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mamawasatesttube · 3 months

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For the fic prompts: 52) “I Wouldn’t Change A Thing About You” with the Souperfam? Thinking about them again (<- Guy who’s always thinking about them)

👉🏾🥺👈🏾

“—in the originals, there were actually five different guys playing Darth Vader! They had the main guy who played him in the full suit, David Prowse, and then his stunt double for a lotta the fight scenes, Bob Anderson, but then his voice was James Earl Jones, obvie. But James didn’t do the breathing! That was another dude named Ben Burtt.”

Across the table, Kon pauses to suck at his milkshake. Kara swings her legs back and forth before hooking her heels back onto the bar on her barstool, humming. He was right; this place has really good fries. And the burgers are solid, too.

“That’s only four guys, though,” she says, counting them off on her salty fingers. “David, Bob, James, and Ben.”

“Yeah! I’m getting there.” Kon grins. He dips one of his fries into the pink swirl of his milkshake (strawberry, because he says he likes everything fruity). Kara wrinkles her nose. That still seems weird to her. But Kon pops it into his mouth, chews, swallows, and continues: “The last guy is Sebastian Shaw. Who was only Vader in two scenes! Although technically you could argue he was never Vader and was only Anakin, if the semantics of that mean anything to you.”

Kara has seen these movies a grand total of once. Very recently. As in, Kon got her to agree to watch all of them this weekend. As in, they finished watching Return of the Jedi about ten minutes before they came here for a late lunch.

“They do not,” she assures.

To her surprise, though, Kon deflates a little. “Oh.” He drops his gaze to the fries left in his basket, then looks up again with a grin that doesn’t seem quite as genuine. “Right, yeah, I’ve been rambling for a while, haven’t I? It’s probably gotta get boring to anyone who doesn’t have these movies literally uploaded into their brain.”

He laughs, but Kara doesn’t join in. She frowns. “I wasn’t telling you to stop,” she objects, and lightly kicks him under the table to accent it. “I was just saying the semantics don’t mean anything to me!” Another kick.

“Stop kicking me,” he pouts, so naturally, she kicks him again. “Linda!”

This time, when her foot connects with his jeans, it freezes in place. Kara gasps, then glares at him. She could probably pull free of his telekinetic grip, but that’d definitely take superstrength, and this diner might not look too kindly on a potential hole in the ceiling. “Let go!”

“Only if you stop kicking me!”

“Then stop pouting and keep telling me movie trivia!”

“You don’t have to say that if you’re getting bored!” Kon huffs. His glasses do nothing to hide the flush on his cheeks. “I know I get rambly sometimes. Blame Cadmus, they’re the ones who made me so good at being annoying.”

He grins again, but Kara’s not buying it. He’s not very slick about hiding that this is an insecurity, is he? He probably thinks he’s being slick. He’s not. It’s endearing.

“I don’t think you’re annoying,” she says honestly. “I like that you get enthusiastic about stuff. I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

And then, because that’s embarrassingly earnest to say to her cousin while they’re in public, she has to follow it up properly, before she starts blushing too. Lightning-quick, she swipes a finger through his milkshake and dabs a dollop onto the tip of his nose. Ha!

Kon squawks. “Linda!” he protests, face even redder. He scrubs his hand over his nose, then licks the melting milkshake from his palm. “Jeez!”

Kara grins at him. “Your move, Conner.” As a concession, she dips one of her fries into her milkshake (simple and plain vanilla), then pops it into her mouth.

Kon huffs at her and makes a big show of rolling his eyes and scrubbing his face with a napkin. “Uncivilized,” he sniffs. But the telltale soft look in his eyes tells her she’s won, even before he opens his mouth. “Anywhoozies. So after the release of the prequel trilogy, George Lucas decided they needed to do some continuity edits on the originals, and there was a rerelease, and…”

#clarkkent-irons #kon #kara #souperfam!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#infodumping is a love language and so is listening to an infodump #superfam

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ooops-i-arted · 3 years

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Child development/Dad-thoughts for Season 2 Episode 8???

Poor little guy. He has to be so terrified and traumatized by the time we see him again - ripped away from his father by scary bad droids, threatened by Gideon and his scary black sword, weakened from using his powers and blood loss, and we don’t even know if he was awake for any medical procedures that surely would have involved his autonomy, personhood, and fears being completely ignored let alone scary ouchy needles/medical tools. It’s hard to gauge how he’s doing since we don’t have the entire picture of what he experienced, although we can assume it had to be terrifying. But when we see him again, he’s patiently sitting by Gideon, apparently having complete faith that Dad will come save him and defeat the bad guy.

I do feel this episode hugely dropped the ball by not showing us Grogu being reunited with Din once Gideon is defeated and Din unshackles him. It’s such an important missing piece - last we saw Grogu was so terrified he was giving in the Dark Side and harming stormtroopers, then he’s sitting (I infer) paralyzed with fear/scared enough to be quiet and still because of Gideon, and next we see he’s tucked in Din’s arms again. How was he feeling to be reunited with his dad? Did Din comfort and reassure him (it would be ooc for Din not to at this point imo)? Did he feel better knowing that Dad came for him after all? Sure, we can infer all that, but it’s a big emotional beat that should’ve been present because it impacts The Big Grogu Moment we get later: Grogu choosing to go with Luke.

I’m not gonna lie, I was really surprised the show went this direction since it seemed like they were setting up Din choosing to keep Grogu as his own and I have my reservations about the story going this way tbh. But I think Luke taking Grogu (for now) does work.

Season 2 Grogu is a much happier, well-adjusted, and more mature child than Season 1 Grogu. Season 1 Grogu was quiet, subdued; he had moments of comfort or testing limits but overall generally made himself less noticeable and was hesitant to indicate his needs or wants to anyone, even Din. Season 2 Grogu is a much more average child; he knows he can indicate what he needs to Din and it will be provided for, even something as the simple emotional comfort of uppies; he chatters more often and isn’t afraid to be more curious, more defiant, and just express himself. In Season 1 Grogu didn’t even ask for food - probably thinking he’d be ignored - he just caught that frog by himself; Season 2 Grogu has a loving dad who tells him “I see you’re hungry, we’ll get you some food.” Season 1 Grogu generally just follows Din around, not wanting him out of his sight but rarely requesting interaction until the end of the season but waiting for it to be offered instead; Season 2 Grogu is always running to Din the second he needs anything. Does trauma magically go away? No, Grogu is still affected. But he’s clearly healing and growing under Din’s care, and having a stable adult in the child’s life is one of the biggest things that can reduce a child being affected by Adverse Childhood Experiences.

Grogu seems to know who Luke is, or at least recognize him as a Jedi. My guess is he did connect with Luke during the Scotty Beam Me Up scene. So it’s not like a stranger showed up to take him away, this is someone he has “met” and “talked to”. And since Grogu has the Force, he can sense for sure that this is a nice person and someone who truly can teach him, which eliminates some of the guesswork you usually get when a kid meets their new teacher/a stranger. So while it looks to Din like some random guy just showed up for his kid, there was more stuff going on below the surface that Din (and the audience) didn’t really see because It’s The Force. So it isn’t like Grogu is being sent off with the first strange Jedi who rolls up (like on Corvus).

Grogu certainly doesn’t act afraid of Luke or anything other than friendly. The only issue is separating from his beloved dad. Grogu will not go unless the person he loves and trusts most in the entire world says it’s okay for him to do so. He goes up to the screen and almost seems like he wants Din to look and show him “This is an okay guy. Look he kills things just like you, Dad.” before pointing and trying to get the adults to open the door. And I definitely got the impression Grogu is calling or otherwise trying to commune with Luke through the Force, telling him “Hey we’re on the bridge, come save us and meet my Dad.” So Grogu is open and willing to start interacting with Luke - as long as it’s okay with Din. (And Din in turn trusts Grogu enough to open the doors when Grogu says it’s cool, this guy is okay.)

The #1 thing that makes Luke taking Grogu work for me is that everyone’s consent is involved. Grogu may be a small child who still needs an adult guardian and guidance in his life but that doesn’t mean he should be carted around without taking his feelings into consideration. This isn’t like a few episodes ago, where Din tried to hand Grogu over without really seeing if Grogu or Ahsoka were okay with it. Luke addresses Grogu directly and treats him like a person, accepting that Grogu needs to be involved in this decision; Luke also addresses Din’s worries and even speaks up on Grogu’s behalf (”He wants your permission”). Grogu is clearly open to the idea of going with Luke - if he didn’t want to, Luke would certainly say so - but also wants to make sure Din is okay with it. And while Din balks at first, once he realizes that Luke can offer Grogu the training he can’t, he gives Grogu permission to go and even gives him a special good-bye so that Grogu knows how much he means to Din. And the face-touch seemed to me, at least, to be Grogu saying, Don’t worry Dad, it’s okay to try and reassure him. And Din tells him in turn “Don’t be afraid.” The separation is hard, but Din and Grogu both realize that Grogu needs to be trained to use his powers safely. They’re willing to do what’s right, even when it’s hard, which takes a lot of emotional maturity. Grogu has certainly grown indeed.

Realistically this probably should’ve taken a lot more time - Din going with Luke to help transition Grogu - but 1. this is a tv show and 2. this is still better than small children usually get in media anyway, since people tend to lump anyone under age 5 as “cute and/or annoying prop for the adult characters.” Also, we the audience know Luke (the real one, not the OOC Rian Jackoff version). We know Luke is compassionate and kind and will take good care of Grogu. If Grogu is troubled by leaving his beloved dad, Luke will do his best to guide Grogu through it, and I personally think that if Grogu ultimately decided this wasn’t for him and wanted Dad? Luke would pack him up in the X-wing and fly him right to Din. So ymmv but Luke training Grogu works for me and I think Grogu is in good hands.

I don’t wanna super go into The Discourse but since I know it’s gonna come up in the fandom and since I am a big Jedi fan, I’ll briefly address the whole No Attachments/Jedi Attitudes thing:

No Attachments refers to No Possessiveness, not You Can’t Love Anyone. The Jedi don’t discourage compassion and love and even family ties, just the whole I’d Commit Genocide For My Loved One (looking at you, Anakin). This post specifically refutes the comments Filoni made in the Making the Mandalorian show and goes into it way better than I could, if you’re interested. I’ll just pull out this George Lucas quote: “But [Anakin] has become attached to his mother and he will become attached to Padme and these things are, for a Jedi, who needs to have a clear mind and not be influenced by threats to their attachments, a dangerous situation.” So Grogu loving and caring about Din isn’t an issue - it’s only an issue when he’s willing to harm and endanger others over it (like choking Cara) or when he becomes so afraid he lashes out without thinking (the stormtrooper free-for-all).

Which is why it’s so important Grogu be trained by someone who knows and understands the power he has. Even if Grogu still decides not to be a Jedi, he needs to know how to control himself and his power so he doesn’t hurt anyone.

Jedi are allowed contact with family and embrace their original cultures as shown throughout Star Wars media. There’s no reason to think Luke will snatch Grogu and never let him and Din see each other again even if Luke did follow the prequel Jedi completely (which he didn’t in Legends anyway, which honestly makes more sense to me since so much Jedi knowledge was lost/destroyed by the Empire).

People have always been allowed to leave the Jedi Order. If Grogu or Din decide “Nope, can’t do this, I want him back” Luke would 100% support them making a decision that works for both of them.

We follow Anakin and Revan because they’re interesting characters and because conflict makes good stories. The Jedi Order didn’t work for them but most Jedi seem pretty well-adjusted so... I don’t tend to think Anakin is really the baseline we should be going by, y’know? Grogu has past trauma but he’s been with people who care for him and listen to him. And not to knock Din at all, but Luke being able to communicate with Grogu is a huge advantage and will actually probably be really good for Grogu. So I think Grogu is in good hands and won’t be Ruined Forever by training as a Jedi.

And of course Din says they’ll meet again. He promised. (And Din & Grogu are Disney’s chief moneymaking duo these days, you want to make your audience worry about your dream team, not break them up permanently.) So I think Grogu will be reunited with his beloved dad. And while the parting was certainly heartbreaking, for now he’s in good hands who will help him continue to grow and thrive.

#i certainly have MANY reservations about how the jedi will be portrayed in the future bc the writers always give htem the shaft but #well that's a worry for another day #friendly reminder this is a pro jedi blog and always will be #the mandalorian #baby yoda meta #baby yoda

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callioope · 4 years

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HEY GUYS! I watched the livestream of Rogue One with writers Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz. I took notes. Because that’s what I DO. I jotted down some of my takeaways. Please note I was watching RO, watching the stream, taking notes, and also doing a few other things so these MAY NOT BE PERFECT. Please feel free to correct me if you see something I misrepresented. That said I tried to be accurate.

YES they DO TALK ABOUT the romantic chemistry between Jyn & Cassian but that is literally at the end, but feel free to peruse the rest of the points because there’s some pretty interesting insights (some good and some bad O_O like Cassian’s original storyline, yuck)

ANYWAYS let’s go

Inglourious Bastards inspired the Lah’mu scene (Gary Whitta wrote this scene, although he admitted it changed a lot but a lot of the structure and ideas stayed in)

In the original version of the script, Lyra was a Jedi in hiding, but this was one of the first things that got killed

Mads thinks he plays a bad guy, but Gary thinks he played a good guy

They talked about how Galen originally wanted to use kyber crystals for energy, but it got weaponized (which is talked about Catalyst)

stormtrooper doll is a gareth edwards touch

idea was that there’d be good people on the Imperial side and bad people on the rebel side

Cassian’s first scene on the Rings of Kafrene was written by Tony Gilroy (who wasn’t present in the stream) later. In the earlier versions, the DS is something that Jyn goes and finds. It was much more like Zero Dark Thirty where she was putting together the clues, and it was a battle for Jyn to get the rebels to take it seriously, but that was too much of a slow burn. So the Tivik scene was to replace that and introduce the idea that Cassian can be dark. Everyone admired Diego’s beautiful bit of acting as he's just lost a little bit of his soul in the fight for justice, the morality is the first victim. It’s very subtle but it’s one of Gary’s fave pieces of acting in the movie

Chris said for awhile they had Ord Mandell, then shifted to the notion of something more like in Casablanca, so a bit of a flavor of that, a part of the Empire that has been taken over that is under violent oversight

Gary said in the original, Jyn went to Ord Mantell (mentioned in Empire?) to find an arms dealer to help her find Saw, then went to another planet where Saw was living on a moon called Yarid

Budget realities played a part in the decision making to scale this back; they wanted to put so much more but just couldn’t fit it in

Originally we were supposed to see the rebels evacuate Dantooine and move to Yavin 4, but it didn’t really accomplish anything in the story accept to nod to SW fans. It didn’t move the story forward and would have cost too much

It was Tony Gilroy writing with Jyn getting freed on Wobani. Some original ideas had toyed with possibilities that she was a deserter or Rey-like scavenger, but obviously you can’t do that once you learn what the the Empire does (chris)

Only time they didn’t use a title card was Mustafar bc they wanted fans to go OH SHIT IT'S MUSTAFAR, also worked bc Mustafar would have been one of those off-the-map planets

Gary was responsible for getting Mothma in the movie

How much did the Yavin 4 briefing get worked on? A lot. sort of inspired by a scene from Apocalypse Now.

“I think this movie really beautifully bridges the gap between the original and prequel” and one of the ways it does that is JIMMY SMITS

Lots of gushing over Yavin. “Gareth just shot the shit out of this movie.” so much praise for Gareth’s vision. “Gareth can compose a shot unlike anyone I know.”

The Yavin 4 set was fully contiguous; you could walk from the inside all the way outside in one continuous shot.

K-2SO is a great example of how one character can have many fathers. John Knoll originally came up with him and he was originally a rebel logistics droid envisioned to be a “black C-3PO” (whatever that was supposed to mean - Gary wasn’t sure). Gary proposed that he could be an Imperial droid that was captured by the rebellion and reprogrammed. K-2 was really limited with what he could do working for the Empire, but once he was liberated, he was going to speak his mind. Chris and Tony and Alan all gave him more life, everyone has a little piece of K-2′s parentage.

Only ever one casting choice for Saw, which was Forest Whitaker. Gary also knew Ben Mendelsohn would be cast as krennic, but no one else was cast at that point -- he knew it was down to 3 choices for Jyn, but wouldn’t say who

Chris brought Bodhi into the story (Gary said so but Chris wasn’t sure)

For Tarkin, they took shots from the ANH and unused takes. There was also a mold of Peter Cushing that had been sitting in a prop shop for decades (I didn’t get what movie it was, something where he needed a large prosthetic eye or something), and they scanned that.

Binoculars that Jyn and Cassian look through on Jedha were inspired from the scene in ANH (like when luke looks through them on Tatooine)

Chris was responsible for Jedha, Temple of the Whills, and Chirrut’s connection to the Force. And Bor Gullet, I think. They said Bor Gullet delights in traumatic memories (more delicious to him). There was a cut idea/scene: Bor Gullet made Jyn trade her traumatic memories for information she wanted.

They talked about the two dudes Jyn runs into that are also in ANH and how they survived the destruction of jedha only to get killed by a Jedi the next day - they must have needed to get a drink at a cantina after narrowly leaving Jedha. Puts their presence at the cantina in a new light.

Screenwriters would tell you this [Jyn saving the girl on Jedha] is a classic “save the cat moment” so that we like that character that otherwise we might not -- like jyn [RUDE, but I think they were joking] [also i took beginner screenwriting in college and YES the “save the cat moment” was like lesson 1 lol

They wanted this war to look like a proper war, and [Jedha] really looks like something you might see happen. Wanted people to feel like it wasn’t just about stormtroopers hassling the guy on the street corner but there were real lives at stake

Commentary on Jyn’s Awesome Fight Scene: this is the first moment Cassian really realizes that Jyn is no one to be messed with

They guessed that Tony came up with the K-2 gag after Jyn’s fight sequence

Lots of good commentary here about how action scenes need to serve a purpose, they can’t just be fighting: they gotta reveal character and story -- don’t write the specifics of the fight, but write what the action is supposed to mean, let choreographers make it look good

Chris said Gareth kind of requested a character like Chirrut, and Chris had been messing around with a Force priest and they became the same guy. Baze was originally a murderer and criminal, and Chirrut was his confessor figure, and they had a weird codependent relationship in which Malbus would commit crimes and Chirrut would forgive him for it. But in this they are both Guardians of Whills. Baze saving Chirrut reminds Gary of Indiana Jones shooting the guy with the sword. Good example of action sequence having a purpose: showing Chirrut & Baze’s dynamic

Coming up with names in SW -- no real formula, you just know it when you hear it

Lots of freedom to come up with new stuff as long as it doesn’t grossly violate canon. Two Tubes was Tony Gilroy or maybe someone just before him

Allegedly Bib Fortuna’s cousin is in scene at catacombs

Someone wanted a Tusken Raider to leave Tatooine to be one of the rebels, but that was vetoed bc they don’t leave Tatooine

“you don’t want every star wars movie to feel like a remix of your greatest hits” - gary [me: LMAOOOO not everyone got that memo!!!]

Guardians of the Whills: Chris said when he came on board, he wanted to go into some deep George Lucas stuff so he looked at the OG screenplay of SW which is pretty “cuckoo bananas” but it’s unfilmable because it’s so gigantic. but there were so many cool things in it. Originally the Force was known as “The Force of Others" by Lucas so he had Chirrut often referring to it as such

There had to be physical tapes because that’s what was mentioned in ANH. Similarly, Tarkin said it was the first time they destroyed a planet in ANH, so they had to do a smaller test that didn’t conflict with canon but we still get to see the DS do it’s thing

Gary said he got sick of everyone on the internet saying “If the empire’s so smart how come--” so he wanted to make it happen for a reason

Chris said - John Knoll, who apparently has some kind of engineering background, said a project the size of the DS, there’d be hundreds of flaws that would bring down the station. Gary responded - it makes sense that there would be a flaw, but it’s more interesting if the flaw would be there deliberately

They went back to the idea that SW was a fairytale and “only one key that the lock fits in in a fairy tale”

They talked a bit about the “nerdy stuff” and technical details, like how fast does a Star Destroyer go, how fast is travel through hyperspace,” but they were pretty insistent that Star Destroyers go at the speed of narrative. Hyperspace moves at the speed of plot. They don’t think about the gritty details. Story always wins. You try to hide those bits. If tech stuff comes into conflict with story, the story has to win. If you can make it work great, but story should win otherwise. [MY TAKE: I think it’s lazy and you might as well try to make it work if you can, BUT I agree that it shouldn’t necessarily hang up the process, per se.]

They talked about Jyn & Co witnessing the test on Jedha and how it’s important that Jyn & Co witnessed the terrifying destructive power of this weapon, so they know better than anyone how important it is to stop this thing

They said Saw always died in the weapon test. Originally it was on a different moon, but always planned for him to die like that.

Gary mentioned in ANH, there’s more than one empty chair in the DS conference room, but Gary wished there had been only one chair so it could have been Krennic’s specifically and he wasn’t in it.

The idea was that Mothma and other Generals were desperately trying to avoid a war and trying to find a political solution to this crisis, but Palpatine is stringing them along long enough for the DS to be ready. So the Rebels have been strung along and played for fools by Palpatine, but once we realize the Empire has built a genocide weapon, the Rebels finally wake up to the idea that the only solution now is war. Empire has forced our hand. the movie is about the idea that tyrannical regimes always fall bc they go too far and they do something so terrible that people are forced to stand up and fight back. If the empire had never built the DS, Gary thinks they could have won the war and ground the Rebellion down. but bc they got greedy they forced the entire galaxy to take the war seriously, so the DS was really the Empire’s undoing

The Rebellion was like the equivalent of the Second Continental Congress, with squabbling factions and not able to get anything done, and the Empire was able to win in the beginning bc they are authoritarian, unified top down

Gary came up with Eadu, but it was originally in the first act. The whole movie got restructured. Originally they went to Eadu very early and discovered they were building the giant dish for the DS. That was the first scene that Jyn had the clue that the Empire was building something terrible. Later it became less a place where the dish was built and more just where they were harvesting and refining the kyber crystals.

It was originally Saw’s X-Wings that attacked Eadu

“rain = mood” idk who said it but that line popped

originally there were local people called Eadui who told story how facility had poisoned rivers and valleys and farmland. Gary wanted to put a face on the crimes the Empire had committed

Mads doesn’t believe that what Galen did absolves him

In Gary’s version, Krennic came to inspect final version of the dish

Cassian was always meant to be compromised in both Gary and Chris’s versions. He was a double agent: for a long time, he was working for the Empire. Chris added: he had lost people who had been killed by Saw Gerrera, and all he wanted from the Empire was the go ahead to kill Saw rather than Galen. That transmogrified along the lines post-Chris and post-Gary into a rebel intelligence officer who had done terrible things. In the original idea, he changes heart after seeing the Death Star bc it wasn’t what he signed up for, and he had to win back Jyn’s heart bc that DS reveal happens after his double agent ness is revealed.

In the original, Jyn actually gets Galen back to the rebel base, but he’s beyond saving, but his whole speech he gives Jyn in his last moments happened in a medbay

They talked about the score instead of the awesome fight scene after Eadu so BOOO on that. I mean yes the score is brilliant but still I wanted insight into this scene.

I blanked out a little because I was mad they didn’t talk about the Eadu fight scene argh

They were talking about Krennic standing his ground against Vader. and then someone said it was probably something among the Imperial officers that “you haven’t really made it until you’ve been choked by Vader.” O_o sorry we could be talking about Jyn and Cassian DAMNIT

the debate scene on Yavin 4 was recontextualized. always this idea that the rebellion is not one monolithic entity, it’s a collection of worlds all of whom have own leaders and own opinions. rebellion historically messier because it’s democratic and harder to get things done.

briefly toyed with a Leia appearance (chris) at the big conference scene, but best for Jyn to give the most rousing speech here.

Who wrote the hanger speech? Spirit of it might be Chris’, but Chris thinks it’s Tony Gilroy. Big difference from version Gary wrote: Jyn convinced the rebels. But he thought it was cool now that Jyn goes rogue and it’s only when Mothma finds out she’s committed to that that she makes the decision to back her up. But in the original she convinced Mothma, and everyone got around the table and said here’s the plan. Chris thinks it was in one of his drafts that they went off on their own.

in Gary’s version Jyn was Rogue Leader.

Chris had grunts complaining all the flyboys create dramatic names for their squadrons but that got nixed

Gary had idea that K-2 had scraped off his markings but had to have them painted back on to go to Scarif and K-2 hated it

Mothma talking to Bail is one scene that survived word for word form Gary’s original script

They talked a little bit about the decision to have the characters die, but I was drafting a question and missed it

They talked about how they came up with Scarif and decided to make it tropical -- what sort of place hasn’t been seen before? sort of coming from production and gareth. but also building these places to fulfill the needs of the story -- like building a walkway that only one person can get across

a lot of extras in Scarif were real ex-military, and Gary said a couple of the X-Wing pilots were real-life RAF tornado pilots

didn’t have Blue Squadron in the ANH bc it interfered with the blue screen

Gareth said “give me a mon calamari that looks like churchill’ and that’s Raddus

Chris and Tony killed pretty much everybody. Sounds like Gary just killed K-2? Unclear bc I missed the main part of that when they were talkinga bout it.

They commented on how RO is one of the darkest tonally movies but also so colorful, beautiful blue sky

They wanted to pay tribute to Battle of Endor

they couldn’t remember who was responsible for ‘stardust’ but it wasn’t gary or chris

who’s idea was it to cut off the “I’ve got a bad idea about this”? gary had a different version of it, Jyn said “I've got a good feeling about this” (which ultimately got used in Solo)

Someone asked about the footage in trailer that wasn’t in the movie: Chris heard on good authority that the TIE fighter in front of Jyn was actually never intended to be used, was always a trailer-specific moment. he said he didn’t know how she would have gotten out of that one. k-2 died on the beach. chris wasn’t sure but as the scenes get cut together in production and post, the narrative necessities can change bc of logistical needs. but some shots were so cool they were perfect for trailers. Some talk on how trailers and movies are very different things in general.

Gary said originally there were two separate facilities on Scarif: vault and comm tower were separated by stretch of beach. so needed to liberate plans from vault and get across beach to tower. as they looked at what they had, there were too many moving parts and they wanted to simplify, so they put vault and tower in same complex.

did they ever consider letting Chirrut pull the lever using the force? NOPE.

“I am one with the Force and the Force is with me” was Chris. it goes on, it’s supposed to be like a psalm for Jedi, but eh wanted a sort of lord’s prayer type of thing.

HELL YES someone asked about the romance between Cassian and Jyn! Was there any romantic potential in any script? YES!!! they said!! yes!!! And Chris said he wouldn’t be surprised if a kiss was shot either!

BUT they went on to say they wanted to side-step the trope that every male and female hero have to be involved.

But clear GARY said yes early on, there was definitely romantic chemistry that got scaled back to a mutual respect, but they’ve obviously grown close. Gary doesn’t think there was anything romantic and they said people found that refreshing. ‘what they’ve been through is the meaningful part” and “‘the stuff that is happening around them is too important" and “it speaks to their character that they wouldn’t let that intrude”

someone said it was like they were walking into a sunset but it was a mushroom cloud and THEN someone QUIPPED that it was sorta like the sunset walking into them RUDE

There was more after that but that was pretty exhausting to keep up with!!!! so i’m wiped. anyone else get any fun takeaways that I missed?

#rogue one

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back-and-totheleft · 3 years

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"Hollywood rabble rouser"

Late one night in the summer of 2008, I found what turned out to be a stockbroker’s iPhone in the back of a NYC taxi. Turning it on in order to contact the owner, I noticed that amongst the stock watch apps and currency converters was an icon of Gordon Gekko, the corrupt market raider immortalized by Michael Douglas in Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s 1987 tale of insider trading and corporate excess. Intrigued, I hit Gekko’s pixilated face (it felt good) and a website flashed up with an entire transcription of his infamous “Greed is good” speech — one of Hollywood’s most iconic parables to the pursuit of unrestrained greed. Whoever owned the phone found those words as important as checking Facebook or texting his girlfriend. Gekko was his hero, his daily inspiration.

Watching back Wall Street a few weeks later as news of the Lehman Brothers collapse and global recession spread, it struck me that a whole generation of financiers must have grown up, like Charlie Sheen’s character Bud Fox, yearning to be Gekko. He was the business equivalent of a rapper wanting to become Tony Montana, another Stone creation. And some of these brokers, as we’ve all since discovered, were willing to trade money that didn’t exist in pursuit of pin stripe suits, corner offices, penthouses, boats, women, and stacks of cash. Perhaps the perks made the 22-year prison stretch Gekko received at the end of the film seem like a viable risk. Or they deliberately chose to ignore his downfall.

Inspired by financial fiends like Bernie Madoff, Stone decided to spring Gekko out of prison for Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. Set in 2008, he is a reformed character that tries, and fails, to warn business leaders of the impending credit crunch. Many fans are understandably nervous about Douglas reprising his Oscar winning role, especially since his hair gel and brick phone have long been put into storage. Stone, who only agreed to direct the film because he felt that current financial climate lent itself to a sequel, understandably feels that it’s time for bankers to grow up. As the director of Natural Born Killers, JFK and Platoon he’s used to Marmite reactions. But, after giving Dubya an easy ride in W, will Gordon 2.0 be one step too far? Is the world ready for goody Gekko two shoes? Or will traders across Wall Street be deleting their “Greed is good” iPhone bookmarks forever? As they say on the stock market floor, let the bull charge.

Tim Noakes: When you were 18 your father got you to work on a financial exchange in France. Was that your inspiration for Wall Street?

Oliver Stone: No, it was a great summer job actually, because it was very exotic. My father was always into the stock market, into numbers. He loved that world in New York and I grew up on the fringes of it but I wasn’t particularly attuned to it. So it was a chance to see it first hand but I didn’t do very well as a trader. In those days you’d run from the phone booth in the back to the floor. It was cocoa and sugar. It was violent and busy. They used to elbow each other to get into the inner circle, like matadors. It was a real crush. I elbowed my way through it and got up to be assistant buyer, which was very complicated because you had to make the orders for everything right. You couldn’t screw up. A lot of money’s involved. So then I thought I should be one of the cocoa buyers. I was a little too ambitious for my own good.

Your father died before you made Wall Street. What do you think he would have made of it?

I think he would have appreciated that I had done a business movie. We always talked about it. He loved movies and he took me to them. We discussed them afterwards, which was an invaluable experience, and he would say that there weren’t many business movies. And there weren’t. There was not a specific genre. Hollywood was not into the business movie concept. It’s hard. I can understand why. It’s all financial talk, it’s not interesting to most people and it lacks those human emotions. Money is an interesting subject, however, for America. That’s why I addressed it in 1987. I thought, ‘Americans love money’, and what lengths they will go to get it is what that movie is about. Especially coming off Platoon, which is a different kind of movie. I was trying to prove that I could do something domestic with ‘Wall Street’.

The original was very much of its era.

It was the era of “Greed is good” and Reagan. With Wall Street 2, I’m obviously more mature, I’ve done more films, I have more confidence, I hope. I’m trying something a little bit deeper in the relationship field. There’s no Darryl Hannah in the movie. There’s a real English girl this time (Carey Mulligan). She anchors strongly the emotions of the film, because she is damaged. She’s the daughter of Gordon Gekko, if you can imagine what that can be like.

Michael Douglas once said that your style of directing is like taking people into the trenches. What did he mean by that?

He makes it sound like I dress him up in uniform and have a military hierarchy. Every single actor that I’ve worked with, and there’s obviously dozens now, you’d have to talk to every single one of them to get their perception. I would say some would disagree. Maybe Michael, because he hasn’t been in the military, would regard it as a military experience. I didn’t think of it that way. I think of a movie as an organisation that has to work at a very fluid pace involving a large amount of people who have to move quickly over a landscape. Call that what you will. It could be an adventure party or a military organisation. It’s really a satellite business. You form, you group, you rehearse, you shoot, you separate. It’s very nomadic. In that chemistry you bring together so many conflicting types of people who have different kinds of egos. It’s quite a mix. At the end of the day, if you look back at the — what is it? 19, 20 films — that I’ve directed, it’s just a mix of styles. Sometimes it really works with people. It clicks. I think Michael did great work on both films, so I’m very pleased with his result. My style might not have been good for him, but it works for other people. Some people, like Shia LaBeouf and Josh Brolin, were digging it. They loved the way I worked because it was intense and to the point and relatively fast.

Do you see yourself as a hard taskmaster or a disciplinarian?

No, I’m not a disciplinarian. I’m disciplined with myself and I think I try to lead by example not by imposition of my will. I try to lead by example. That’s just to say that people know that I’m trying to get this thing done. My approach is that we’re all in this together. The idea is king. We all serve that king. It is not a democracy, it is a constitutional monarchy, so to speak, with strong legislative power in the House of Lords. No, but the idea is king. I repeat that. Not the director. The idea. I serve the idea.

How do you balance the logistics with trying to create a piece of art?

Oh boy, if I didn’t tell you I wasn’t humbled so many times, you would not believe it. It’s a very humbling experience to make a movie, because you’re at the mercy of the elements. Of the winds and the weather as well as conditions that can go wrong — disease, sickness, bad tempers. All sorts of stuff can happen. Given that nature, to pull off a movie is extremely difficult. The editing room is another humiliation. All your mistakes are thrown back in your face. No matter how many good choices you make, and making a movie involves thousands of choices, you’re constantly having to question yourself again. I find it a very difficult position. I don’t think I enjoy it. I think I’m more experienced at it but I don’t think I completely enjoy it. I think sometimes it’s so painful you want to scream bloody murder and run somewhere.

What’s the cut-off point? How do you stop?

How do you stop? A famous director once said that every film is abandoned, never finished.

So you just let it go?

Some people won’t but I do let it go. I’m not looking for perfection. I don’t believe in it. I believe that a film is many things to many people and it changes over time. I think you have to feel good about it and about what you did. It hangs together and it’s going to be a story that can move an audience. It’s so difficult to pull off quickly. It takes time.

The world’s moved on since Wall Street. Were you apprehensive about creating a sequel to such a well-loved film?

Apprehensions? No. I’d have had more apprehensions if I’d had to do it in 1990, I think. Twenty-three years is a long time to call it a sequel. I think of it more as a bookend.

Don’t you think that’s laying you open for even more criticism? Look at what George Lucas did with Star Wars..

We’re not going back into that period. The beauty of this thing is that there’s a new period upon us, which is quite different, technically. It’s a different kind of Wall Street. The landscape has changed. It’s no longer 1987. It’s really a computer game now. The money has accelerated at a square root that is beyond belief from millions to billions. Hedge funds invest 30–40 billion dollars. Even to have one billion dollars is an enormous amount of money. When you hear these guys say, “Oh, it’s just a billion dollar hedge fund” it’s unbelievable arrogance. The heights are dizzying, and the losses are dizzying. It’s just unbelievable what happened. By all accounts it was a near-fatal heart-attack.

Were you planning on revisiting Wall Street is the crisis hadn’t happened?

No, that was the catalyst for it. It wasn’t the only reason. It was a wonderful idea for a script, that Gekko would be a different type of person. That he would start from the outside. He didn’t have power or connections anymore. Time had passed. He was dated.

Is Michael Douglas in danger of becoming a pastiche of what made Gordon Gekko good?

I feared that. That’s why we approached it in a wholly different way. Michael is playing it twenty-two years older, he’s coming out of prison. Michael has changed in that interim. He was a charming rogue, certainly, in the Eighties. You saw a lot of that in his subsequent performances. You saw a lot of Gekko in later films, so I think it was smart to move away from that pastiche, as you call it, because it would have been boring after a while. There are flashes of the old Gekko, which I love, but it’s not like the charming reptile, so to speak. It’s a different man now. I’m not saying that he’s a wholly reformed figure looking for a martyrhood, but what’s interesting about him is what he’s going to do, and how he’s going to play the game to get back. He has suffered extensively in prison, his family has fallen apart, his oldest son has committed suicide. It’s very tough on him.

How did you persuade Michael to get back on board?

Frankly, I didn’t convince anybody. I passed on the script in 2006. It wasn’t important for me to make it. I felt, what was the need to make this movie if it was going to glorify the pigs on Wall Street? They were really making money and it was ugly. There was a spate of books too like The Wolf of Wall Street, which was a big hit and they are going to make a movie out of that. There was kind of a surfeit and there was sickliness to it all. I got turned off by it. I passed, and I moved on with my life, and I did W and World Trade Centre and stuff like that. Then there was this crash and the crash changed the equation I think, I hope.

Do you think the original message of Wall Street failed because young traders ended up idolising Gordon Gekko?

That’s a very good question. Frankly, I wondered at times. The original Wall Street came about because of my experiences on Scarface. I was living in New York and I was hanging out with the dealers and the mob. That whole scene in Miami was a very shocking thing in 1982–3. Wall Street, was like Scarface north. I was suddenly seeing people my age, in their twenties, making millions of dollars, so easily, so quickly. Moving inordinate amounts of money. Also, snorting and drinking. The partying scene had really kicked in big time in the 80s. It was all new to me, so that’s how that was born. Then it went to excess. But I was very clear that Gekko was the antagonist in the movie, but as you say a lot of young people caught on to him. I do think, and perhaps I’m retrograde, that although he was not feted at the time the anchor of the movie is Charlie Sheen.

But no-one wanted to be Bud Fox.

Well that’s the movies. They want to be heroes. They want to make money. I did meet a lot of people in their 40s that said, “When I saw your movie I was studying this-or-that at this-or-that school, I was going to do history or medicine or law but then I saw the movie and I moved to Wall Street for that reason.” The the kicker was that some of them were multi-millionaires, one of them was a billionaire, and they had moved to Wall Street because of the movie. I said, “Oh boy, I wish I had a royalty on that.” These guys are really rich.

I find that quite worrying.

I gave birth to some rich people. But some of them did good. Some of them created something. That was the whole point of the original. Not to shit on Wall Street but to basically say, ‘Look, this is an engine of capitalism’. This can work. My father always felt that Wall Street was a good thing. It creates companies, it finances new companies, creates research and development, and it does. It still does, by the way, it’s not forgotten but it’s been buried in the greater picture of making bigger profits and more greed, but it’s still there. Wall Street is a good thing. It was a good thing and it can be a good thing.

Throughout your career critics have said you shouldn’t glamourise the people you put on the big screen. Do you like to provoke that reaction?

No, I like to make bigger-than-life characters but ‘World Trade Centre’ is about two very ordinary men who were real heroes. On Bush I guess you could say I supped with the devil and brought out all the reasons I thought why people voted for the guy. There is this fundamental thing which Americans like in him, and I was trying to root that out and how he became President.

You were criticised for making Bush too likeable.

You can fault that, but he was re-elected. I didn’t like him. I was very clear — I empathised. Empathy means I walked in his shoes, or tried to. As opposed to sympathised. I don’t agree with anything he said. Anything. I think he was a disaster. It was a nightmare eight years.

Do you think you were too soft?

No. I wish I’d done it a year earlier and it would have been more timely. He was out of favour when it came out, because of the economy, but frankly the movie was about the national security state which concerned me more.

Why are you drawn to these anti-heroes?

They don’t do me any good. Nixon, too.

I see a lot of similarities between Tony Montana and Gordon Gekko. In Scarface, Tony says “You need people like me to point the finger at and say, ‘That’s the bad guy’”. Do you think film critics see you in that light?

I think you’re right. I think film critics have me as a punch ball. It’s an easy target, I guess. I’ve been misidentified with the characters, but I think over time you see that there’s a whole assortment of different characters. But I agree, I think that’s true and I think that’s hurt me. It’s hurt my career as well as some of the political statements I’ve made and positions I’ve taken in documentaries I’ve made. They’ve hurt me too and they’ve given me a profile that’s not necessarily me, it’s just a profile. Absolutely.

There’s been huge furor recently that you’re reported to be attempting to humanise Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong.

I think it’s out of context. I did use the word ‘scapegoat’ and I think that was an unfortunate word, but frankly it’s a very interesting history that we’re putting together. We’re using the facts that we have, that are known but have been forgotten. There’s no question that Hitler had a big hand up the ladder. He didn’t come out of nowhere. He is a Frankenstein, he is a monster and I have no sympathy for him, but he was created by a Dr Frankenstein. That Dr Frankenstein is a very interesting mixture and you have to study cause and effect to understand history, otherwise you don’t learn anything from it. It’s my fault because I’m interested in the world, and I’m willing to go out there. I’m not trying to provoke, I’m trying to look for the truth. I’m trying to shine a light. For Christ’s sake, I feel like we’ve become so politically correct that you can’t do shit anymore. You’re not supposed to turn around.

Do you feel like you sometimes exploit sensitive subjects too much? More than some people can take?

Well, that’s why I like the English. They’re much more out there and they’re willing to explore subjects that the Americans are not. Having been to war, having seen the devastation America visited onto Vietnam, I cannot just be another typical American and live in isolation. My taxes are going as we speak to blowing up people in Afghanistan. I don’t feel good about that.

Back to Wall Street. Gekko says “Every dream has its price”, what’s the biggest price you’ve paid to get to where you are?

I’d have to talk to my psychotherapist, who I haven’t seen in ages. I suppose the price is that you do have long absences from home and normal quotidian values, at times. Your children grow up and you have to readapt to the fact that you haven’t been the attentive father. That’s a big issue, but I have been as attentive as I can be in taking care of them. Still, there’s gaps there. Divorces have happened. Those things.

I see Wall Street as epitomising the ruthlessness of the Eighties. During that era did you find yourself being a slave to the success that you had earned?

Yeah, I suppose everybody can become a mental slave to the need to produce. Remember, I was on a roll in the sense that I had to get financing for very complicated movies. I felt like I had a mission. To get JFK made in that era was very tough, still. You need heat. To make that movie after The Doors you need to keep rolling. In a sense I worked very fast, and hard, but I knew that I could get things done. Nixon was sort of the end of the line. I was making movies all those years. Platoon was impossible to get made. So was Salvador. Every single fucking one. ‘The Doors’. They were always problems. There were always tremendous issues. You asked what the price is? The price was to keep going fast, before they change their mind. The idea was ‘Wrap it up, get another one done’. These are tough subject matters. With ‘Nixon’ I’d done eleven or ten, I was exhausted. Frankly, I needed to take a break.

What kept you moving on? Obviously the pressures that you’re talking about manifested in different ways. You had your drug problems earlier on, but how did it manifest when the financing started to crumble down? Did you resort to those kind of vices?

I think there’s other factors. There was a lot of living. A lot of pain. Children. Divorces. This and that. But I think I have been very successful. I got movies made that wouldn’t have been done in the normal radar. They were not on the scope.

In Wall Street 2 Shia LeBeouf says, “No matter how much money you make, you’ll never be rich”. With all your success, do you empathise with that sentiment?

Of course I do. I don’t think money is the solution to happiness. Life is complicated, but certainly money can have the opposite effect. It can make you unsatisfied with life, and make life harder for you. There are two effects of it. One is that it leaves you unsatisfied, you always want more, as we see from these billionaires. Two, it leaves you falsely content and over-satisfied.

And you’re not either?

I don’t feel that way, no. I feel like I’m one trade away from disaster.

The new film is called Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. What gets you off to sleep?

What gets me off to sleep? Sonata. Medication. I’m just joking. The best solution for sleep is having lived a full day and tried hard to live life fully. That makes you feel the reward of sleep.

-Tim Noakes, "The Hollywood rabble rouser sets his sights on a new generation of Wall Street wolves," Medium, Mar 3 2010 [x]

#medium #tim noakes #w.#wall street #wall street: money never sleeps #oliver stone

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giveamadeuschohisownmovie · 4 years

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Since I got Star Wars back on the mind, I wanted to share just a little realization I had when it comes to the franchise in general.

So, the OG trilogy will always be the best to me (although Rogue One is my favorite overall movie). When it comes to the prequel and sequel trilogies, my feelings are a lot more mixed. They’re both bad but they’re bad in their own unique ways.

I’d say the prequel trilogy is��“auteur bad”. A lot of the stuff that people hate about episodes 1-3 came from George Lucas who, even though he did bring the franchise to life, is not that great a writer. Like, there are plenty of great moments in the prequels, but there are also lots of cracks in the writing. Dialogue is spotty, especially in episode 2 (“I don’t like sand”), lots of questionable plot development (Anakin built C-3PO and midichlorians), and the story is a bit underdeveloped (Anakin being the “chosen one” comes out of nowhere).

For the sequel trilogy, I’d say those movies are “corporate bad”. It varies from movie to movie so here are my observations in simplest terms. Episode 7 is stuck in nostalgia-mode and is clearly banking on people’s love for the original trilogy in order to sell this new movie. It’s almost as if Disney and JJ were afraid of making risks (aside from killing Han) so they made a relatively safe movie. Episode 8 is the outlier since I’d say that movie was “auteur bad” due to a lot of the decisions coming from Rian. But then we get to Episode 9, which goes back to “corporate bad” since that movie was just JJ Abrams and Disney doing damage control for the previous movie.

I think this is why I prefer the prequels to the sequels. Look, I never thought I’d ever be defending the prequel trilogy since I still don’t think they’re good movies (Attack of the Clones is borderline unintentional comedy) but at least those movies had some sense of...creativity? Freedom? It’s hard to describe but I feel those movies had a lot of potential to be great but were hampered by mediocre writing. Like, you could tell that George Lucas had this great story in mind but he needed someone to help him bring it to life (the exact reason why the OG trilogy is great since it wasn’t just Lucas who was in charge).

Meanwhile...was there ever a great story in mind for the sequel trilogy? I mean, the sequels had their moments but the overall story feels so aimless. Ep 7 is too generic and nostalgia-heavy to stand out on its own, Ep 8 had some interesting ideas despite some questionable plot decisions, and then Ep 9 backtracked on the previous movie in an attempt to cool down the flames in the fandom. I don’t know, maybe I’m just jaded but I feel the sequels could’ve been great if they had someone like George Lucas plotting out the entire trilogy. Or, fuck, it didn’t even have to be Lucas, they just needed a Kevin Feige-type leader making sure that the story flowed and that each movie built on the previous one.

TL;DR Prequels needed more hands in the kitchen, sequels needed less hands in the kitchen (or at least a head chef managing the team)

#star wars #star wars discourse #George Lucas #star wars prequels #star wars sequel series #the phantom menace #attack of the clones #revenge of the sith #the force awakens #the last jedi #the rise of skywalker #prequel trilogy #sequel trilogy #star wars prequel trilogy #star wars sequel trilogy

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gffa · 4 years

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hi! i recently rediscovered a star wars fanfic i started when i was 14 and madly in love with ahsoka and have been using quarantine to update it. i was wondering what, in your opinion, would have had to change in order to avoid the jedi genocide? my ideas were a) pro jedi propaganda b) anakin receiving adequate support during his breakdown so he doesnt have to rely on palpatine c) palps dying/being fully incapitated d) a secondary temple to which the vulnerable can be evacuated but idk

re: my last message: of course deactivating the chips and ruining palpatine politically would have been extremely effective too but i have no idea how they could have pulled that off? they really were in a terrible situation

Hi! I think pro-Jedi propaganda/PR was probably the biggest thing + getting Palpatine out of the way somehow.Even with contingencies, one of the biggest problems, aside from the general public being apathetic towards their democracy and it being a story about how the Senate/general public handed themselves over to a dictatorship, is that Palpatine was there to undermine everything that was being done to bring the Republic and the Separatists to peace.Yes, he was orchestrating corruption and apathy that were already there, but without him, Bail and Mon and Padme and the other Senators who were really working at this would have had a chance.That’s the first and most important thing that needs to change.Without that, I think Anakin would have had a really strong chance--the problem isn’t that he wasn’t offered help, because he very much was. The Jedi way is analogous to real world therapeutic ways, but even George Lucas has talked about how Anakin didn’t want to accept Jedi sentiments and beliefs. He wanted to listen to Palpatine telling him he was more special than anyone, that holding onto his anger was valid, that his fears about not being trusted or appreciated were right.Even Padme poured every ounce of love into him that she could and it still wasn’t enough, he still turned on her, he still believed that she would betray him without even giving her a chance to say anything but, “No!” We see in TCW that he refuses to believe that she doesn’t have feelings for Clovis because she won’t prioritize Anakin’s feelings about not wanting them to work together over the good she can do by working with Clovis.Nothing was going to be enough for Anakin so long as he had someone who was dripping poison in his ear. Whether this means he would have recommitted himself to the Jedi Path or if he would have left to find some other life, it’s hard to know, but I think he would have found it, had it not been for Palpatine. (This doesn’t absolve him of his choices that he made on his own, just that I think the temptation of Palpatine’s manipulations were too much for him to resist.)Ultimately, I think it’s easy to say the Jedi being aligned with the Republic is what caused their genocide and that’s not wrong, because it is what happened, once the government became more corrupt than it was good. But cutting ties with the Republic isn’t going to do much good, either, except to save the lives of the existing Jedi, though, their ability to help anyone on a bigger scale is now fucked. They will have no negotiating power, they cannot represent the Republic, so they cannot be called in to handle disputes, they cannot chase after criminals except as bounty hunters because they have no legal authority, as well as the question of, “So where does the money to fund them come from?” because the people who most need their help are going to be the ones who can’t pay them.Which brings it back to--they need a less corrupt government, which needs to be Palpatine getting taken out. Even Anakin’s role in things wasn’t really a determination in whether the Jedi would face genocide or not--had he stayed loyal, the entire clone army still would have marched on the Jedi Temple and it still would have fallen.The clone chips are the other big thing, because it doesn’t matter if the public is on the side of the Jedi or not if the clones don’t have a choice about following those orders, if their entire free will and minds are taken from them. Palpatine could use them as an army to take over and, once everyone was dead, spin whatever story he wanted, and as long as no one was there to really dispute it, history is written by the victors and all that.So, get Palpatine out, get the chips out--they almost discovered them, until the evidence was destroyed and they had no breathing room left to investigate further, but it depends on where you’re starting your fix-it from. The earlier in the war, the more breathing room they have and the more the Republic vs Separatists isn’t as contentious or propaganda-laden as it is, the more Padme and Bail and Mon have a chance to actually push good legislation through.Honestly, my answer has always been: Kill Palpatine off, put Bail Organa in as Interim Chancellor, keep a lot of the emergency powers to forcefully root out the corrupt Senators, push better legislation through, then shave off the emergency powers after things have stabilized between the Republic and the Separatists. (I would suggest Padme, but I don’t think she wanted it. And Mon wasn’t in the right headspace for it yet, the Rebellion is what really tempered her into steel. Bail was really the driving force of those proto-Rebellion meetings, imo.)The rest of the stuff with the Jedi would sort itself out, once they had some breathing room and were no longer drafted into a war that was stretching them too thin. (As always, it’s your fic, do what makes you happy with it! But that’s how I would approach it. ♥)

#anakin skywalker #jedi order #meta #Anonymous

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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What Went Wrong With Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze?

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The story of how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles went from underground comic book to the highest grossing independent film of all time is the stuff of Hollywood legend. But ask producer Tom Gray about the sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, and you are likely to hear an altogether different tale. One of a frantically rushed production, censorship backlash and a change of director and direction. Actors were replaced, there were clashes with the comic book creators and a series of strange and unusual characters were added to the mix – including Vanilla Ice.

Gray was head of production at Golden Harvest, the Hong Kong studio behind martial arts classics like Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, when comedian-turned screenwriter Bobby Herbeck first approached him about a live-action film adaptation of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s cult comics.

It’s fair to say he took some convincing.

“I hated the idea. I thought it was stupid,” Gray tells Den of Geek. Undeterred, Herbeck pestered Gray for months until the Golden Harvest chief had a sudden change of heart.

“I had an epiphany and thought we could just put stunt guys in turtle suits and make all our money in Japan. That was why I was interested; making it low budget. It escalated when Steve Barron came onboard.”

Barron had made his name with groundbreaking music videos for Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and A-Ha’s “Take on Me” and sold Gray and TMNT creators Eastman and Laird on his vision for the movie.

More importantly, he enlisted the late Jim Henson and his legendary Creature Shop to bring the Turtles to life using state-of-the-art animatronics, which came at no small expense.

Even so, Gray found the project was a hard sell when it came to finding a major studio willing to distribute the movie.

“George Lucas’s Howard the Duck had just come out and bombed,” he recalls. “When I went around people would say ‘oh no I’m not going to put my name on the next Howard the Duck. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, how absurd.’ Nobody wanted to step up in the major studios.”

Undaunted by the mass rejection (“Hollywood is always the last to know”) Gray eventually secured a deal with New Line Cinema, then best known for A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The rest, as they say, is history.

That first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie came from nowhere in the spring of 1990 to make an astonishing $135 million, becoming a cultural phenomenon in the process. A sequel was inevitable but the results were anything but.

“It was rushed,” Gray says when asked for his overriding feelings about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. “Once the first film opened, we figured we had to get another one out as quickly as possible because this whole thing could fade away very quickly if we didn’t come back.”

Incredibly, a release date for the sequel was set for almost exactly a year on from the original. That seems crazy to think now, in the era where the Marvel Cinematic Universe is carefully plotted out years in advance, but this was 1990 and New Line Cinema. At this point the production company which was working on its sixth Nightmare on Elm Street Movie in the space of just seven years. The quality of those films had varied wildly but one thing had remained consistent: the quick turnaround.

“New Line wanted it out on pretty much the same date, maybe a week earlier in fact. So, we rushed into the production, got a script together. The overarching thing was speed. We had to get it out,” Gray remembers. “I think that’s probably the reason why it doesn’t top many people’s list of the best Turtles movies.”

A Change in Tone

One of the first challenges facing Gray was a tonal one. While the first TMNT film had garnered praise for maintaining the dark and dangerous feel of the original comics, not everyone was happy.

“We started getting some pressure from parental groups. They felt it was a little too dark and a little too frightening for children,” Gray says.

In the US, there were reports of Turtles toys and merchandise being banned in schools over worries they encouraged aggressive behavior in kids. In the UK, the characters were even rebranded the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles amid concern among censors that the word “ninja” promoted violence. Michelangelo’s nunchucks were also banned. It wasn’t just the censors who expressed concern either.

“The toy company was also telling us that maybe we shouldn’t be too dark,” Gray said. “And then, of course, then there was Jim Henson himself, who died while we were making the first film. His whole thing from the beginning was that he didn’t want to make a really dark film. Steve [Barron] was able to convince him it was the way to go even though it was different from the Muppets and everything he had done before. They had a great relationship. Jim trusted Steve.”

The decision was made to approach the material with a lighter tone, with Todd Langen’s original script undergoing a major rewrite to address the change. Despite the change Gray insists an attempt was made to retain some of the darker elements.

“We tried to get somewhere in between but probably didn’t succeed.”

Ultimately, however, the looming deadline left little room for nuance.

“If you sit down and think about this thing too much, you’re never going to get underway,” he reasons.

A New Director

In another notable shift that fans have questioned down the years, Barron did not return for the sequel.

The Irish filmmaker told Flickering Myth that the shift in sensibilities was the deciding factor.

“[It was] lighter, and all the instructions that had gone on from the first film were coming from the producers about keeping the color and lightness and getting away from the dark edge in number two,” he said. “For me it was poppy, and that wasn’t my sensibility.”

Gray tells Den of Geek Barron didn’t come back “for reasons that I won’t go into” but during the interview paints a picture of difficulties during their work together on the first film.

“I fought with the crew every single day but they did a hell of a job. Budgets were not adhered to but I’ve always given them credit because of their vision,” Gray says.

The producer also revealed that the first film was re-edited from Barron’s original version after his bosses were left unhappy with the director’s cut.

“The studio did edit the film in the end to come up with a different version. It was felt it was cut so you didn’t get to see the roundhouse kicks and fighting which was the hallmark of Golden Harvest. When the bosses saw it in Hong Kong, they complained that they couldn’t tell what the turtles were doing. They wanted to see these guys kicking and fighting. Steve’s style was good but we wanted another look.”

Despite Gray’s diplomatic tone, it’s not difficult to imagine such developments might have created tension. In Barron’s place came American filmmaker Michael Pressman, who Gray knew from his days at United Artists.

“What I liked about Michael was that he was a disciplined director. Having gone through the problems with the first picture I wanted someone who shot fast and stayed on budget. That was my main motivation,” the producer says.

A capable director who has gone on to enjoy a long and varied career in television, little of the blame for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2’s failing can fall at Pressman’s feet though it’s undeniable that some of the creative spark of the first film was lost with Barron’s exit.

So was much of the original’s violence, with the Turtles rarely shown using their weapons in the finished film while the action set pieces were also significantly watered down.

Eastman and Laird

Despite the criticism levelled at the sequel for failing to retain the tone of the comics, all of what went into the movie was greenlit by the TMNT creators. Part of the deal inked by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman saw them retain final approval on anything in the film. But that created other issues both at script and production level, as Gray recalls.

“Kevin was certainly more malleable with going along with things because of the budget but Peter was very difficult to get things by because he would say ‘Oh, well Michelangelo would never say that’. So, it was very hard from the point of view of the writer trying to figure it all out.”

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With Barron no longer around to mediate and sell them on the plans and with time ticking on, the pair’s reluctance to sign off on ideas led to increased tensions.

“We argued a little bit,” Gray says. “These things are never sweet or nice. It gets down to what we can do and, in the time provided. It’s about compromise. In the end they approved Langren’s changed script. Maybe it was reluctantly but we weren’t going to meet the demand and get this out if they kept changing things.”

Tokka and Rahzar

One of the most noted criticisms of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 concerned the decision to introduce two new sidekicks alongside returning villain Shredder, rather than draw on the wild array of mutant animals that had featured in the comics and TV series.

Many fans had expected to see Bebop and Rocksteady, the mutant warthog and rhinoceros supervillains made famous in the cartoon, feature. However, that cartoon outing proved both a blessing and a curse.

“I didn’t want them in any of the movies,” Laird later revealed on his personal blog. “It’s not so much that I disliked the characters so intensely, but more that I found their constant one-note shtick in the first animated series to be extremely annoying and silly to the point of being stupid.”

Gray’s version of events differs slightly.

“We wanted new villains because we would get a piece of the royalty, which we didn’t have with the first movie. We figured if we created something they didn’t come up with we would get a piece of the pie. It was a business decision.”

Together with the creatives at Henson’s Creature Shop, they “threw together” Tokka and Rahzar, a mutant Alligator Snapping Turtle and wolf respectively, based on pretty much whatever was available.

“Those things were basically the Henson Creature Shop’s ideas, because they had to figure out, technically, what they could do, how big they were going to be and how they could move,” Gray says. “They had to design all this stuff, put someone in the suit and then wire them up or get the animatronics going to make it work. So, we just went to them and said we need a couple of villains.”

Indeed, the resulting animatronics proved less complex and less compelling than the heroes in a half shell – and it showed on screen.

“They were just big models,” Gray admits. “We cut corners, there’s no question about it.”

Sweaty and Claustrophobic

Meanwhile, the turtle suits themselves had undergone little in the way of upgrades since the first film, when the actors playing the four leads experienced any number of issues. Not the least of which being the claustrophobia and sweating that comes with wearing up to 70lbs worth of turtle suit.

The animatronics also, despite being state-of-the-art, continued to suffer their fair share of glitches.

“We knew what the difficulties were and they were unbelievable,” Gray says. “There were days when we couldn’t even get these things set up. We were filming right near the Wilmington Airport. We set up a shot and when it came time for action the Turtles would not speak. We realized they were on the same frequency as the airport.”

Gray blames the lack of a major upgrade, in part, on the lack of additional budget.

“The budget didn’t exponentially go through the roof, because of the speed,” he explains. “I have read things saying it was $20 million. It wasn’t, it was $16.5 million.”

A New April O’Neil

Away from the animatronic issues, the human cast of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 proved a mixed bag. Corey Feldman didn’t return to voice Donatello after pleading no contest to a drug possession charge while, more notably still, Judith Hoag was replaced by Paige Turco as April O’Neil.

Hoag later told Variety she was never approached about the sequel, claiming her omission was a result of the fact she complained about the level of violence in the first movie and the six-days-a-week shooting schedule.

“Everybody was beating everybody up,” Hoag said. “I thought the movie suffered because of that. It was something I spoke to the producers about, I think they thought I was too demanding, and moved on.”

Not that Gray felt the production suffered as a result of either changes.

“No, not at all,” he says. “Certainly not with Corey Feldman because it’s a voice. Remember when you play that movie around the world it will be in 40 or 50 different languages and subtitled anyway. It makes no difference and nobody overseas even knew Corey Feldman was doing a voice…With Judith, we thought it might be of concern but then again it’s all about the Turtles. People aren’t showing up for Judith – though she did a fabulous job – it was really all about the Turtles.”

Elias Koteas also failed to return as the ice hockey stick-wielding vigilante and ally Casey Jones – though that was more down to the film’s shift away from adult themes and one of the more violent human characters.

“Casey was discussed but the reason he dropped out – and I don’t think this was a major issue – was the direction we wanted to take the film,” Gray says. “We wanted to go lighter. That was part of cleaning up the act.”

In his place came Ernie Reyes Jr, a rising martial arts star who had served as a stuntman on the first film and was introduced as Keno, a pizza delivery boy who befriends the turtles. It was a stark departure from Koteas’s character but, once again, it was one Gray says came with the backing of the TMNT hierarchy.

“If Peter and Kevin had wanted Elias back, he would have been back. So, either we were able to convince them that we wanted to go with Ernie and they went along with it.”

Vanilla Ice

Quite how they were convinced to include rapper Vanilla Ice in the proceedings is anyone’s guess, with the rapper turning up in a mid-film nightclub scene to perform new single “Ninja Rap.” His cameo continues to delight and horrify fans to this day. Few will be surprised by the commercially-minded circumstances that led to his appearance.

“SBK the record label producing the soundtrack album said ‘You gotta have Vanilla Ice in this, he’s hot’ so we put him in…We had a good album out of it. Sometimes you don’t make the movie for the reason of art you make it because the thing could go away in a heartbeat. I’ve always been fairly honest and upfront about our motives. It is a business.”

While others might disagree, Gray stands by the inclusion of Vanilla Ice in the film.

“He actually did a very good job. He’s a very cool operative and he loved doing it.”

Shredder or Krang?

Looking back on the sequel, as much as anything, the most disappointing aspect was the decision to resurrect Shredder rather than explore different villains in the way other comic book franchises have.

While Shredder has always been the main antagonist, as with Bebop and Rocksteady, there remained a plethora of colorful villain characters that could have been plucked from the pages of the original comic or the animated series. But the decision to stick with Shredder was not one takem lightly by anyone, and others were discussed.

“We went through the whole catalogue of villains and certainly Krang and all these other characters were in play,” Gray says. “We thought of them but we stayed with what works and that’s what you do in these situations. Don’t try and get too clever.”

As much as anything he blames the Hollywood system and a refusal to take risks. New Line too, would have no doubt been happy to press ahead with a Shredder-oriented sequel, seeing him as the TMNT’s very own Freddy Kreuger of sorts.

“Nobody trusts their instincts,” Gray says. “You go with what worked before and try to modify it a little bit. If it works [and the plethora of Freddy sequels suggests it did] then you are justified in using the same thing over and over again.”

Once again though the decision to stick with Shredder and avoid the kind of time and expense required to create something like Krang, a brain-shaped alien carried around in the waist of a robot man, was influenced by that release date.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze opened in theaters on March 22, 1991, less than a year on from the original. It went on to make over $78 million to become the second most successful independent film of all time.

Despite turning a profit, the film garnered mixed reviews and left Gray and others disappointed.

“It didn’t deliver on what we had hoped because there was this race against time to get it out one year after the first one. When you do that, you really have to compromise.”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III

After the rush to make a second film, it was decided that they would take more time over the third one.

But anyone hoping for a return to form was left disappointed by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in TIme, which saw the gang head to 17th century Japan.

“With number three, we were aiming something at the Japanese market, which was the number one market for foreign films,” Gray explains. “That’s why we had the time travel storyline with the samurais. That was definitely one of the motivations.”

There was just one problem though.

“We hoped it would get the film released in Japan. To this day, it has not been released in Japan.”

Though Gray returned to produce an animated fourth film in the 2000s box office returns diminished with every film. By the time Michael Bay got involved in the franchise, Gray was long gone. He now considers himself “out of the turtle game” with this being one of the last interviews on the subject. But despite the highs and lows endured on the second film, Gray remains proud of what was achieved.

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“These movies were made by committee. It’s amazing they turned out so well.”

The post What Went Wrong With Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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mst3kproject · 4 years

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The Star Wars Holiday Special

Happy Holidays, MSTies! Your present is Episodes that Never Were are back! Remember last year, when I said Elves was so bad I wished I’d watched the Star Wars Holiday Special instead? Let’s find out what those words taste like.

The galaxy may be in the midst of a rebellion, but Chewbacca promised his family he will be back for Life Day, and god damn it, he’s gonna get there! He and Han Solo dodge Imperial forces and asteroid fields on the way, but the real danger may be waiting for them at home, as Stormtroopers do a treehouse-to-treehouse search for rebel sympathizers. It won’t be much of a holiday if Chewie arrives home only to be immediately arrested!

That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? It even sounds like it could be made to mean something. There is perhaps a point here about inter-ethnic empathy – Life Day may be a Wookiee holiday, but Chewbacca’s alien friends still know how important it is to him and they’re gonna help him keep his promise. We could also compare it to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. In that movie, the Martians want to celebrate Christmas but aren’t particularly interested in what it means. They get all their information about it from pirated television and from children who don’t understand anything much more than ‘free stuff’. We didn’t give Christmas to them, they literally stole it by kidnapping Santa. In the Holiday Special, the Wookiees are sharing their cultural traditions with outsiders who have become part of their family – Leia’s speech at the ends notes the humans’ respect for this.

But none of that’s relevant, because this is just a bad 70’s variety hour in a Star Wars costume. We don’t get to see claustrophobic scenes of our brave heroes hiding from the Storm Troopers. We don’t get sweeping space battles or bickering robots or weird new planets… we don’t get anything we go to see Star Wars for. Instead, we mostly watch the Wookiees sitting around their house passing the time as they wait helplessly for Chewbacca to get home. This could have been neat in itself if Wookiees had an interesting culture, but they live in a Mod 70’s Treehouse and seem to spend most of their time watching television. The brief opening sequence, in which Solo and Chewie outrun their pursuers in the Millennium Falcon, is just a tantalizing offer of chocolate on the tip of a giant turd.

The actual point of the show, as far as the people who produced it were concerned, was the various little musical numbers and comedy sequences along the way, some of which are more Star Wars-themed than others. Most of these are presented as one or other of the characters watching them on some form of television, which often doesn’t make any sense. The sequences themselves are usually not very well-presented and a lot of them are just downright boring, so let’s go through them one by one. Top up your eggnog, folks. We may be here a while.

Our first setpiece is a holographic circus featuring jugglers and acrobats, which the adults use to distract Lumpy so he’ll stop bothering them – like parents at the mall letting their kids watch Paw Patrol on a tablet while they shop. When you see televised circus acts, they’re usually filmed up close and at interesting angles, to heighten the sense of danger, and give you a good look at what’s going on. The Star Wars Holiday Special presents it as tiny figures on a table, always shot from far away and looking down, which removes all the drama from the stunts. Lumpy enlarges a figure, but it’s only the ringmaster. The others remain tiny, all while this little Wookiee looms over them like a kaiju that will start stomping if it isn’t entertained.

Then we get Mark Hamill’s cameo (in which he looks weirdly like one of the puppets from Invaders from the Deep), followed by Malla’s attempt to cook Bantha Surprise by following the directions on a tv show. I’m not very interested in cooking shows anyway, but I have a hard time imagining anybody being interested in a fake cooking show featuring fictional ingredients from other planets. What we see on Malla’s screen comes across as a sort of parody, but not actually a funny one. I’m tempted to think Harvey Korman must have been making fun of some particular 70’s cooking show maven but I don’t begin to know who that might be.

The ‘humour’ of the sequence is supposed to come from Malla’s attempt to follow the directions even though the cook on the show has four arms and Malla only two. I could pull some commentary on ableism in cooking and cooking shows out of this, but it would be a stretch, and nobody on the writing end was thinking about it that hard. It’s just stupid, and so is Korman’s plastic wig. Malla eventually turns it off in frustration, long after we’re tired of listening to it.

By the way, if you’re wondering whose stupid idea it was to set the whole thing on Kashyyyk (or, as a guy in the Special calls it, Kazook) and not have any subtitles to the Wookiee’s dialogue? That was apparently 100% George Lucas. The actual script and everything was in the hands of the television producers, but Lucas would not budge on the premise being Wookiee-centric. At least he exorcised that particular demon here, instead of subjecting us to it on the big screen.

Anyway, next Art Carney drops by to deliver some Life Day presents, among which is the source of our next setpiece: a VR machine which reads Itchy’s mind to present a personalized fantasy! This takes the form of Diahann Carroll in a sparkly feather wig, singing a song and saying things like “I am your fantasy, experience me!” The song is okay, I guess, and Carroll has a lovely voice, but what we’re seeing is basically a boring music video. She’s just standing there on a glittery black background, and we can’t forget that she’s singing to a geriatric Wookiee who is doing the Wookiee equivalent of jacking off to this (emphasized by the appearance of literal little swimmers in part of the sequence!). The fact that it’s a personal fantasy plucked from his subconscious makes it feel like this was something we weren’t supposed to be privy to, like we’re looking through somebody else’s computer at his girlfriend’s nudes.

Princess Leia (also looking disturbingly puppet-like… are we sure the actual actors appeared in this, and not look-a-likes in heavy makeup?) and C3P0 get their cameo, and then there’s the single actually effective moment in the Special. This is when we think Han Solo and Chewie are about to arrive home, ending our torment a full hour early, but no, it’s the Storm Troopers! This bit isn’t fantastic, but it does work. Then, sadly, we’re on to the next variety act.

This is a holographic music video which Carney shows to the Imperial troops as a demonstration that the device he has brought Malla for Life Day is harmless. It’s Jefferson Starship moaning out a rock song, in which I can understand at best one word in three. The visuals are in intense soft-focus that’s probably supposed to be artsy. The costumes (what I can see of them) aren’t any more Star-Wars-y than anything else bands wore in the 70’s. And the song sounds like something you’d find in the ‘easy’ setting on Rock Band. Why does Black Helmet sit there and watch the whole thing when he’s supposed to be searching every house on Kashyyyk/Kazook for rebel sympathizers?

The version of the Special currently available on YouTube, which tragically lacks the commercials, has a lot of comments along the lines of this is what you hallucinate after buying Death Sticks from that guy on Coruscant.

To drive the point home, the next thing we see is Lumpy watching a cartoon about Han Solo and Chewbacca crash-landing on an ocean planet while searching for a mystical talisman that makes things invisible (I wish they hadn’t actually shown this object – then I could have made jokes about it being the One Ring). This sequence is generally regarded as the best thing in the Special, and it introduced Boba Fett and provided some characterization for him. It is definitely true that this is the only segment with a plot, and with its weird aliens and grubby outposts it feels a lot more like Star Wars than anything else going on here.

The main thing that keeps me from enjoying this segment is that it just looks weird. The animators use exaggerated squash-and-stretch on the droids, even more so than on the living characters, which makes them look like they’re made out of jell-o. Princess Leia looks like something out of a cheap 60’s manga and Luke like he was drawn by a twelve-year-old based on an action figure that wasn’t actually of Luke Skywalker. Luke has no pupils, which is very distressing, but not as distressing as when C3P0 blinks. Even worse, as far as I can tell Han Solo has no eyes at all.

The design of the alien planet in this sequence is pretty cool, though. It appears to be entirely covered in a kind of goopy ocean and the creatures that live in it are neat-looking, even if not terribly plausible. Animation is really a great medium for fantasy and science fiction, because it levels the playing field: we’re not thinking about the special effects because everything on screen looks equally unreal. This is something Disney, who used it to such beautiful effect in Lilo and Stitch, totally forgot at just about the same time as they acquired the rights to Star Wars. Oh, for what could have been.

I want to note here that the average review on this blog is about as long as what you’ve read so far. We’re only about two thirds of the way through the Special, though, and I can’t really divide a holiday review up into two weeks. Therefore, consider this your permission to take a break and go snag another latke or whatever you’re snacking on, and then we’ll continue.

There’s one fun bit of background social commentary in the animated sequence, too: the only way for humans to survive the virus is to hang them upside-down so their brains will get enough oxygen despite their weakened hearts. In the city there’s an advertisement for the cure – and the upside-down human pictured in the ad is, of course, a woman in her underwear. The image isn’t detailed and it’s not the focus of the shot, so I don’t think it’s an actual piece of gratuitous cheesecake. Apparently somebody at Nelvana Ltd was just salty about the advertising industry.

The self-contained story in the cartoon makes sense within itself. It justifies Fett’s fearsome reputation far better than anything in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, and the characters seem to be in-character even when they’re off-model. The problem is with it as a part of the framing story about the Imperial troops searching Chewbacca’s house! The Special is very explicit that this is not something that’s actually happening in the real world at the same time as the other events – it is a cartoon Lumpy is watching on TV. Why, in a galaxy controlled by the Empire, would there be cartoons using the real names of real rebel operatives and presenting them as the heroes? If nobody’s supposed to know Boba Fett is connected with the Empire, why does the show blow his cover?

More importantly, where can I get one of those awesome giant stuffed Banthas Lumpy has in his room? I don’t know if that’s a real toy that was available in the late 70’s, but Comic Images does make something similar and you can buy them at Wal-Mart or Toys R Us.

While cleaning up the mess the Stormtroopers made of his room, Lumpy watches an instructional video of how to put together some kind of radio. This features Harvey Korman as an android who keeps getting jammed. Like cooking shows, instructional videos aren’t very interesting unless you’re trying to follow the directions – since we can’t follow the directions, this one is pointless to begin with. The ‘joke’ is not funny, and lines like “every one of the ten thousand terminals on your circuit breaker module is a different colour” might be amusing when written down but they just don’t work when somebody says them aloud. Fortunately, it doesn’t last long.

Then we get on to what’s probably the second-best thing in the Special, the bit where we learn that the Mos Eisley cantina is owned by Bea Arthur. It would be easily the most expensive thing in the Special were it not made up of b-roll footage and re-used puppets from Episode IV. It’s also kind of got a plot, in that a guy with a baking soda volcano on top of his head (this is certainly an efficient way to get the alcohol directly to your brain) is trying to confess his love to Bea while she just wants to get on with running her business. Eventually he gets his heart broken and leaves, and then the Empire shuts the bar down, so Bea throws everybody out with a song.

I have to admit, in The Force Awakens when Han Solo mentioned a female friend who ran a ‘watering hole’… there was a moment there when I was half-expecting it to be Bea Arthur’s character. I’m relieved that it wasn’t, but also just the slightest bit disappointed. We had to wait for The Mandalorian to get a proper Holiday Special callback.

This bit almost had a chance to say something with its ‘thwarted romance’ plot. Usually such a thing in a tv show would get what the male character would consider a happy ending. He would prove to his love interest that being cared for is important, she would realize that love is better than money, and they would metaphorically ride off into the sunset. What it looks like we’re going to get here instead is something more like the episode of South Park where Butters fell in love with the Hooters waitress. Harvey Korman’s character (yes, he plays three different characters in this Special and this was apparently supposed to be a selling point) realizes his crush is based on a misunderstanding, and while it makes him sad, he’s not going to be an asshole about it.

Nor is Bea’s character vilified for rejecting him, which she does tactfully but firmly, as if she’s gone through this many times before. He’s just a minor annoyance in her day before she goes on to worry about bigger problems, like getting everybody to obey that Imperial curfew. Then, however, at the last second he pops up from behind the counter after everybody has left – and that’s where the segment ends. I think we’re supposed to assume they got together after all, but I kind of hope she just threw him out with the rest of them. No means no, damn it.

Bea Arthur’s Go Home Song is to the tune the Cantina Band was playing in Episode IV, so it pretty much goes without saying it’s the catchiest piece in the Special.

Then, finally, it’s time to celebrate Life Day! The Wookiees hold up some glowing Christmas balls, then dress in red robes and walk through outer space into a, uh, wormhole, I guess, that takes them to the base of the giant tree from Avatar. There it’s time for our final setpiece, the culmination of this whole ninety-minute ordeal… Princess Leia sings! The Life Day Carol is to the tune of the main Star Wars theme, and the lyrics sound like something from a generic Christmas album you get free if you buy three cards at Hallmark. Carrie Fisher is a decent singer but she looks like she’s as glad this is over as we are.

Much like Howard the Duck, The Star Wars Holiday Special is a production in which they made all the worst decisions they possibly could. Focusing on the Wookiees at home rather than following Han Solo and Chewbacca through the action killed the whole thing at the starting gate. Then that plot is nothing but a frame on which they can hang the various variety acts, and none of those are very good. It’s only towards the end of the sequence that what we’re seeing even has anything to do with Star Wars. Watching it is an ordeal on the order of an un-riffed Coleman Francis film. It’s so bad, it’s not even something people get together and watch like they do Manos or The Room.

So why do we still have it? The Holiday Special was only broadcast once, and was met by fathomless loathing from critics, Star Wars fans, and ordinary people alike. It has never been released in any other format (Andrew Borntreger of badmovies.org has a story about how Lucas had him thrown out of a Q&A panel for asking if it were getting a DVD release), so the fact that you can find it on YouTube today is down to some nameless hero who recorded it on their newfangled VCR back in 1978. That person then showed it to friends, apparently on the basis of oh my god, you guys, this is so bad, you have to see it, and then because misery loves company they copied it to show to their friends. What we have today is copies of copies of copies of copies, like fragments of Sappho only with VHS artefacts instead of holes in the papyrus (and without the artistic vision).

Humans like to preserve remarkable things. Sappho we’ve preserved because it’s remarkably good, but the Star Wars Holiday Special we preserve because it’s remarkably bad. Lucasfilm has tried very hard to stamp it out. George Lucas himself has said that if he could he would gather up every copy that exists and smash them with a sledgehammer… but we won’t let him do it. We keep copying the Special and passing it along, in a way that’s very familiar to MSTies in particular. We’re circulating the tapes! Why this tape in particular?

I don’t claim to know, but my working theory is that it keeps us humble. We are a species that can produce great things when we put our minds to it. We landed on the moon. We eradicated smallpox. We built the Taj Mahal and the Sagrada Familia. We wrote The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Einstein Field Equations and the aforementioned works of Sappho. But for all that, we are also capable of throwing the same kind of effort into creating utter disasters – and the Star Wars Holiday Special is the rare example of an unmitigated disaster that didn’t actually hurt anybody. It reminds us to take a step back and look at what we’re doing without getting too invested in it, but does so while being harmless and at times humorous.

Would I still rather watch this than Elves? You bet your shaggy Wookiee ass I would. The Star Wars Holiday Special may be longer, but it doesn’t leave nearly such a bad taste in my mouth.

I will leave you with this: the Special was, as I mentioned, only broadcast once, in 1978 – that means its signal is now forty-one light years from Earth and still going. There are several hundred stars within that bubble, around two dozen of which are known to have planets. Somewhere out there, aliens might be getting their first signal from humanity right now and it’s the Star Wars Holiday Special.

#mst3k #reviews #the star wars holiday special #episodes that never were #holiday reviews #70s

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thegirlwholied · 3 years

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I think it’s interesting as someone who haven’t been following the Star Wars movies as they come out if there has a been significant change in the stories since George Lucas stepped down. For example taking the prequels and sequels and comparing their shortfalls etc (of course there was many more people involved but in general the sense I get is that Lucas was very much the guy in control) but as I haven’t seen them yet I could be totally off as most of what I’m basing this on is secondhand info

so one of the things about Star Wars is it really highlights for me how, just because you love someone’s work, you may not love everything they do. I really like J.J. Abrams and I think Lawrence Kasdan’s a fantastic screenwriter; did not love Force Awakens and think the sequel trilogy’s issues are seeded there. Loved Rion Johnson’s Knives Out; didn’t love Last Jedi. George Lucas is responsible for 2 of my favorite franchises of all time. I so admire his vision. But!

one of the other things about Star Wars is how important editing and criticism is, and my take (and it’s not a unique one) is that I think he needed more of an editor. More collaboration & more criticism.

There’s not one magical thing or person I think could’ve changed/fixed the prequels- and Lucas did apparently talk to other screenwriters who didn’t want to step on his toes (...OR could some tell he had a very set vision & there wasn’t room to bring their own? No idea, but I can imagine quite a bit)

There is this anecdote from Lawrence Kasdan, sourced here, emphasis mine:

There were many times over the ensuing years when George [asked] me to be involved in all three [prequels]. He said, 'Hey, how would you like to write such-and-such?' I said, 'George, aren’t you supposed to start shooting in two weeks, in Australia?' He said, 'Yeah, but it’s not too late,'" Kasdan recalled.

...yeah I think a rewrite, or multiple rewrites, was needed, and no one else was in a position to insist. It’s extra interesting in the context of Rogue One & Solo, both bringing someone in ~ to different degrees of takeover ~ for final changes.

I don’t dive too deep into the behind-the-scenes stuff but it’s clear Maria Lucas’ editing and the actors’ own improvisations and tweaks, also Carrie Fisher’s fledgling script doctoring career, played a shaping role in the original trilogy. AND Lucas only wrote/directed the first one, whereas the prequels were all his in a different way. I get why he’s defensive of them, and I get the impulse to want to continue editing his work, but I also think he’s not capable of being objective about it... because if Lucas could be objective about Star Wars, we’d have an accessible, restored version of the Star Wars movies as originally released and not just the Special Editions. (I’m very thankful my parents bought the VHS way back in 1995, aka the last release of the OG movies, as that’s pretty much the only version I’ve ever watched and I always forget the changes exist until stopping on one of the OT movies on TV. Let’s say I do not find the changes artful.) There has to be a time when you stop making tweaks & let the world have the thing you made... and, the world already loved the thing Lucas made!

I’m always intrigued by the what-might-have-been cuts of movies but I don’t think there’s a guarantee they’d be better... i.e., all the hype over the Snyder Cut, though I’m certainly intrigued to see a tonally-consistent version of Justice League. Would I have liked Lord & Miller’s Solo better? Would I have liked Treverrow’s Rise of Skywalker better? Would I have liked a George Lucas helmed sequel trilogy? Eh. I’ll never know, anymore than I’ll know if I would have loved the Roswell TV show even more if Heath Ledger had gotten a lead role (yes, Roswell almost cast Heath Ledger, and yes, that is my #1 ‘if I could get DVDs from an alternate universe’ wishlist item, and yes, I am apparently such a movie/TV geek that the different filmmaking is one of my first AU thoughts).

There’s that weird balance between “oversight in making sure a movie aligns with a franchise” and “artistic freedom”, and my instinct is always to side with artistic freedom, but also... when it’s part of a continuing story? I’m not suggesting studio meddling here but simply a writing team. It was a trilogy. Why were they playing pass-the-baton with the story, why didn’t a writers’ team get involved in storyboarding all three from the beginning?? The extent to which Last Jedi shut down elements from Force Awakens, and then Rise of Skywalker did the same to elements of Last Jedi, is... actually comical. And baffling. I feel they were trying to recreate the way the original trilogy was made and that’s... trying to recapture lightning. Lightning’s fickle. Maybe it will strike twice, but even if it does, don’t expect it to strike the same exact way, and trying to imitate it exactly to entice it becomes only a recreation, a lesser-replay of the original strike.

I feel like I kind of...get why the prequels are the way they are, what Lucas was trying for & the elements that just don’t click for me, whereas with the sequels I don’t get how it was screwed up. And it was, for me: I’ll forever be a little sad about the state of the Star Wars galaxy’s actual future vs. where Return of the Jedi left us.

Just my take! I think there’s lessons to be learned from Star Wars Past, both good and bad; I’m enjoying the Mandalorian in Star Wars Present; and I have, always, hope for Star Wars Yet to Come. It is, anyway, all Star Wars.

#star wars #star wars writing #star wars ot #guess who's procrastinating work today #also my childhood dream was writing Star Wars and the fact that writers out there are being handed new!EU Star Wars books #new movies and shows galore are being made #...and i am nowhere in the vicinity of any of those things #does make me question my life and choices yeah

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rptv-starwars · 4 years

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'The Empire Strikes Back' at 40: What the 'Star Wars' sequel's iconic special effects owe to Ray Harryhausen

By Ethan Altered-States (Ethan Alter)

Yahoo Entertainment, Yahoo Movies • May 27, 2020

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/the-empire-strikes-back-star-wars-special-effects-ray-harryhausen-212159259.html

[article was edited for brevity, clarity, and to omit dumb commentary by the original author]

Dennis Muren poses with an AT-AT walker behind the scenes of The Empire Strikes Back. (Photo: Lucasfilm)

Both Ray Harryhausen [special effects creator prominent in the 1960s for stop-motion animation] and The Empire Strikes Back (ESB) are celebrating milestone anniversaries this year. 2020 marks the 100th birthday of Harryhausen, the special-effects pioneer behind vintage Hollywood spectacles like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, as well as the 40th anniversary of the second movie in the Star Wars original trilogy.

But they have more in common than the calendar year: The AT-ATs and Tauntauns that walk through ESB are inspired by Harryhausen’s menagerie of stop-motion creatures, from cyclopses to krakens. “They had character, they had performance and they had purpose,” says Dennis Muren, who parlayed a childhood spent watching Harryhausen’s films into a groundbreaking career as a Star Wars F/X legend. “They were wondrous to look at, and the designs of the shots were dynamic. Ray’s work grabbed you emotionally, because it began with him. I’m the same way: being emotionally connected to the performance and design of a character who, simply put, looks really neat.”

Currently the Senior Visual Effects Supervisor and Creative Director at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Muren first joined George Lucas’s pioneering visual effects studio in 1976, when it was still making and photographing spaceships in a Van Nuys warehouse. After the success of Star Wars (A New Hope), Muren followed ILM to the Bay Area as Lucas planned for a sequel. “It was the hardest film by far,” Muren says of how ESB came together behind the camera. “Everything just got bigger. The spirit of the film was still fun and adventure, but it had more romance, it had more action, the Empire was bigger and the universe was bigger than we thought on the first movie.”

Muren’s role also expanded with ESB as he took point on directing the fleet of miniatures in the film’s iconic opening on the ice planet, Hoth. With the advent of digital technology still many years away, Muren and his team brought the Rebel’s herd of tauntauns and the Empire’s squad of AT-AT walkers to life by hand. And through it all, he followed the example established by Harryhausen.

“I always think of the Cyclops from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, who comes out of his cave roaring and angry, and his hands are up because he’s ready to grab one of the sailors,” explains Muren, who later won his first Oscar for his work on the film. (He currently has nine statues, the most of any living person.) “That’s what I always strive to put in my work: that there’s a reason for that creature to be there. You’re not just giving the audience an effect: You want them to feel something from it, whether that’s ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing,’ or ‘Oh, that’s really creepy,’ or ‘Wait, that’s impossible!’”

In honor of ESB's 40th anniversary, Muren walked us through the seemingly-impossible task of making the Hoth sequence, and his own close encounter with his F/X hero.

Yahoo "Entertainment": You said that The Empire Strikes Back was the hardest Star Wars film to make. What was the reason for the degree of difficulty?

Dennis Muren: Well, The Phantom Menace may have been equally difficult, because there was a lot of real groundbreaking work on that in terms of getting all the digital stuff to work. But we had two supervisors on that. For Empire, we had just moved up from Los Angeles, and only brought about 12 people up from the 50 in L.A. and had to hire locally just to get the thing done. All of us working on it wanted to top ourselves, and George had already done that with the designs. The number of lands and battles you saw in Empire was at least five times more than you saw in Star Wars. You had an ice planet and a city in the clouds — how are you going to get that to look right?

Doing any kind of compositing over a light-color background is very, very hard. And the whole movie was full of that in addition to your normal space battles. The vision was so big, and we had a couple of years to do it, but it took us so much time to get the fire to do it and the people to do it. We all wanted what George wanted, which was also what the audience wanted: to show you that this universe is so much bigger than what we saw in Star Wars.

Yahoo "Entertainment": What was the most challenging part of the Hoth sequence specifically?

Dennis Muren: The opening tauntaun shot was one of the most difficult things, and the most interesting. The story behind that was that George had brought back this helicopter shot from Norway [where the Hoth exteriors were filmed], and it was about 200 or 300-feet off the ground with the cameras looking straight down. He didn’t know whether if that shot was going to be necessary to the movie, but at the very end, he said, “Yes, it’s necessary to have this shot. Do you think there’s a way you can add a Tauntaun to this?”

There wasn’t! There were no tracking markers on the ground that would have helped us make the stop motion camera map exactly with the moves the helicopter made, and then we could have combined that with an optical printer. But none of that stuff was there. I thought about building a big model, but I didn’t think it would work with the background. George said, “Well, just think about it.” I spent 15 minutes thinking about it, and figured it out in 15 minutes! I learned an amazing lesson from that: There’s usually an answer, there’s always some way that you can fiddle around with what you know to attempt. If I had stopped thinking at 14 minutes and 59 seconds, we wouldn’t have had that shot in the movie.

Yahoo "Entertainment": The tauntauns definitely feel very Harryhausen in their design and behavior. Did their form match what you could accomplish then with stop-motion or did the stop-motion dictate their form?

Dennis Muren: George had the idea for a galloping horse kind of thing, and I think Ralph [McQuarrie] and Joe [Johnston] worked on the design. I was involved in how we were going to create a setting that looked like it was going to be real, and wouldn’t be encumbered by any of the cameras. I don't know how many shots we had of it — maybe 12 or 15 or something like that, and they were some of the last ones we did. There were a couple that George added right at the very end of that. It was like, “We can finally take a breather after two years, but no, there’s one more shot!”

Dennis Muren (behind the camera) filming Suzanne Pasteur (a friend of Lorne Peterson's) on her horse for tauntaun movement reference. (Photo: Lucasfilm)

Yahoo "Entertainment": I remember connecting to them very strongly as a kid — I always through they’d be fun to ride.

Dennis Muren: That comes from the design and purpose of it. It doesn’t act like an evil creature: It’s a fairly big, bulky thing and it actually looks kind of cute with a horn and steam coming out of its nose. It’s not a creature that could kidnap you or anything — it’s just a beast of burden. That’s true of all the Star Wars movies: The behavior is familiar, so the audience can relate. Even with the designs of the spaceships; I tried to show how they would bank off to fly to another planet or something, like an airplane would do in the air even though there’s not gravity in space and that would never happen. It looks really neat and you can relate to it.

Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) on a tauntaun on the planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. (Photo: Lucasfilm)

Yahoo "Entertainment": In terms of the AT-AT walkers, that’s a case where you’re bringing character to a non-living thing. There’s behind-the-scenes footage of the ILM team studying elephants for movement reference.

Dennis Muren: When we saw the designs, we thought they were kind of like big animals. We went to an animal park in Dunn, California, and put a bunch of chalk marks on the elephant and had it walk by left to right and right to left with the camera on. That gave us the weight; those things would have weighed thousands of tons, and we had to make it look like they had gravity or else they were just going to look silly — not as powerful and as evil as they're supposed to look. We also shot the elephants in slow motion to make them look even bigger, and observed traits like how far up the knee goes up and how far forward the body travels. Does the foot just lift up? Does it drop back down again? All that stuff was used as a basis so that when we went to animate, we had a body part to do that.

We also had some really good equipment to look at the frames as we were shooting them and make sure the animation was working well. Like now, there's all sorts of stop-motion photographers, and ours wasn’t done like Ray would have done it where you couldn’t tell if you made a mistake and could go back and say, “Did I move this too far?” We were able to compare and say, “Oh yeah, we did move it too far,” and then change it to move to a better place. So it's probably more of a fluid motion than you might have seen before and that was important. Any sort of chatter in the stop-motion looks like the mechanics of the walkers. They're all mechanical anyway, so there's got to be little bumps and grinds in the motors. So that adds to the feeling, you know?

Yahoo "Entertainment": Besides Hoth, what was your favorite sequence to work on?

Dennis Muren: I don’t know — they’re all so different! [Laughs] I really like the asteroid sequence; that might top Hoth a little bit. It was also really difficult, but a lot of fun to do. George wasn’t interested in the beats of the action, but the attitude. It had to have a certain clarity to see what was going on, which was difficult because the asteroids were coming in from any direction. I did a mock-up of that sequence and realized that everything had to be based on the Millennium Falcon blasting through the asteroids. We came up with the idea of having all the asteroids going in one direction, from one side of the screen to the other, and then you could show how the Falcon makes evasive maneuvers.

Yahoo "Entertainment": Did you get a chance to meet Ray Harryhausen before his death in 2013?

Dennis Muren: Oh, yes. I was probably about 14 at the time, and he used to be in the phone book as was almost everybody else in those days in L.A. I called him up, and he was living up in Malibu, so my mom drove me two hours up to his house, and I met him and his wife. They were just the nicest couple in the world. They invited me in for an hour or two, and we kept in touch. As I got older, I went back to his garage and showed him my home movies, and he showed me some of his early home movies. He was a kindred soul. He later moved to England, so I didn’t see him very often after that.

Special effects legend Ray Harryhausen working on a model for a Clash of the Titans character. (Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection)

Yahoo "Entertainment": Did he ever visit you while you were making Star Wars or Empire?

Dennis Muren: No, but I did see him while I was working on Dragonslayer. We were at the same studio in England, and he was making Clash of the Titans. I think I brought him by to show him the dragon, and the rear-projection work. We were working on the next step beyond stop-motion, which was the combination of animation with a motion-controlled motorized camera. He didn’t entirely relate to that, and I can understand why: It could take five days if you’re lucky to get a full shot. At the end of the day, [his method] didn’t have quite the realism that ours ended up having, but he also had the energy to just get in there and grab the figure with his hand and spend the next eight hour animating it.

After Empire and things like the Tauntaun sequence especially, I realized that we needed to get away from stop motion and try and look for something else. I would say that we didn't get the tauntaun to move quite as much as we wanted to, and there were some shots that we didn’t quite finish. But George was utterly accommodating about everything, and there was a feeling of real accomplishment when it was all over. Empire just opened everything up: You can see there’s a lot more stories you can tell, and they’re still going on.

#star wars #empire strikes back #empire40th #ray harryhausen #george lucas #lucasfilm #yahoo news #stop-motion #80s movies #i love the 80's #denis muren

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britesparc · 4 years

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Weekend Top Ten #448

Top Ten Moments in The Secret of Monkey Island

This week was one of those weeks where I had a list all ready to go, and then I discovered something that made me throw the whole lot in the bin and write something new in a hurry. And the thing that I discovered is that it is, approximately, the 30th birthday of my favourite videogame of all time, The Secret of Monkey Island.

When I was a kid, I’d go round my cousins’ house and play on their Spectrum or their C64. I played the usual 8-bit hits of the era; Dizzy, Ghostbusters, Skool Daze, that really weird and probably insanely offensive Spitting Image beat-em-up… then I got my Amiga around Christmas 1990, and I figured games would be more-or-less the same but with more colours. I was wrong.

I got two games in short succession that utterly changed my appreciation for the medium: Lemmings and Monkey Island. The first was funny, inventive, colourful and characterful; a fiendishly difficult puzzler that nevertheless made you want to come back for more, because you just fell in love with the Lemmings themselves. It was like nothing I’d seen before, and felt impossible. Monkey Island, on the other hand, was not only better, not only more my cup of tea gameplay wise, but just blew the doors of my perception of what games were and what they could do. It was like an interactive movie before that was even a term; a living cartoon where you were the main character. A funny, wordy, witty adventure story, full of gags and references that I didn’t quite get but that I knew were smart and humorous (and there was lots of daft humour in there that I did get, too). It wasn’t just a case of being able to talk to people – I’d done that in stuff like Skool Daze – but the ability to solve problems, to divine solutions; to work out that you can drug dogs by smearing meat with dubious petals. And even when do did something like that, the game was irreverent enough to put a disclaimer on screen assuring you that the dogs were only sleeping. It broke the fourth wall, and I was only just old enough to understand what that meant in narrative terms; this was a game about gaming, about stories and adventures. It was filled with movie references (George Lucas even makes a cameo!). It inspired me to write into Amiga Power for help with a particular puzzle, and they printed my letter, but by the time it came out about three months had passed and I’d solved the puzzle on my own.

Monkey Island was the first game that I loved as much as the cartoons I watched or the comics I read; Guybrush and Elaine and LeChuck and the rest were the first gaming characters that I took to my heart in the same way as Bumblebee, Garfield, or Peter Venkman. I’ve said it before, but I’m not sure I’d love games the same way if I’d never played Monkey Island. It certainly changed the types of games I wanted to play; even though I’ve enjoyed my fair share of platformers, racing games, and shooters, it’s always the slower-paced narrative games that I come back to, the Fables and Mass Effects and Deus Exes of this world (even faster-paced games like Halo, Gears and Half-Life still grab me with their stories, as daft as they may sometimes be). Basically, Monkey Island made me a sucker for a dialogue tree.

Monkey Island was my gateway to a whole host of other LucasArts adventure games; Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango… Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer were among the first names of games creators that I ever knew (probably the very first, in all honesty, was Peter Molyneux – I am British after all). It was a window into a much larger world, one filled with choice, consequence, non-sequiturs, and rubber chickens with pullies in the middle.

Anyway, to celebrate Monkey Island, here are my Top Ten moments from the game. See you next year for the Monkey Island 2 list.

How to Get Ahead in Navigating: I’ve gone about it before, but this simple, daft joke – swapping a guide book for an actual navigator’s head – blew my mind as a kid. It forced me to think differently about puzzles and comedy and how to approach the game. For little old me, it was a revelation, and just desperately funny.

How Appropriate, You Fight Like a Cow: a discussion of Monkey can’t be had without talking about the innovative swordfights; a wholly successful attempt to replicate the verbal parrying of a classic Hollywood swordfight, the insult-riposte dynamic also reinforced the puzzle mechanics of the game. Sublime.

Order Hint Book: Monkey Island was the first adventure game I played, so I didn’t realise at the time how innovative its gameplay was, because you could never get hopelessly, game-ruiningly stuck, and nor could you die. Except at one point, when you drown, but even that is a hilarious gag that is easily avoidable. The control verbs changing from things like “Pick Up” to “Decompose” is just tremendous.

Use Staple Remover on Tremendous, Dangerous-Looking Yak: Monkey plays fast and loose with game conventions, sending itself up in the process; the moment when Guybrush enters a room and is hidden from view, undergoing a series of preposterous and expensive-sounding adventures, which you only know about because you can read his actions in the sentence line as if you were still controlling him (“use… gopher repellent… on another gopher…”), is a phenomenal piece of comedy stagecraft, a game parodying games parodying itself, using its own architecture to tell a joke (as well as being a play on the whole “noises off” style of gag in the first place).

Ask Me About Loom: like I say, I’d never played an adventure game before; I’d never heard of any LucasArts (sorry, Lucasfilm Games) titles, apart from maybe Maniac Mansion. So the bloke in the SCUMM Bar with his “Ask me about LOOM” badge, who launches into an intense sales spiel when you speak to him, didn’t make sense at first. But when it clicked, the very idea of a pirate in this game directly referencing another game was fourth-wall-breaking hilarious genius; happening right near the start of the game lets you know what you’re in for.

The Rock: when you get to Monkey Island, there’s a puzzle where you need to use a makeshift seesaw to catapult a boulder onto a tree (or something). If you line it up wrong, you can sink your own ship (and presumably drown your mutinous crew). The first time I played the game, this is what I did; there’s another great gag where castaway Herman Toothrot turns out to have a ship of his own. But the second time I played through, I didn’t sink my ship, and sailed back with my original crew. This blew my mind; whilst obviously not at Warren Spector levels of emergent game design, the fact that you could actually change what happened, to have a different experience to another player, was phenomenal, and another one of those watershed gaming moments for me.

Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates): the trio of loitering pirates are funny in and of themselves, with their breath mints and Pieces o’ Eight and minutes from a PTA meeting. But what I always found really funny was that they are literally called “Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates)”; that’s what it says in the sentence line when you hover your cursor over them (an aside: Monkey Island and Lemmings probably taught me how to use a mouse). Again it was the game using the structure of a game to tell a joke.

Rescuing Otis: this is what promoted me to write into Amiga Power back in the day: how the heck do you rescue Otis from the jail?! There are delightful red herrings regarding files and whatnot, but the eventual solution – juggling acidic grog from mug to mug as you make your way through the town to eventually pour it on his lock – was a rare moment of fast-paced tension in a relatively slow game. Solving it on my own made me feel so clever at a tender age. And it’s funny! So great!

A Rubber Chicken with a Pulley in the Middle: ah, my beloved rubber chicken. Found early on in the game and used in a couple of puzzles, I don’t think I quite grasped the silly brilliance of it; as a kid you’re just more accepting of the surreal. Why does a rubber chicken have a pulley? It’s basically just so you can zip-line across a chasm; it’s a wholly functional, boring plot device. But it’s also a rubber chicken. It’s sublime comic genius. And then you cook it! Madness!

The Voodoo Root: I’ve not even mentioned The Ghost Pirate LeChuck yet (if I’m honest his best “moments” are in the sequel) but the finale of the game, when you’ve distilled your Voodoo Root and you’re dispatching ghosts left right and centre, brilliantly marries an epic adventure action sequence with the point-and-click structure of the game itself. But then you fight LeChuck and he boots you around the island, until finally you crash land on a soft drinks dispenser, and finally defeat him with… a can of root beer. Cue fireworks and a strangely romantic ending. Is it as good as the ending of Monkey 2? No, but nothing is. Literally nothing, in the history of the universe.

Wow, there we are. I never had room for the dance steps, the recipe, finding the treasure, defeating the Sword Master, or Stan. Stan! I didn’t have room for Stan! See, that’s how good the game is; I barely mentioned one of the greatest gaming villains of all time, and I didn’t even get round to one of the medium’s funniest supporting characters. Blimey.

Man, I love The Secret of Monkey Island. Ron and the rest of you guys: you done good. Thanks for the memories.

#top ten #monkey island #the secret of monkey island #monkey island 30 #lucasarts #lucasfilm games #ron gilbert

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grim-on-the-darkside · 4 years

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George Lucas involvement in The Clone Wars Series

This subject is being talked about by some here on Tumblr, so I thought I’d break open my Star Wars Quote files and share what I could to facilitate others who are already in discussions about it. I hope this aids them in that.

That said, Ohh boy, here we go. =]

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"This series [Clone Wars Series] at least to George is NOT EU, it is a part of Star Wars as he sees it. I think if anything there was a period where Henry [Gilroy] and I had to learn exactly what it took to be a part of George Lucas’ Star Wars, and tell the Star Wars story his way. We had to learn how to look at the Galaxy from his point of view and let go of some of what we considered canon after we found out the ideas were only EU." ~ Dave Filoni 2008

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"This is Star Wars, and I don't make a distinction between [The Clone Wars] series and the films." ~ George Lucas, SciFiNow, October 2011

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"The TV series is exactly like the movies, exactly. I mean, you can see it in the clip. It’s basically just the movies only with cartoon characters. It’s basically a dramatic series, there’s a lot of action, a bit of humor." ~ George Lucas, 2008 Interview about the Clone Wars series.

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One of the main characters in the feature film, a 90 minute introduction to the series that hits theaters August 15, is Anakin's teenage Padawan, Ahsoka. Lucas said:

"[With Ahsoka] I wanted to develop a character who would help Anakin settle down. He's a wild child after [Attack of the Clones]. He and Obi Wan don't get along. So we wanted to look at how Anakin and Ahsoka become friends, partners, a team. When you become a parent or you become a teacher you have to become more respnsible. I wanted to force Anakin into that role of responsibility, into that juxtaposition. I have a couple of daughters so I have experience with that situation. I said instead of a guy let's make her a girl. Teenage girls are just as hard to deal with as teenage boys are."

~ George Lucas 2008

https://io9.gizmodo.com/george-lucas-spills-all-about-clone-wars-at-skywalker-r-5033398

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"I get all my information on the Clone Wars from him. [George Lucas]"

"I can pitch him ideas and say 'lets do certain things', but at the end of the say he will say 'yes' or he will say 'no', and than that is the way it's gonna go."

~ Dave Filoni, 2019

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"The importance of The Clone Wars that cannot be understated is that it was the last huge expansion of the Star Wars universe that came directly from George Lucas." ~ Pablo Hidalgo

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"Star Wars: The Clone Wars is the biggest education on how George Lucas saw his Universe. Over 44 hours of his storytelling compared to the 13 hours or so he spent in live action."

~ Pablo Hidalgo 2018 https://ibb.co/ryvk5K2

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DAVE FILONI: The First Time George Lucas Talked About Ahsoka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAjnLseHQwA

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"In discussions directly with George, he was very adamant about Jango not being Mandolorian, which is the entire reason that scene existed that moment. To have that specificity that Jango was not Mandolorian at least not to Mandolorians."

~ Dave Filoni, 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6p9sM7OLFk https://ibb.co/WgCGf1X https://ibb.co/Y2wLHd0

FROM THE FILONI FILES: In the season 2 episode of STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS, Mandalorian prime minister Almec made the claim that Jango Fett is not a Mandalorian warrior. This info stunned many fans who always assumed he was pure Mando. Many claimed Almec was lying, others claimed it was a cover-up. This topic came up a few times during our conversations with Dave Filoni. In this compilation, Dave addresses the issue and sets the record straight.

https://ibb.co/x7j5BhK

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This of course resulted in massive retcons of the Expanded Universe version of Mandolorians. This wasn't on accident, this was intentional on Lucas part because he was pissed at some of the liberties and things people in the EU were saying that went against the agreement in allowed the EU to come into existance at all.

Seperate Universes. This wasn’t figurative, this was meant literally, and Lucas said it over and over. Plus he found out they were using the term 'canon' in reference to EU things, and that was a massive no no. Only his direct works were canon. This went against the agreement he made with Howard Roffman, who really didn't keep his side of the bargain officially. They were essentially lieing and being deceitful about the EU's standing. That whole Canon Tier, that wasn't a policy, that was the filing system Leland Chee used for the Holocron. It was only used by Lucas Licensing. It was all a big shame to make people think the EU had more standing in the SWs than it did by the legitimate agreement. Roffman was concerned that if people knew it was a separate universe and it wasn't canon that they would be less likely to spend their money on it because 'it didn't count'.

Roffman couldn't get Lucas to agree to it being one universe, he tried over and over again, but Lucas wasn't having it. This was behind closed doors at the time of course, Roffman comes clean about in a live broadcasted interview with a studio audience when taking questions.

They couldn't get Lucas to budge, and Lucas didn't really care about the retcons he might cause, and there was a lot of fighting over it. But, of course, Lucas was the boss and it was his final say. This had been ongoing thing, it wasn’t something happened overnight.

That's why you have accidental retcons of major story lines, opps... He says what is and isn't canon, no one else. People weren’t following the guidelines he set, and he had been a pretty good sport about it overall. Again, this wasn’t overnight. It built up over time.

There’s some speculation about the specifics, but that there had been many angry words said, back and forth in the background. Roffman and Lucas apparently had a lot of loud conversations.

“So we would have very interesting skirmishes because we had a bunch of stuff that became to the fans pretty much canon [Head-canon] about what happened after Return of the Jedi, what different places in the galaxy were called, lots of different things and if he was proposing to do something in the prequels that contradicted that we would have long debates which usually ended at least after the first session with "I don't care this is what I'm doing", but after he 4th or 5th session sometimes "Alright 'maybe' we can change it this way."

~ Howard Roffman, 2017

[I’ll be sharing more very important quotes from that Interview with Howard Roffman soon.]

A great deal of the time, Lucas wouldn’t budge. The Mandolorian Storyline in The Clone Wars being one such example of that.

This resulted in Karen Traviss losing her mind over the Mandolorians Lucas made in canon, and she was saying she wouldn't go along with it because they were 'changing canon', which is totally untrue, but she made some public statements about it

"Please also be aware of one basic fact - all writers for a franchise have to follow official canon. You can't go off and do your own thing, or else the book won't get approved and printed. It's that simple. So please don't keep asking me to carry on in the old canon, because I'm just not allowed to."

Karen Traviss EU Author, 2009.

[This is what insanity looks like when you write it down. - Must follow canon, but wont let me carry on in the old Canon? Earth to Karen, please respond. The EU wasn’t canon!! ]

So Lucas shot back thru his head writer on the Clone Wars series, Henry Gilroy whom himself had been an EU author in the Clone Wars comics before being tapped for Canon Clone Wars series who responded, although not directly to her, but in response to her being unwilling to go on and leaving over it.

"It is unfortunate that [EU author Karen Traviss is] moving on because [of] her opinion that canon is being changed. I guess the big problem is the assumption that her work is canon in the first place. After working with George on The Clone Wars series I know there are elements of her work that are not in line with his vision of Star Wars.."

~ Henry Gilroy, The Clone Wars series Head Writer/ EU Author [Comics] 2009

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To Lucas, the entire Saga is about Anakin Skywalker/ Darth Vader, of course he was going to be heavily involved in the Clone Wars series, Anakin was one of the major reoccuring characters in it, that's Lucas pride and joy. But I digress....

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“For me and my training here at Lucasfilm, working with George, he and I always thought the Expanded Universe was just that. It was an expanded universe. Basically it’s stories that are really fun and really exciting, but they’re a view on Star Wars, not necessarily canon to him. That was the way it was from the day I walked into Lucasfilm with him all through Clone Wars, everything we worked on, he felt the Clone Wars series and his movies were what was actually the reality of it all, the canon..."

~ Dave Filoni 2017

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"In the same interview, Dave Filoni said that George Lucas told him, that the movies and The Clone Wars television series, were the only thing Lucas considered canon." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_expanded_to_other_media

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"That’s one of the biggest debates in Star Wars, what counts? *The idea of what is canon? When I talk to George I know that he considers his movies, this series and his live-action series canon." ~ Dave Filoni, SW:TCW 2008

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"I always think of the research you speak of as what I knew about the EU before I took this job. As I stated above, working directly with George changes the way you see the EU and everything in it."

~ Dave Filoni 2008

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What do you think about Star Wars: The Clone Wars not following the continuity established previously in books and comics for the timeline between Episodes II and III? Could all those events that are being unfolded ever be folded into a coherent timeline? Some time ago you started a podcast related to The Clone Wars, will there ever be new episodes?

"As far as continuity, I see The Clone Wars as being no different than the arrival of the prequels in 1999. We fans knew that those movies would be a representation of the true Star Wars universe as imagined by George Lucas, and in some cases, it would not perfectly match the stories told by Expanded Universe authors. So, we had to unlearn all we had learned about the Mon Calamari being discovered by the Empire, about Boba Fett being Jaster Mereel, and about the Republic having a standing military.

I think with each episode, we start to get a better understanding about what the real Star Wars universe is like."

Pablo Hidalgo 2010

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"There's this notion that everything changed when everything became Legends. And I can see why people think that. But, you know, having worked with George I can tell you that it was always very clear -- and he made it very clear -- that the films and the TV shows were the only things that he considered Canon. That was it.

"So everything else was a world of fun ideas, exciting characters, great possibilities, the EU was created to explore all those things. But from the filmmaking world I was brought into, the films and TV shows were it". ~ Dave Filoni speaking about working with George Lucas

This is the actual video of when Dave Filoni said the above quotes during an interview on 'The Star Wars show' [41.40 mark] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcNXPNXOv2A&t=16s

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"What George did with the films and The Clone Wars was pretty much *his universe ,” Chee said. “He didn’t really have that much concern for what we were doing in the books and games. So the Expanded Universe was very much separate." ~ Leland Chee, 2017 - SYFY WIRE

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“Lucas’ canon – and when I say ‘his canon’, I’m talking about what he was doing in the films and what he was doing in The Clone Wars – was hugely important. But what we were doing in the books really wasn’t on his radar.”

–Leland Chee, 2018

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Pablo Hidalgo on Lucas and the EU being separate Universes. https://i.redd.it/3fpbkocr43q01.png "He [Lucas] only considers his movies and TV projects as his universe, and told the Clone Wars writers to only worry about those."

[That really says it all.]

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“The most definitive canon of the Star Wars universe is encompassed by the feature films and television productions in which George Lucas is directly involved. The movies and the Clone Wars television series are what he and his handpicked writers reference when adding cinematic adventures to the Star Wars oeuvre. But Lucas allows for an Expanded Universe that exists parallel to the one he directly oversees. […] Though these [Expanded Universe] stories may get his stamp of approval, they don’t enter his canon unless they are depicted cinematically in one of his projects.”

-Pablo Hidalgo, Star Wars: The Essential Reader’s Companion, October 2nd, 2012

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"Canon is only what's on the screen. - Episodes I-VI, TCW and what's to come." Pablo Hidalgo, 2013 - https://ibb.co/S0fYM7q

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“Working on ‘Clone Wars,’ it was always canon.” ~ Dave Filoni

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[Orginal commentor] - "Some facebook site just posted a "Bring back GeorgeLucas" petition....wrong on so many levels. With Ep. lll & TCW he went out ona high."

[Pablo Hidalgo] "Why would he ever come back to these folks? All that love and goodwill from the internet.=]"

[Second commentator] - "I remember the EU fans in the early-mid 00's trashed George endlessly, and now they act like he's their savior."

[Pablo Hidalgo] - *"And yet we are following his model of regarding the EU vs. his canon. Weird."

[Second commentator] - "Well they get the false impression that George was a big EU fan and stood by it."

[Pablo Hidalgo] - "Where do they get this stuff? =] It's like his last 3 movies and six seasons of TCW didn't happen!"

https://ibb.co/Q9GXSbd

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Q: Hi Mr Chee! I’ve got a question about continuity – are all the various different media of Star Wars (the films, TCW, the video games, the EU) intended to form a single universe, or is the EU intended as a parallel, alternate universe (like, for example, the different continuities between the various Batman comics and films)? I realise that fans tend to each have their own personal preferences, but I was wondering what the official Lucasfilm company policy regarding this was? Many thanks!

"The dual universe question comes up often. I know George Lucas has mentioned it being two universes, but that’s not how I see it. His vision is definitely not beholden to ours, but ours is definitely beholden to his."

Leland Chee 2012

[Nabbed!!! He was still talking his 'singular universe' garbage the week before heh]

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“Star Wars continuity, even EU continuity, does not rest on my shoulders. Our licensees submit product directly to either our editors or our product development managers. The Holocron serves as a tool for them to check any issues regarding continuity, and after that, if the editors or developers have any questions, they pass it along to me to check for continuity. At the same time, I am constantly on the lookout to make sure that any new continuity being created gets entered in the Holocron. With regard to the the films and The Clone Wars, I am not involved in continuity approvals though I have often been asked to provide reference material.”

~ Leland Chee

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"..at the end of the day there is a difference between what you see in the Star Wars films and TV series and what you see in those books." ~ Dave Filoni 2012

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These are pretty much all about the Clone Wars series, and him working with Lucas on it.

DAVE FILONI: George Lucas's Origin of "Mandalore" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yCjKTHjE0I&t=270s

DAVE FILONI: Is Jango Fett A Mandalorian? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPw08Bimr0Y&t=80s

DAVE FILONI: Working with George Lucas on The Clone Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaq8jRVtfnQ

DAVE FILONI: Incorporating Mandalorians Into The Clone Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whHJc3jX2AE

DAVE FILONI: Learning Star Wars from Lucas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG_yLWLdDdQ

[This one is interesting, *if I remember it correctly* in this one he tells the story of how he and Henry Gilroy and Lucas were speaking and Lucas was telling them how things work and he told them that "He was teaching them how to make Star Wars for when he was gone".]

DAVE FILONI: Ahsoka vs Vader Duel Breakdown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=196kd-UvGEM

DAVE FILONI: Growing Up With Star Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB0tMecj51s

Dave Filoni on Ashoka vs Vader and Midi-Chlorians - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBKQfbN7Vaw

These are just some of them, there are alot more and even in ones where it doesn't specifically site Lucas in the title, he comes up in all of them at certain points and talks about working with Lucas on the Clone Wars, so if your interested in this subject, it really pays to listem to all of them, they're facisinating insights and you learn so much about so many things both in story and out of story, some really good stuff.

They're call ins for Rebel Force Radio, They interview Filoni constantly, theres a ton of of them on Youtube. This should get you started and than you can go from there on your own if you were interested and hearing more. Really good stuff.

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There’s a lot more, but I think this should serve as a good example of just how pervasive Lucas’ direct involvement in the Clone Wars series was.

Lucas loved it. He saw it exactly like the movies in terms of importance.

#LucasIsGod

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acearchivist359 · 4 years

Text

My Rise of Skywalker Opinions/Commentary

this is mostly for me but and for my other blog (not on tumblr) but I thought I’d post it here too cause why not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ happy Star Ways Day fellow humans, may the force be with you

Okay so here's something I have a lot of opinions about. I'm gonna have to say right off the bat, I didn't like Rise of Skywalker. Being said though, I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. I've seen it twice by now, I wrote my notes having seen it once, I've had lengthy debates about it with multiple people ranging from one of my parent's friends to one of my best friends to my little brother. I saw it like the day after it came out, I wrote my notes on January 1st, so I've sat with this for awhile and I'd sat with the movie before I wrote them. I kinda forgot about it all for a bit cause I blocked it out of my head and then I thought it might be too late to post it but I put a lot of, frankly chaotic, effort into my notes and I figured when it came on Disney+ people might start talking about it again so here we are. Now I'm still using my original notes, which I added to after seeing it the second time, cause I have no desire to watch this movie again. I really don't. I honestly wouldn't have even seen it twice but I had told my grandma I'd go with her cause she loves Star Wars and she had no one to go with. My grandma loved it, but my grandma loves them all "because it's Star Wars." My mom also saw it and liked it, she's only seen the originals though and had no idea what was going on. I, on the other hand, spent a lot of time hitting myself in the head (the first time round) and there was a few occasions where I honestly said "what the fuck??" out loud in the theatre. So one more thing I have to note, I feel the same way about the whole trilogy I don't really like any of them and I never did. But I'm not entirely just looking at this as one movie, a lot of what I've got to say looks at this as the end of the "Skywalker Saga" cause that’s what it is. I also have some things that go back through the entire trilogy but this is mainly based around TROS since it's the most recent and I refuse to watch the others to make notes on them. Also, I'm aware of the problem they had with the whole George Lucas vs. Rian Johnson thing and how they wrote them separately, however I'm still gonna call them out on things they should have done to tie things together from the beginning cause that was a really dumb way to do things anyway. Plus like I said I'm looking more big picture on a lot of things (mostly cause there's major plotlines that I hated). One of these days, I'll make a positive review but it won't be about the sequel trilogy, I'll tell you that much. With all that said, I vote that I get on with this. Just for reference though, none of this is in chronological order. There are some things I did like about this movie, I will give it that, so I feel like we should start there. Small Positive Things:

The first thing I put in my notes is just "Finn and Poe" and honestly that's still a mood. I really liked them in this one and I really saw why people ship them.

The next point in my notes just says "death star" which boils down to two different things: the aesthetic and the Imperial March

I know I said positive things but I didn't think of it in my notes and I need to address this. You're telling me that the Death Star exploded but there's still that big of a piece in tact??? But whatever not the point.

The aesthetic: vague continuity thing aside, I fucking love the Death Star in this I really do. It looks awesome. It's really cool to see this broken down, abandoned version of the Death Star. I loved the Stormtrooper helmets scattered on the ground, for some reason that part really stuck in my head. Being said though I generally love the old Stormtrooper helmets, the First Order ones just don't do it for me, but seeing them scattered around.. Idk it was a nice touch I think

Imperial March: so like the Imperial March is the shit, obviously, but that soft, subtle hint of it in that scene as Rey steps into the throne room is one of the only parts of that movie that made me hit my brother's arm in excitement (we do that at the movies, it's our thing). It reminds me of that thing they do in Clone Wars when Anakin does something just a little Darth Vader.

Right so the next thing I had was that part where Kylo Ren finds Palpatine and he switches from his voice to Snoke's to Darth Vader's.

It was a little thing but I liked it a lot. As far as having to tie it all together, the idea that it was actually Palpatine manipulating Ren wasn't so bad. (That being said the whole how Palpatine is around thing is pretty far fetched, but they tried.)

My next thing, and this I actually laughed at as opposed to like confused laughter, is the part where they get back from their little mission to find the map to whatever the place was called and Threepio introduces himself to Artoo and Artoo literally does a double take and backs up like "what the fuck??? " That was such a human expression for a robot, it was hilarious. Also Threepio being like "You're not messing with my head!" *cuts to Artoo messing with Threepio's head* Basically anything Artoo cause I love him.

Again tiny random thing, but the Jet Troopers and the Sith Troopers were really cool. Me and my brother quote the "they fly now??" "they fly now!" part all the time. Also just like red Stormtroopers..

So here's a thing that gave me feelings. (I'd like to just point out that this is one of the only things that gave me feelings and it's about to be clear why.) Chewie finding out Leia died. That hurt my heart. I knew that they couldn't possibly go through that movie without having Leia die, and I said this before the movie ever came out. What I said before was that they really had two options: they could have Leia die off screen which would have been disrespectful to both Carrie Fisher and Leia or she could just sorta disappear which would have also been bad. However they gave her the death scene she deserved. I mean sort of, jury's out on it really. But Chewie making sad noises and falling to his knees hurt me. Similarly Artoo beeping at her sadly made me weepy. (The Anakin in me really jumps out whenever Artoo comes up but like I love him)

I honestly have nothing else to say for this point besides: I can't believe Harrison Ford agreed to do that

I just wanna touch on Poe again cause he was always my favourite of the new characters, I wasn't really connected with any of them (which is so uncommon for me) but Poe was my favourite cause he was funny. He was really good in this one, I thought he was funny, again him and Finn had a brilliant thing going. For whatever reason this one made me appreciate Poe more.

I have some (general) grievances to air out now

I have to say one thing that really irks me about this trilogy is that none of the original characters reunite. The exception of which being everyone and Chewie. Also are we counting Luke and Leia's? I guess in the end they end up reunited in the force in the end either way but still. I mean really Han and Leia have their scene together, and I love that scene, but other than that nothing. No Han and Lando, no Han and Luke reunion. Han and Luke is the one that bothers me though cause them and Leia are the trio and Han and Luke are the only ones that don't reunite. We never see Leia and Lando together on screen either. It's a crime.

I don't know how I feel about Hux being the spy. I feel like it was just kinda lame, you know? Pretty predictable when you think about it, would have been cooler if he wasn't the spy. Seemed like it was just comic relief when it should have been a plot point.

I think it would have been cool if there were more Jedi in the final scene. Like all those Jedi voices spoke to Rey, but only Luke and Leia are there at the end? I get the symbolism with the lightsabers and Luke's place and all that, but still. Like at least, you know, Obi Wan or Anakin. This is one of those full circle things but still, I think it would have been a cool scene.

Okay so this is just me being petty but like I don't care it bothers me. The fact that they keep acting like the lightsaber Rey has is Luke's when it's actually Anakin's bothers me. I know it's a little thing and Not Important but it's dumb. Cause it's not Luke's lightsaber, Luke made his own later on.

Also the fact that they started calling it Rey's lightsaber annoys me so much for the same reason. She has her own lightsaber now, leave Anakin's alone.

Okay so, we have reached the point where I start talking about things a bit more, bear with me (if people even bother to read this at all idc this is mostly just for me to rant and stuff):

So like look, I'll be the first to say not a Kylo Ren fan. He had potential, I will give him that, and that's where I'm going with this. The other movies had him as this whiny, try hard, Darth Vader wannabe and I just really didn't vibe with that. I mean this is the first real villian since Darth Vader (not counting palpsy during the prequels cause he was just behind the scenes and every movie had a different Bad Guy) and he throws a temper tantrum. Those stormtroopers were hilarious but still. But anyway, did not expect to come out of this movie having wished Kylo Ren was in it more. If they had had him be the way he was in this one the whole time, I might have actually liked him. He did some cool stuff for once in this one so let's discuss that:

I talk about things being full circle a lot (but with movies as nostalgic as Star Wars there should be full circle, fight me) but him fighting with Anakin's lightsaber was very full circle

I do like that it was Leia's death that triggered his return to the light side (I mean I'll get into some things about that later) as opposed to some romance bullshit with Rey. I really don't ship them, like at all, and I think it makes it more compelling that it was his mother's death instead.

He did some cool shit at the beginning, that fight scene was cool. I like the part where he slams the guy down on the ground, don't ask me why I have no idea. I saw it in the trailer and I liked it.

The Han Solo in him really jumped out in the end there and it was really entertaining

The fight with the Knights of Ren was really cool (besides that one jump thing he did cause I see where they were going with it but it just didn't look as good)

What was definitely cool is the part where he pulls the lightsaber out from behind his back, that was a cool move

Alright so here's my thing and this is gonna make me sound bad probably but like as already established, I don't really like the new characters as much. I just didn't connect with them on the same level as the past trilogies characters, which is fine it's whatever. But I am just gonna say it, I don't really like Rey. But here's my thing, I've always been indifferent towards her but like not really caring either was but there are some things she did in this one that just.. bothered me so this being my platform I'm gonna talk about it.

So the thing with Star Wars movies for me and most people is the family feel right. But like Rey just goes off on her own and ditches Finn, Poe, Chewie and Threepio all the time and like I get that she's sensing something or she wants to get to the death star but she could say something instead of just.. disappearing

Okay so here's another thing, and I know they wanted to find a way to tie it back to the originals but….. a Palpatine?? There are so many other characters they could have gone with but it's like they just wanted to do the 'watch the light side defeat the dark side' thing in as many ways as possible in one movie (Which I'll talk more about later)

Alright so here's my last solely Rey related point and like I don't know where people stand on this cause they seem to either love it or hate it. But Rey Skywalker?? Here's my thing, I've a really hard time getting past the Palpatine thing on that one. But also is that supposed to be the Rise of Skywalker? Because I don't know that I consider that to be rising for her.

Alright, on the topic of the light side vs. dark side thing. Yes I am aware that this is a fundamental part of Star Wars and always has been. However they did it in two different ways in the same movie. Here's the thing I don't like Rey or Kylo Ren over each other, I have the same level of indifference with both of them. So this isn't me being a Ben Solo stan, promise cause I could not possibly care less if they bring him back, I'm not gonna fight them on it. But the storyline of him overcoming the dark side, would have been more interesting to me. Because I knew Rey wasn't gonna go to the dark side, this is Star Wars. But I wish we could have seen Kylo/Ben struggle with the dark side vs the light side more. I mean they gave us such a good look at it with Anakin, we watched him struggle and fall. That to me would have been rising.

Not to mention Palpsy literally just tries to use the same trick on Rey that he already tried to use on Luke. That's not full circle, that's Palps being dumb.

Okay, now for the full circle nonsense I keep talking about. The thing with this is that it probably would have been the things you do over two movies and not just the one but just cause they didn't write them that way doesn't mean I can't imagine it.

For one thing, I'd have had Ben kill Palpatine.

Hear me out: Palps himself refers to Ben as the "Last of the Skywalkers" and given that Palpatine is the reason behind all the Skywalker drama from the beginning. With that being said, having the last of the Skywalkers kill Palpatine and thus end his insane, saga long reign over the universe would have been amazing

Not to mention this would be finishing what his grandfather started which was his thing the whole time. Anakin tried to kill Palpatine at the end, and having the last Skywalker, the last of Anakin's blood genuinely finish what he started would have brought the whole thing to an end

Along the same lines as that, the power the all of the Jedi scene would have in that case (and I'm saying this like he was good for more than the last 10 minutes of the movie) been so much more powerful. To have him hear Anakin's voice, like he always wanted but guiding him towards the light instead. Not to mention his mother.

And also, small thing but on the topic of finishing what Anakin started and all that but his grandson, the last of his blood (I'm gonna keep using that) using his lightsaber, the very one he had when he first fell to the dark side, to kill Palpatine once and for all would have been one of those full circle moments that I expected the movie to have more of.

SO yeah that's everything, all my thoughts and feelings. This literally took me forever to finish. It's been like 5 months but it's Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with You!) so I had to cram to get it done or I'd die. Plus once it started to get away from when the movie actually came out, I figured I'd wait for it to come out on Disney+ and it has so here we are. I'm glad to be done with this and get it all out cause I honestly just don't care for that movie. I'd rather watch Clone Wars (the finale was soooo good). Anyways, peace out and may the force be with you, always! -Moony

#star wars #the rise of skywalker #may the fourth be with you #literally just me rambling really #hntrswrlk-reviews #i should really bring that back i was serious about it before

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bearpillowmonster · 4 years

Text

Star Wars SPOILERS Review

Ever since TLJ, the question lingers in my mind with every Star Wars related thing to come out “will they take it seriously?” It’s probably my biggest fear for Star Wars to date. Do they overwrite everything and try to reverse TLJ? And do they purposely try to subvert expectations so much that it seems like nothing matters?

I want to decrypt some of the things I said in my nonspoiler review but for the most part I will mention new things that I didn’t say. Forgive me if I state the obvious but some people haven’t realized the literal meaning behind some things.

My favorite thing about this movie is Ben and Rey. If you’re a Reylo shipper, you’ll like it but also be hurt. I wasn’t one way or the other with that. But instead of the constant fighting between Palpatines and Skywalkers, we’re given the end, the “marriage” if you will, though they didn’t get married, just kissed, between the grandson and granddaughter. It's a game of opposites, Kylo is in a way the opposite of Vader with Vader “wanting the girl until he met the dark side” vs Kylo's “wanting the dark side until he met the girl” and Rey is in a way the opposite of Palps. You see how Rey looks at him and heals him when she realizes his mom just died, she felt sorry, they were both sad and shared in that moment. Episode 3, Skywalker saves Palpatine(though they say that was just to get Anakin on his side, he could’ve beat Windu) but in Episode 9 Skywalker saves Palpatine again. Before he dies, we are given the best version of Ben. Though I did hear that Ben didn’t have any lines after he turned good...I mean...you’re not wrong? They really didn’t make him say anything though? Also I thought maybe Ben gave back the life force that Rey gave him on the Death Star, returning the gift, so to speak. Now...with that said, did we need to see Ben die? This is something a lot of people seem to be sad about, mainly the shippers. I mean I feel like people would say there weren’t any consequences if he didn’t but I also want to call back (I know it’s been shown over and over but the new trilogy doesn’t listen) to when George Lucas said during the original trilogy that nobody needed to die because we go to see a movie to be uplifted.

So really it’s kind of a mixed bag, you could say he finished his arc but then again so did Rey, so did everybody, maybe it’s punishment for what he’s done, but I feel like he could have more chances to atone for himself, is he redeemed by having that moment? Did he even need to be there? Could Rey have handled it on her own? I really don’t know what to say here.

I will say though that I felt like Ben went down the road of never coming back in TLJ, but it didn’t make it surprising that he came back, in fact it almost seemed obvious because Palpatine came back, Ben wasn’t going to follow orders again, he just took out Snoke, why would he do that? He would try and do things his own way, he would try and follow what Darth Vader always had in mind about overthrowing and we know there weren’t going to be 2 villains. Also during that end scene it looks like he’s just wearing an Under Armor shirt, you could’ve complained saying “he took all that time to get changed or else he could’ve saved Rey sooner” but still, he should’ve had a light side outfit. But I don’t like the idea that he’s the reason the original 3 died. He killed Han in the first one, had a fight that pushed Luke past his limit in the second, and had Leia try to bring him back one last time in the third. Also we get the message that you can choose your family, Rey chose everybody as her “family” then took on the Skywalker name, blood isn’t everything. The title is about her but also Ben, Ben rises as a Skywalker once again and Rey rises as a jedi.

I thought the ending would be a force ghost fight but it didn’t end up happening which I’m kind of glad but we still got the “I’m all the sith” “I’m all the Jedi” and she says it like the “And I...am Iron Man” well this all started with Korra “I’m all the Avatars” I know this would’ve been fan service and you can see some cameo ships in that one scene but you don’t see any recognizable characters, it would be more effective if we actually saw these characters. Speaking of, they have cameo voices in Rey’s head, you can barely make them out and it’s cool to hear them but still, force ghosts would’ve been cool too, not to fight but to see like maybe on Tatooine.

People complain about how Rey and Palp are too OP in the end. I heard a rant from a former Lucas prodigy that the force balances itself out so the light will take its hosts and the dark will take its. In the prequels we see tons of Jedi and sith that they have to share the force in a way but with the new sequel trilogy...those were the only ones of each side so of course the force would infuse everything it had into them, that’s why they had “all the Jedi and sith”

Also Palp died by his own hand because Rey was just reflecting his attack and he knew they could both heal/bring back the dead so which he says something like “I haven’t saw that in a long time” a callback to his master Darth Plagueis. Speaking of, what I’ve seen a lot of people complain about is that “Jedi can use healing so it breaks the universe” but that’s not the impression I got. Palp says that quote so I got the impression that only certain people can use it, it’s not a force power everybody can use and I imagine either he couldn’t use it or you can’t use it on yourself (which would make sense since you use your own life force) which then made him change his mind about Rey killing him and drain both their power. So no, I don’t think anybody could have used it before, for some reason it just so happens that these two can. So if you’re going to complain, complain about convenience. He might have been talking about the force facetime relationship the two have but still, I think he saw that they both had the power, Ben can do what Rey can and Rey can do what Ben can.

We see a tank of Snokes which leads me to believe Palp was trying to create a new body? I mean he says he “made him” either through training or literally, not much beyond that.

I knew as soon as they found D-O that he would have some sort of connection or map to Exogal and yep, he did in a way but what was the point if Rey was just going to lead them anyway? I know it connected to that Jedi Hunter but still. Turns out the writer also helped with Justice League and Batman V Superman which makes sense because Bats V Supes has similar fundamental problems as this one.

Also, how is Rey Palp’s granddaughter? Like did one of the opera members get with him? And he’s still...capable? I liked the clone theory better and even that seemed off. Then it’s “No, I am your grandfather” now. Let me put it this way, I doubt there was a meeting back when TFA or even TLJ came out where they were like “Rey’s a Palpatine” it feels like an afterthought but maybe it isn’t because I see more evidence such as how she used a lightsaber for the first time and why that vision was in the Death Star, maybe RJ just ignored it and was like “Yeah no”. It was like they were teasing it throughout TFA just to be shut down and then focused around as the main plot of the final movie, I don’t like that setup, maybe they didn’t want to make it too much like Empire by revealing heritage but still...I mean the idea that “nobodies can be made somebody (force sensitive)” is a cool idea, they did that with Blade Runner 2049, but he wasn’t any “chosen one” but he did great things but this set it up to be hype in TFA and just kept cancelling out after that. Also Luke knew and Leia knew but for how long? Couldn't they have protected Palp's son and wife and Rey? And if they knew from some kind of force power then how did Han seem to know in TFA? I'm guessing that the whole thing with Ben turning bad didn't happen until after because Rey was pretty young when she was left. I like that they had Luke on the trail of going to find him but it feels like Force Awakens "we only have a piece of the map and there's no way to tell from just that." I would think it would be obviosu one of the wayfinders would be on Endor, but I might be thinking too much into it.

I’ve since watched some interviews and some rumors since watching it, I’ll focus on the more relative and close to confirmed stuff but Episode 9 is a big thing, you had George’s version, Trevorrow’s version, JJ's version, Rian's version, Disney (Iger and Kathleen)’s version (end version) and it’s just a lot that I’d like to see explored and explained, I hate how big corporations are like “nope, to the vault.” Like let the respective people be open about it if they want to, it’s after the fact so it’s not like it’s gonna change anything. Apparently there was a version JJ wrote up with the dagger of Mordis and Son of Mordis with Matt Smith but Disney didn’t like it and this that and the other thing, which explains why there was a dagger but in a way, the characters “were” the dagger of Mordis. I think where all these versions diverged is having Luke die, he was going to die, it’s just a matter of when, Disney and Rian pushed for 8 (for whatever reason). And everybody else was for 9. George said he wanted another 10 years to develop the sequels if he were on board and Disney wanted it out as soon as they could as well as avoiding having a repeat of the Prequels but with this sequel trilogy, people love the prequels now and the sequels have become the very thing they sought to destroy, ironic. I think the 10 years (which would be soon by now) would have done these sequels good, that way we have a clear vision and there might not have been so much crap behind the scenes. George also said that they wouldn’t let him have creative freedom but had no problem giving it to Rian Johnson. So yeah, apparently people agree with me on this because there's a movement called "Release the JJ cut" just like the Snyder cut of Justice League, I don't see why they can't just put it in the deleted scenes of the dvd or take a note from LOTR and make an extended edition, it's not like they're going to recycle it or anything, even if they do refilm the same basic scene then that's just something fans can make contrast to, it's not everyone's cake but it is definitely a good amount so there is demand, release the George Lucas Scripts, release the JJ cut.

I wanted Finn to lead a sort of revolution of Stormtroopers, have them rebel like he did. We saw that one deleted scene where they questioned Phasma in TLJ, that could have led to it but they just brushed past it with this one and gave “Jannah” the same backstory! I joked with my dad and said “the helmet had blood on it and everything.” “Really?! The same thing happened to me!” "No way!" Then at the end they make it out as Jannah is Lando’s daughter, apparently he says “my daughter was taken from me” at one point and I missed it and then they say they are from the same sector. It went right over my head, people say it’s a fun payoff, others say it has no impact. The way I took it was that Lando asked her what sector she was from and she said “I don’t know” and he said “Why don’t we find out?” I could’ve sworn that’s how I heard it, so I assumed to build off of that scene where everybody is hugging somebody but Finn meant that him, Lando and Jannah were going to find the homes of the defective stormtroopers, which once again would’ve just brushed right past the idea.

Even more so, Finn’s force sensitive? Pretty much like how he used a lightsaber in TFA so it lines up but they don’t go anywhere with it other than “Rey will be ok” “Kylo is on that ship” “The Nav is on that ship” it’s just used for convenience, there was no moment where Finn came in and really saved the day, I didn’t really care for that part where he drops the bombs with Jannah. Sure you could say that Leia was like that in the original trilogy but first of all, they were siblings so it made sense, and second, she had other development so she had stuff to still do, she was a princess after all, they wanted Luke to be the last Jedi to train new Jedi and she would’ve been among those as we can tell from this movie. Also we never figured out what happened to Luke’s green lightsaber, I thought that’s what he was going to give Rey but it ended up being Leia’s lightsaber, one we didn’t even knew existed until then.

Why does Finn have to have so many love interests? Honestly such a ladies man? There’s one every movie now yet he didn’t end up with any of them 😂 poor boy, almost confessed to Rey then Ben beats him to it, like some kind of Hunger Games drama. Unless he was going to say “I have a feeling which means I’m force sensitive right?”

I played with the idea of Ben seeing Han again and I’m content with it because it played out the same scene from his death but the way it should have gone...but we hear that remark from Luke that he’ll “haunt” him but he never does. They use the force touch ability pretty well in the movie, I kind of liked it, with the battle on the Death Star, I thought he was a hologram, I was surprised to see he was actually there. However Holdo is already forgettable because Poe does the same basic light speed jump over and over at the beginning of the movie, they call it a “Holdo” at the end but it just doesn’t seem special anymore.

My dad brought this up and I don’t really know what to think about it. So when Ben saves Rey at the end, he disappears, then Leia’s body does too, does that mean Leia was acting through Ben to save her? Or did they just poof together? Oh yeah! The Knights of Ren! So I thought maybe they would act like the Black Order then take them out one by one before Kylo was the supposed final boss and then Palp would end up being the big baddie instead but they don’t do that, they are called “Knights of Ren” not too sure about that considering they attack him in the end, more like Knights of Palpatine. The trope I was talking about is that they make a big deal of getting through it together but Rey just goes off and does her own thing, she stares into the distance a lot and gets sidetracked easily.

They made it seem like Anakin would return with Hayden in press events, he doesn’t other than a voice, a bit disappointed, then "that boy is our last hope." "no, there is another." well that "another" is...well...a “Palpatine”, Anakin wasn’t the foil anymore or “the other hope” it was Rey, she gave the final blow, she can take the name Skywalker, sure but I don't think Lucas would have let it play out that way, I mean Anakin saved Luke then Luke trained Rey but still. Luke was one of my main gripes for TLJ, not the acting, Mark Hamill is always great, but just the way they wrote and handled him. I remember after seeing it, someone at work told me “I loved Luke, he did an excellent job and had a great fight” and I thought “Yeah, coming from the guy who likes Alien Covenant” Idk what movie he was watching but I wasn’t a fan of that Luke and neither was Luke himself, Mark Hamill so that tells you something. This version seems to go back on that and does a 180, we don’t see too much of him but I started thinking how we didn’t see much of Ben Kenobi in 5 and 6 so I guess it’s alright, they at least treated him better with what we saw and that’s what matters.

I said this before but I imagined Luke taking down a Star Destroyer with the force in my ideal version of post ROTJ, just like Starkiller, we have a moment sorta like that with Rey and this cruiser, I got really happy seeing that, then Kylo fighting for it and drawing out Rey to use the dark side that she didn’t even know she could use. Speaking of, the reflection scene in this movie is what the one in the last one should have been, same scene but placed on Acht-To as training, you can have the whole snap thing and this and that but give it meaning, I feel like they were just avoiding being like Empire but then you did it anyway so it defeated that purpose.

The ending should have ended on Tatooine, I’m glad it did, right where it started. It’s funny how I had a very similar wallpaper before seeing the movie.

Then her YELLOW lightsaber made out of her staff is *😙👌🏻* great. I do think they partially did that out of fan service though, why Rey would want to go to a sand planet again is beyond me. However George has once said that "having a boy and a girl walking into the sunset adds 10 mill to the box office." and uh...I mean Disney again kind of just went against his wishes there.

Gotta admit, the whole star destroyer fleet were just Death Stars for the most part, Palp doesn’t know how to make anything else I guess. “Maybe we could make it bigger” “maybe we make it 3x more powerful” “maybe we could make tons of them!”

I also wanted to mention this because my dad liked TLJ and didn’t see why it was so divisive but seeing this movie he immediately understood so maybe it just makes things more clear and others hazy, idk.

So I thought of a way they could introduce Mara Jade and atone for Luke’s behavior in TLJ which was having Ben kill her and that’s why Luke went and banished himself and why the Jedi "forbade" any relationships like that, but then it would turn out she actually lived, that’s who I thought Zori Bliss was until she started flirting with Poe. Then I got the idea that they were going to do that with Rey, Luke knew that Palpatine was back and wanted to protect her so he left her on Jakku and banished himself on Ach-To, again wasn’t the case but I could see some big plot holes and opportunities in that theory too so maybe it’s better it didn’t go that way.

Another thing I thought was a theory I found online about C-3PO and how he would be hooked up to the Death Star and reactivate the droids as well as have some golden sentenials as an army (with him leading) to fight the First and Final Order, a callback to how the Ewoks made such a big deal out of him like he was their leader and how it was Anakin who made him so it would make sense to have some big surprise planned, that didn’t end up happening, the red eyes were just for reading sith language which makes sense, it’s cool.

Oh and that message that the emperor sent out, I couldn't find in the movie, but you know where it is? Fortnite. Yep and it’s kind of vague and dumb so rather than going to go find it, I will write it here for you “At last the work of generations is complete. The great error is corrected. The day of victory is at hand. The day of revenge. The day of the sith.” So...what is this “great error”? Vader?

One thing I know, but expected, is that these trailers are super misleading and I get that it’s supposed to be mysterious and get you to go but really? It made it look like they were destroying Vader’s shrine together, just an accident while facetiming. They made Rey look like she goes to the dark side, TWICE! Once in TLJ and once in TROS, at least with TLJ, I must say, Rian Johnson warned us about it like “hey, some stuff may not be what it seems in this trailer” so Disney is doing this on purpose, take what they have in trailers with a grain of salt. Turns out it was just a force vision like everyone was saying, called it, almost feels like they did that specifically for that reason, to put it in a trailer. But I there is at least an argument that Rey was struggling with the dark side and now we know why, I still think about the “Empress Palpatine” “Empress Rey” it’s got a ring to it, ngl. So them at least exploring that even just a bit was fun for me.

I’ve seen people say the complete opposite as me, that they liked the parts I didn’t and didn’t like the parts I did so it really is to each their own. It did some cool things with what it was given because it had to keep up with the other two, not disappoint people who hate and end the Skywalker saga, all in one bite while he wasn’t even set to direct it until late into it so he thought he was done which means there wasn’t a final script or any plan ready. I think it might have been more cohesive had it not had to deal with everything at once. There was a lot going on at one time to try and stuff in there. I think that if you had a path and then stuck with it then it would be more respectable, whether it was TFA or even TLJ, honestly I do believe that, pick one or the other but we shouldn't have to, just be committed to what you're trying to say, if Rey is related to someone, let her, if not, that's fine too but choose gosh dang it, don't throw the audience for a loop like we're some of the Mii's in Wii Sports, I'm not blaming anybody or any movie but this one.

Those are my thoughts on it at the moment, I'm reading the Thrawn trilogy so I should have a review for the first book eventually and I'll make reference back to this through that, you'll see why. As much as it's been said on the internet, I feel like it's true, like we're in a love-hate abusive relationship with Star Wars, so I think I need a break from it other than that. Disney has seemed to have based their movies around "avoiding" "avoid the Prequels" "avoid the Ladt Jedi" well, in the process I think they're avoiding Star Wars.

#star wars #spoilers #tros #the rise of skywalker #review #spoilers review #tros spoilers #star wars spoilers #sw

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starwarshyperdrive · 5 years

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I’m concerned about the Star Wars canon

I’ve always been a huge Star Wars fan but didn't follow the old EU (extended universe) because it was too convoluted and well.. a bunch of gobbledygook (granted there were some good bits in it, who doesn’t love the Thrawn trilogy even though he is pretty much a different character now), so I actually welcomed the new canon. Start over with a clean slate and make sure everything is connected, makes sense and feels Star Warsy. So far the story group has done a decent job, even though there were some questionable bits and pieces. As hardcore Star Wars fan and apologist I can force myself to get behind a lot of things and I was cool with the Bendu somehow, but the Clone Wars Mortis arc, as well as space whales and the world between worlds really rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of people are celebrating Dave Filoni as savior of the true Star Wars spirit and he is certainly an inspired artist and nice guy but I once again have to wonder whether or not some of the comic bookish stuff REALLY fits the Star Wars universe. Yeah I know ‘it’s a huge universe bla bla’ but do we really have to accept everything?

Someone recently described hardcore fans (such as myself) as a ‘cult’ and Star Wars Celebration to a religious ceremony and if I’m being honest and self-reflective I can’t really argue against it, but that’s also why you always need to check yourself and not just ‘swallow’ everything without questioning it. Keep a critical eye. Things like time travel and other super hero stuff ( I haven’t seen any of the recent Marvel or DC movies) have no place in Star Wars. Of course Star Wars is for everyone, but does that then also mean we need a Star Wars romcom, a Star Wars coming of age movie ..or ..? I don’t know..porn? Leave that to fan fiction.

Star Wars was always more about mythology, some sort of buddhist Excalibur and I am seriously concerned that at some point the ‘people in charge’ will forget that and it will become a shallow bubble gum entertainment focus on ‘what is selling at the moment’. A good example are - again - all the super hero movies picking up on trends. I don’t want a Thor Ragnarok Star Wars movie with a Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack. Don’t make everything the same. Keep Star Wars unique. Keep ‘that Star Wars tone’.

‘XY doesn’t UNDERSTAND Star Wars’ is an overused and abused phrase and in so many ways pointless as there are many facets to Star Wars especially now that we have generations of fans who grew up with the prequels, the Clone Wars, Rebels or even Resistance - I should point out that I actually liked Resistance because it’s not tempering with the mythology - but the lore has been laid out in the original trilogy and everything needs to acknowledge that. We cannot have some Terminator-franchise kind of disaster a la ‘Ezra traveled back in time and actually was there with Yoda on Dagobah’ or what not.

By now it’s common knowledge that - despite what they say - there has been no overall plan for the sequel trilogy, which is quite concerning and feeding into my concerns that it’s all downhill from here (after The Rise of Skywalker and the Mandalorian or course). I know a lot of people who vehemently defended The Last Jedi when it came out, mostly as a reaction to all the stupid hate it got for the wrong reasons and I am one of them myself, but most of them are admitting now that there is something off about the movie. It is written into a corner and not picking up on the clues given in The Force Awakens. It has some amazing scenes and I will keep defending it, but there are some scenes that just don’t feel right and leave a bad aftertaste. I frequently rewatch all the movies and besides Attack of the Clones it’s the only one where I think ‘Now I have to endure THAT bit again’. I go to a lot of Q&A and it’s interesting to see how people who have worked on the movie feel the same. Even if you 100% loved it and it’s your favorite movie ever, let’s be honest - the humor is completely out of place. Fart jokes in The Phantom Menace > Your Mom jokes. And it’s just too long. Of course we all want MORE Star Wars, but where does it end. Would you go and see a 6h movie? If you are a good filmmaker you should be able to say what you want to say in the same about of time as the other movies. But that’s just my personal 2 cents. It just felt like someone who was hellbent on doing his own thing for the sake of doing his own thing and not for the sake of the story. Don’t get me wrong. It was a great idea to (spoiler alert) kill off Snoke that casually, so the movie has redeeming qualities that save it for me. Then again, as a Star Wars fan I WANT to like it. I still watched it 13 times or so. I was in the room for the trailer reveal at SWCO. I want to take ownership and be part of the hardcore fan community, but they shouldn't bank too much on it. I still want a good movie. I’m not gonna be meek and mild about something contradicting the core mythology. Ryan Johnson is allegedly still doing his trilogy and then there is the Benioff and Weiss trilogy. They didn’t exactly do a great job wrapping up Game of Thrones and left fans in awe about how the show ended and have not really proven that they can handle a franchise well either. Will all off them have free rein and just go to town on a Star Wars story as they please? Am I the only one who finds this a bit odd?!

I trust JJ Abrams to do the right thing and I hope my trust is not misplaced. I think the allegations of The Force Awakens being a A New Hope reboot are misplaced as there are also a lot of similarities to The Phantom Menace, so.. if you’re a fan you know what comes next.. ‘it rhymes, it’s like poetry’. So it makes sense. So I think ‘he gets it’..

My main concern in the new canon overall. I made an effort to get all the publications of the new canon, but the books and comics already started to get weird again. Star Wars always had a slight alien but yet familiar vibe and some stories feature people smoking cigars, drinking coffee in the morning and doing other stuff never depicted in Star Wars before. How long until someone gets a Star Wars burger at Star Wars McDonalds or orders Star Wars pizza while watching Star Wars HoloNetflix. I’m sorry. That’s ridiculous. It’s not automatically Star Wars just because you use Star Wars terminology like death sticks or Nerf steaks. Watch the movies and make an effort.

And now the novelizations of the movies are apparently not considered ‘hard canon’ anymore because the authors didn’t know the direction the next movies are going, so the clues and hints may be completely useless. So why do I force myself through some really not very good books then (others are great, no generalization here)? That’s quite alarming. Wasn’t the entire reason they got a story group to avoid that? What’s with all the loose ends? That's also why I think they will shy away from using canon characters in the movies (for the most part). Its easier to have a self contained canon universe where you can introduce Purge Troopers in a comic and then have them in a video game. I once read an interview with one of the Star Wars authors who invented a character and then got told ‘give him that name / make him this person’ instead of having this particular character in mind from the start. This is how you lose consistency. I’m well aware that over hundreds and thousands of years that’s EXACTLY how ancient history was written, which is why there are flood legends all over the world and why Jesus and Mithras are pretty much the same person, but they DID NOT HAVE A STORY GROUP and ancient mythology hasn’t been written over a course of a few years.

At the same time it’s interesting how there seem to be purists who are very determined to bring that original Star Wars vibe back. Like Jon Favreau with The Mandalorian. And like I said earlier about Resistance. Its so much easier to do that if you stay away from the mythology. It’s really tricky and so much could go wrong. The stuff introduced in Rogue One like Guardians of the Whills and the temple of Kyber is a perfect example how it’s done. Some of the stuff in the Clone Wars and Rebels is the complete opposite, so I’m really curious to see how Dave Filonis involvement in The Mandalorian pans out. He is really great with stuff like Mandalorians, Clones and I even came to accept Ashoka after reading the book and seeing her all grown up as Fulcrum, but I’m very skeptical when it comes to his ‘mystical side of the force’ interpretations.

In conclusion I know that I sound like a preacher and George Lucas repeatedly stated it’s ‘just for 10 year old kids’ but tell that to all the dead Bothans.

Please just don’t ruin Star Wars.

#star wars #star wars movies #star wars theories #Star Wars The Force Awakens #star wars the clone wars #star wars the rise of skywalker #dave filoni #jon favreau #gareth edwards #the mandalorian #star wars rebels #star wars resistance #star wars fan #lucasfilm #story group #pablo hidalgo

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