trilogy on Blu-ray -- the theatrical version, not the expanded director's cut which was already available on DVD.)

Fortunately for fans of "Star Wars," the announced Blu-ray discs of the classic trilogy will not be such a skeletal release, and will even include a deleted scene from "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope." But will it serve as a replacement for your current copy of the films? That depends on which "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" you want to see. For the purists, you may wish to continue viewing your copy of the adventure in which Han Solo is the first to fire upon Greedo, rather than the other way around in the digitally enhanced remix -- a re-cut which also includes the insertion of a new scene with a digitally rendered Jabba the Hutt. (The extreme purists will argue that it's all been changed around since the theatrical release anyway, which didn't even include the verbiage "Episode IV - A New Hope" in the immortal scrolling text that opened the film.)

But 3-D? It is a maligned medium, and justifiably so, particularly because of feature films that have the 3D tacked on after the fact, just as is the case here (just see "Clash of the Titans"). The technologies are becoming much more incremental and gimmicky. Lucas is running out of excuses to re-release his once beloved (and now increasingly despised) series. But so long as an audience exists, and people are willing to pay out the cash to see the latest and "greatest" remastering, it will continue to happen. He runs no risk of fragmenting his audience since Lucas has wisely chosen to expunge all previous versions from future releases. "This is the definitive version," we are told. "Pay no mind to what you've seen before. They're not authoritative." With a benign gesture of his hand, he intones: "These are not the movies you are looking for."

Star Wars will always be a generation's touchstone, but each will have a different version, a vaguely remembered halcyon adaptation of yore different from the last one's. This is now guaranteed for one more generation (and surely for future generations as well). What comes next is anyone's guess at the moment, but you can rest assured that there will be a "next". Perhaps Lucas sees himself as a modern Walt Whitman, refining and rewriting his masterpiece, a perfectionist always trying to make something better. But we all see him as a profiteer, an opportunist seeking to exploit our memories for a fistful of dollars more. And I just don't know how much longer we're going to put up with it.