Bluray versions of the six Star Wars films will be released in the fall of 2011, it was officially announced today. And no — not the original versions of Episode #4, #5 and #6 but the digitally tweaked-and-upgraded versions, per the order of George Lucas.

Is there anyone who expected anything else? The man is an animal.

“Perhaps bracing for the reactions of fans who decried some of the changes made to the special-edition films — like, say, an exchange of gunfire between Han Solo and a certain green-skinned bounty hunter — Mr. Lucas said that to release the original versions of these films on Blu-ray was ‘kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good,” a N.Y. Times story reports.

“You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” he added. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.”

In short, Lucas could do the right thing but he doesn’t like the price. With all his toy licensing money?

I’ll buy Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and let it go at that. Which will mean waiting until Signore Lucassimo decided to sell them individually, which will probably be sometime in 2012 or ’13.