I keep hearing this half-baked bullshit about how Lucas altered the OT and won't change them back because of his divorce. Namely, that if he re-released the OT as it was before the Special Editions he would have to pay Marcia Lucas some ungodly amount of money.

If a married couple splits and one spouse has the rights to the family home, he or she can do what they want with it. If they are co-owners, one usually buys out the other -so they can do with the home what they want; OR they sell the home and divide the profits. If one spouse decides to add a room onto the house, the other has no say in the matter. Changing the house doesn't change whether or not someone has a stake in it.

If Marcia Lucas is still co-owner of Star Wars properties, then nothing George Lucas did to change them would change the fact that she has a stake in them, unless he drove Lucasfilm into bankruptcy.

Why do people believe this idiotic horseshit?

Well the rumors are that Lucas altered the original trilogy so his ex couldn't profit off the new SE (Special Edition) release... or something. The source of those rumors also put out some sort of LFL is outsourcing it's work to India... or something. There are too many words that I'm not reading here.

Pabawan weighs in on the outsourcing to India rumor:

[web]http://blogs.starwars.com/pablog/83[/web]

What's this? T-Bone taking an unsubstantiated rumor and running with it? Making baseless assumptions? Then crying "woe is me" when he's called out?

"Wow, Deja Vu."

This could be more a) Idiotic Horseshit b) unsubstantiated rumor c) half-baked bullshit or d) the truth (in whole or in part)

I had heard that GL sold a division of his digital computer co. (now Pixar) to Steve Jobs to finance said divorce .... ?

George Lucas was invested/investing in developing computer graphics technology as early as A New Hope, but it took a VERY long time for technology to develop and become profitable.

Lucas sold part of this division (wich was called Pixar even then) to Steve Jobs.

There is a really good account of what happened in the book "Droidmaker" as well as a really good account of the whole evolution of CGI. It's a great read.