Fixing Return of the Jedi

Our 5-year old likes Star Wars, and recently completed the first trilogy by watching Return of the Jedi with some judicious fast forwarding through the rancor and the Emperor electrocuting Luke.  It's been a long time since I watched RotJ.  I remembered there being lots of problems with this movie (though the good far outweighs the bad) and I winced through the painful Luke and Leia scene in the Ewok village, as expected, and shortly after Mark Hamill awkwardly zigzag exits somewhere backstage, he's replaced onscreen by Harrison Ford... and the scene just gets *worse*.  The killer is that Leia won't talk to Han about what she's just learned.  This isn't some deadly secret that you can't tell, this is a burden that you share!  The only reason I can imagine why the script doesn't call for her to tell Han at this point is so that they can have that "funny" reveal near the end.


Okay, here's how you get the funny reveal and remove that particularly horrendous scene: Han pilots the Falcon during the attack on the Death Star with Lando as his co-pilot.  It never made sense that two of the rebellion's three best pilots go on a ground assault anyway, so we're fixing that, too.  Leia leads the ground team on Endor.  Chewie goes with Leia because he wants to make sure that Han's not-quite-fiance is safe.  Luke goes because... he needs to start passing on his knowledge to Leia?  Hey, it's still not going to be perfect, but in the fixed version, Luke can tell Leia shortly after feeling he's endangered the mission.  Han reaches the surface and rejoins his friends before Luke can get there, wants to know where Luke is, looks up at the remains of the Death Star, and the reveal proceeds as it does now.