No sense crying over spilled milk. I could write as vitriolic a screed as anyone about the prequels, or about the SpecEd changes (Seriously, why the blue fuck did Lucas change Vader’s absolutely tone-perfect “Bring my shuttle” to the much longer, much stupider “Tell my Star Destroyer to prepare for my arrival”? The first underscored how frustrated and angry he was that his encounter with Luke hadn’t really worked out to plan and it was uttered with just the right amount of angst; the revision detracted significantly from the impact. WTF.)
But that ship sailed long ago. However bad the prequels ended up being (“I don’t like saaaaaaaand. It’s all saaaaaaaaandy!”) doesn’t really change the fact that they’re fully “real,” by virtue of having appeared on the screen. The thing that we nerds often forget is that SW isn’t really even for us—not anymore, anyway. Most of us got bitten by the SW bug when we were little, and that’s the target audience. That’s the reason for Jar Jar and podracing and jawas and ewoks and all the odd turns in phrase and plot that are so painful to us as drama-keen adults.
I’ve posted this video before, but it’s perfect for this discussion—Star Wars is for these guys right here. It always has been, and we used to be those guys, but we’re not anymore. And it hurts to realize that the universe we held so dear and wanted to see so much complexity in is just light weekend matinée fare that’s managed to stay true to its roots in spite of a vocal, abrasive fan base that often resembles this guy in both words and deeds.
So, no, I didn’t write about my dissatisfaction with the prequels because they are what they are. I’d much rather that they’d been written differently, but there’s no changing that. The EU, on the other hand, contains a lot of execrable stuff that now possibly will indeed be execrated, and that’s a good thing.
Personally, though, with the whole Disney thing, I am optimistic. The problem with the prequels - especially the first one - is no one had the balls to stand up to Lucas and insist on edits and revisions. Every turd of an idea was met with “Great idea, sir! Really great! Genius! The kids will love it!”
While I am sure Abrams has some clout and isn’t a sock puppet, he has should at least have a team that comes together to try to find out what will make the best film - not just a bunch of yes men. My one fear with the movie is they rush it.
I sorta wish Pixar was some how in on this. They seem to have a really good track record with good, solid stories.
That’s why I’m glad they’re taking this approach instead of how Paramount handles Star Trek: almost all filmed Star Trek is canon, while the books, comics, etc. are not.
Prepare yourselves, though, for a bunch of angry cosplayers if, to straighten out the sequels from VII on, they do away with Mara Jade. That’d be a shame, too, because she’s easily one of the more interesting characters from the expanded universe.
I wo[quote=“jsroberts, post:5, topic:19205”]
I always thought there were canon and non-canon elements to the extended universe, and that the Thrawn trilogy was almost up there with the films. I don’t see why they have to throw all of it out just so that they can make a new series, but at least it isn’t a reboot.
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The only thing that concerns me is that Jade is such an important character, and eventually becomes Mara Jade Skywalker…as I said before, I worry about the fan response if the keeper of the canon decides to do away with the fan-favorite fiery redhead.
We talk of how great the Zahn novels are but forget that he created force-resistant creatures. In my mind this is as much of an abomination as midichlorians.
The ysalamiri’s most remarkable characteristic is its ability to create a “bubble” in which the Force cannot exist.
This is the post that I’ve been reading through all of the comments waiting to see. I was 6 when the first movie came out and my son was 7 when they announced episode VII. Already, he’s managed to learn and regurgitate more about the SW universe than I was in the 36 years of fandom since I saw the first movie. This is about them, and its always been about them and it should always be about them. The SW universe is one that you can discover when you’re young and love it for all of its big battles as well as it’s silliness and then grow to love it in other ways as you age. EU should always be non-canon, and the movies should always be about the kids. When a new SW movie is announced, we should all try to be the 6 year olds jumping up and down and do our best not to be the comic book guy.
I saw Epi 1 at 2am at a theater that was 40 miles away from me, because it was the closest earliest ticket I could get. We rented a van to drive down to see it, a big group of us and the van was silent on the way home.
But now that I’ve watched a 4 year old discover all of the movies (in the order of theatrical release, of course) and saw the same magic in his eyes for episodes 1-3 as for 4-7, I get it now. Those movies weren’t made for 27 year old me. They were made for kids born in the 90s and kids not yet born. Sure, even the 7 year old says “The original trilogy was better” but he also shows me that not all of the new movies suck, and it gives me hope that I can watch the newest movies more like that 6 year old in 1977 than that 27 year old in 1999.
I dunno - I liked the idea of the ysalamiri. IMHO - Jedi are pretty over powered in a lot of ways. If you aren’t in tune with the force (not necessarily a Jedi) you were fucked in a battle with them. A concept to make a Jedi more “human” and equal I think is a good one.
And it’s not that the force didn’t exist, it just neutralizes or repels it - like two magnets of the same poles trying to touch.
There is a difference between making a film that appeals to a 6 year old, and making one that ONLY appeals to a 6 year old. And it isn’t that the film was made for a 6 year and it worked - it was just made so poorly that only one possessing a six year old’s intellect can appreciate it. I tried like hell to like the first episode - but it was total shit on too many levels.
I do get what you’re saying, though. The problem is nothing will compare to your experience of seeing the first films when you were six. Even if it were some how “identical”, your experience would be different. This is probably why the much beloved ET I thought was shit because I waited until I was 20 to see it. Or how I rewatch some of my old favorite cartoons and a dismayed at the low frame rate, lack of action, and reused sequences.
Some kids might like TPM, but it just is a totally shit film. I know we’ve all seen the Plunkett Red Letter Media reviews already but I go back to them because thwy do a really good job of showing exactly what’s wrong with the prequels. I wonder if Film Crit Hulk has ever written about them?
Even judging them purely as kid’s films -and I have no problem with that argument - they just suck big hairy ones.
Oh, and I’m with you on ET, probably for the same reason.
See, I didn’t see Star Wars IV when I was a kid. I was in high school. And not in 1977, I saw it on VHS around 1990. But it still worked like a charm because it’s a charming movie tapping in on a lot of various things: mythical hero’s journey, Kurosawa, anti-establishment, Saturday cliffhanger matinees. There’s no “this will appeal to children” blatancy about it more than an homage to swinging across chasms and shooting blasters from the hip.
Episode I is nothing but pandering to children. I expected something that might make me as sympathetic to Vader as Luke’s journey, but instead we got Jar-Jar and poop jokes. And endless marketing opportunities that sell toys instead of characters.
I fully expect my kids to be furious with me the day they find out about Episodes I-III from friends at school. “There’s more to this and you didn’t tell us!?” And even then I still won’t let those movies in the house.
That said, I will be sad if Thrawn is banished from this world, but I do expect the curation to be smartly done by someone who cares about the source material, possibly more than Lucas does.
My husband and I had a conversation about when our daughter could see Star Wars for the first time, which led me to ask the stupid question: “What movie would we start with?”
Him: The first one.
Me, incredulous: Seriously? That one sucked.
Him: You don’t like A New Hope?
Me: Yes. But I thought we were talking about …
Him: It’s not like George Lucas ever got around to making the prequels, after all.
Me: …
Him: Yup. It sure is a shame that Lucas never got to make those prequels. I bet they would have been neat.
I could give several hundred Likes to this paragraph. I’m pretty sure Lucas did it because in the REAL version of the movie, he says “Bring my shuttle,” and two minutes and eighteen seconds of fairly frenetic screentime later, there he is on the bridge of the Executor. (I have the Theatrical DVD, so I just checked.) The time passage works acceptably well for sensible folk like us (having seen movies before, we know that not every cut occurs in realtime), but no doubt some unsubtle yahoo asked George how Vader could have gotten there so fast, and so George added all that extra crap in between, showing every step of the journey: getting on the shuttle, disembarking the shuttle inside the Executor, etc. I have a similar beef with 3PO’s ADR when he describes the location of the tractor beam generator. “He’ll try to make the precise location appear on the monitor” worked well enough for us, but apparently later generations needed to be told precisely how shutting down a tractor beam would allow the ship to leave. Sigh.
I have no rights to the SW universe, so nobody at Disney or Lucasfilm cares what I think (as long as I spend money on behalf of my kids), but I do think it’s a shame that they intend to relegate the SW canon only to the kids. I maintain that even though I saw the first movie as a wide-eyed 7-year-old, the movie wasn’t aimed just at kids. Sure, it’s not exactly literature or high cinema, but neither are there many bloody severed arms and crushed tracheas in your garden-variety Nickelodeon or Disney fare. And lame and mindless and kid-pandering as Phantom Menace was, it concerned itself with a trade embargo, of all things. Sure, there were spaceships and lasers and funny aliens for the kids, but the politics of the Rebel Alliance against the Galactic Empire took a bit of explaining to my kids, and the whole Trade Federation and Palpatine’s political maneuverings to gin up the Clone Wars wasn’t exactly the simplest situation either. These movies are aimed at a wide audience, not just the wee toy-buying tots, and as it happens, the success of Zahn’s novels (as well as the best of the rest of the EU) is a direct result of writing for an audience that’s slightly more sophisticated (if only slightly) than the ones who play with the toys after school. There are plenty of juvenile and YA books in the EU, but there are also ones that describe the formation of the New Republic after the eventual defeat of the Galactic Empire. There are several moments that display how the revolutionaries who ran the Alliance and beat the Empire are not necessarily the best career politicians and bureaucrats needed to run the New Republic. There are occasional insights and subtleties like that that work better for older audiences. In fact, it’s just a rich universe for storytelling for all ages in all genres, whether romance or zombie horror. And it helps when all those stories work fairly well together, as the EU usually did.
It could be “light weekend matinee fare” that’s focused squarely on the third-graders, or it could be a rich science-fictional universe with stories for everyone. Redoing them all (as the Disney SW canon) will give us future consistency, which is a good thing as far as it goes, but there’s no guarantee at all that the Disney SW stuff will be any better or worse than the worst of the existing EU. Comic nerds seem fairly happy with how Disney has treated the Marvel universe, so there’s that.
And you know, what do I care anyway? “Canon.” As if any of this shit actually happened.
Granted, but here’s my rub with the new trilogy: they put in a bunch of awful stuff that they thought would appeal to kids but really didn’t.
Take “young Anakin” or the Padawans, for example. They were clearly all meant to give younger fans some characters to relate to, but kids’ imaginations don’t work that way—they like to pretend to be the cool characters like Han Solo or Darth Vader. Even kids who loved the prequel movies are more likely to dress up as Darth Maul or Clone Trooper #90172A for Halloween than “Podracin’ Annie.”
I was going to blow off the prequels, too, but my plan was to tell my kids they existed, but that I didn’t like them so they could go seek them out on their own. But as it happened, fate stepped in. I was going to wait until my daughter was 7 and my son was 5 before I showed them the movies, but a kid at my son’s preschool liked stomping around saying “Luke, I am your father” in sepulchral (for a 4-year-old) tones, and there was no way I was going to allow that reveal, the coolest plot twist in my young moviewatching history, to be spoiled by some kid on the playground. So I decided to show the kids the movies. Initially I showed them the Theatrical DVDs since I had them, but since they’re letterboxed and standard-def, I eventually broke down and decided to get BluRays of them. And as it happened, I went to Amazon to buy them and it turned out to be last May 4… that is, May The Fourth Be With You, Star Wars Day. And Amazon had a screaming deal on all six movies on BluRay for like $60, so I went ahead and got the prequels too.
So now they’ve seen all six, but I’m proud to say they only wanted to watch the prequels once.
I don’t disagree with you, actually. There’s a lot of crap in Ep 1-3 and not even filler, full on sections of nothing but crap.
But it doesn’t matter, kids look around the crap to the stuff that’s actually cool. When there are 10 second graders in front of my house wacking the crap out of each other with lightsabers, they’re either pretending to be Luce, Vader, Mace Windu, Darth Maul, Asoka or Leia. No one is ever Anakin, or Jar Jar or Padme. Hell, the only “kid” from the first movies you see them pretend to be is Bobba Fett.
They get the cool stuff and don’t even think about the crap. They talk about the battles, and the ships and they memorize specs. The cool stuff.
The love story? Jarjar’s poop jokes? Never comes up.
Yeah, it sucks that its there, but to them, the canon is the movies, all six of them, warts and all (and to a lesser extent the Clone Wars comic). EU is cool, I’m glad it exists, but the idea that it should be canon forgets what Star Wars is all about.
Mine has been too afraid of Vader’s entrance, but we made it all the way to “If this is a consular ship, where is the Ambassador?” this time around.
That said, I have acquired the Harmy versions if we ever delve further, all I have around the house is the VHS because in my universe Han always shoots first.
I’m also really glad I got the box set to Indiana Jones when I did. That way the fourth movie is always a distant possibility that the stars never aligned for.
I was aware that Kevin J. Anderson was much reviled for what he did to Dune, but up until now I did not realize that his work on Star Wars was also, um, unappreciated. Not that I’ve ever read much of either.
Multi Hugo and Nebula-winning Greg Bear did a Star Wars book; that’s the most prominent author I can think of who got involved. Did that turn out so badly?
