During the brief time I worked for one of the big four audit firms, I rewrote an audit report in Yoda-speak. It was the hit of the office holiday party.
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I remember taking a linguistics class and the professor sharing a hypothesis that in the absence of input, people create meaning in that absence. I think his hypothesis was based on the idea that politicians and lawyers tend to keep the things they say to the public as brief and incriminating as possible but I think this hypothesis applies here.
George Lucas is a victim of his own success and he let a generation of Star Wars nerds (I say this with great affection as I did buy the 220 dollar laserdisc set in 1996) play with their toys endlessly, engage with the novelization and comic books, and craft a lot of what they believed the mythology was going to be. His silence let the fans build their own storylines and opinions about what Star Wars was. By leaving almost 15 years for fans to speculate about and decide what was going to be next, he set the stage for his additions and intended improvements to be hated. On top of this, his ideas were a mess.
I think George Lucas was generally more interested in creating visuals and atmosphere than telling a coherent story.
It is like George Lucas created Lisa from Weird Science while not finding Kelly LeBrock attractive. He gave a bunch of nerds a dream he didn’t share.
Unlike other fans, though, I don’t blame George Lucas for the problem. It was his product, he could do whatever he wanted with it.
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There’s a bit early in the Mad Magazine parody “Star Roars” where R2-D2 calls C-3PO the f-slur. I found that shocking, first reading it in a reprint in the '90s.
I’ve reassessed it a bit now that I know the guy who wrote it, Dick DeBartolo, is openly gay. That puts it in a pretty different light than if a straight guy had written it.
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weren’t they eating them at the end!!?
i mean they almost roasted and ate luke and han for goodness sake*. i for one found the cute but actually we’re voracious cannibals thing terrifying. and then they sang
( * a very different ending exists in the multiverse with that one. but it was a very nice dinner )
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A New Hope was a fairy tale, presented with respect that fairy tales had never been given on the big screen (in live action) before. Empire showed that the fairy tale was maturing into a more complex story. Unfortunately, every time Lucas touched the films after Empire -the re-releases and the second trilogy- he injected more and more immature, childlike elements, and a lot of us have always felt pretty miffed about that. It seemed as if he was literally afraid of leaving what had worked once. Our tastes became more sophisticated, while Lucas regressed creatively (fortunately the people he had hired to help him didn’t, so the production quality skyrocketed - which was enough to keep the films interesting, if not entirely satisfying).
In the latest trilogy, Lucasfilm did much the same thing, in an effort to make the films feel more “mythic”. The first was a rehash of the original SW myth, the second branched out from that safe, familiar story-telling. But the third regressed back into fan service and jumped at a fairytale ending. In a lot of ways, relying on the original characters put them in a box, cutting off most original directions they could have pursued. Rogue One has been the only truly exciting work in SW filmmaking since the first film appeared, because, like the first film, no one was expecting the directions it took.
Disney’s series have been fun, but have still been too simple for my taste. I’m really looking forward to Andor. It might be even too harsh, but it might open up a galaxy that should have become more than a simple fairytale by now.
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I didn’t realise at the time as a young one just happy to watch more star wars but the return of the jedi is as far as the story could go. Half of the characters have already ran out of arc and the conclusion of the conflict between Luke and his father is not enough to carry the movie. So they resort to give the fans a double shot of nostalgia, long space battles, popular characters from previous movies and stretched lightsaber duels
The end of the movie is too convoluted, switching between 5 different storylines, every one of them with a different pace and tone, all rushing to the finish line. It barely made it, saved by clever editing and suspension of disbelief
But the time of the prequels, this happy accident became the SOP and the rest is history
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Cheeseburgers in paradise?
Yeah, it was nice how the clip ended with him mansplaining how “accents don’t equal stereotypes” to Williams 
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“Lord McVader”… that I would like to see…
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The Ewoks weren’t eating other Ewoks, to be fair. They just saw the unintelligible invasive species as good eatin’. They were vicious little terriers, to be sure, but relatable as locals who were underestimated. And then nerfed in the TV movies and the animated series.
As for Threepio, well, he wasn’t supposed to be lovable. He was the straight man to Artoo, the “reasonable one” of the duo in 1977. Again, relatable, and as a 'droid you could explain a lot away as his programming. We didn’t understand AI then too well.
All this to agree with the choir that George doesn’t want to admit to himself that he screwed up Jar-Jar, as “comedy relief” is simply not enough. And he refuses to admit that the lesson he really screwed up was that ILM was praised not for wowing us with special effects, but for internalizing the credo that the best special effects are those that you do not notice. Instead, he wanted to rub making CGI characters in our face and forgot to give the character any depth whatsoever.
And so we come to the real problem with Lucas: he is inattentive. I say this as someone whose career has been plagued by my own inattentiveness, that it shows.
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I didn’t find him especially charismatic in The Force Awakens but he only had about 1 minute of total screen time and was powered down for part of it.
Also, when Grogu showed up on Tatooine nobody was paying much attention to the droid in the back.
I’ve always wondered about R2D2 as the “ultimate ride or die,” he seems morally ambiguous to me. That or he just shows personality as programming and isn’t independent like Chopper and others.
I think it all comes down to George not being a very good filmmaker. I mean, he might have been at one point (people of a certain vintage seem to love American Graffiti), but it seems when left to his own devices he produces crap. I used to be a Lucas apologist (“Hey, Willow wasn’t that bad!”) but when the special editions and the prequels came out, he totally lost me. Just so much unnecessary bloated juvenile crap. But then maybe he knew his audience and it wasn’t me.
My reliable insider source at Lucasfilm at that time confirms that George was surrounded by yes-men which explains all the dinosaurs, fart jokes, Jar Jar, etc. that we got when he was allowed free rein. Perhaps he was the kind of creative person who had some good ideas — really good ones — and a lot of bad ones and it took people with some intellectual and creative discipline to filter them.
At one point, I was loaned a copy (OMG, on VHS!) of “Radioland Murders”, which was supposed to be the movie that George always wanted to make but couldn’t because the studios didn’t share his vision. One rainy day, I decided to watch it and turned it off after about 10 minutes because I felt sorry for the actors. Usually I’ll tough it out but, damn, it was really that bad.
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Lord Jeff Vader?
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The title for this is completely wrong. George and Robin are talking about a Documentary called Learn & Live and has nothing to do with Star Wars. I know this as I am in the picture.
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I’m not sure that you should excuse Robin William’s instincts either. Dig through enough of his work, and you’ll find plenty of this stuff.
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yes, a classic.
Lucas has admitted that he sucks as director. Nearly the whole of the Phantom Menace trilogy is unwatchable for me. It is incredibly trite and mawkish (the birth of Darth Vader scene was beyond embarrassing and has to be one of the most cringeworthy moments in cinema history. There is nowhere to go in the star wars universe. It’s been rehash upon rehash, simplistic and facile.
Rebels, outnumbered and rag tag versus imperial might and planet-destroying weapons.
Lucas is astute when it comes to money (born out by his getting the rights to the franchise ‘merch’ right from the get-go.
His real talent as such is to generate ideas for others ( well just Spielberg), films like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Anything he has any creative involvement with is garbage. Howard the Duck?!..
Red Tails… soul-destroyingly awful.
I tuned out after Return if the Jedi…
He tried to get others to make the prequels for him. Notably, it was Ron Howard who convinced Lucas that those were his films to make.
As a prequels apologist, I must point out that as much as those films did not work for people many of an older generation, the kids who grew up with the prequels in theaters and often more accessible to them than the original trilogy became a whole fan movement themselves and were on-ramped to the world of geek interests by them. The prequels deserve credit for something.
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I have viewed them later with a better appreciation than I did when they came out. But one thing is for sure, if the prequels were never made then Dave Filoni would have never gotten to meet George, impress him, go onto make Clone Wars and Rebels (two amazing star wars sagas that deserve attention) and then create The Mandalorian. For that alone I find them worthy.
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Oh I would love to see the extended scene with the heavily Scottish accent imperial!
I liked the ewoks. As a nine year old, I thought they were cool. So there. (And not that cute - have you seen their teeth?). So rests my defence of ewoks. Good day.
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