Every Star Wars character’s name is a hyped up 5-year-old’s idea of a Star Wars character name should be.
Signed,
A former 5-year-old who thought Obi’s name was OB1 Kenobi
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I remember getting the Star Wars “novel” (which I think was by Alan Dean Foster!) from the library and being very excited by the suggestion spelled out in it that Obi-Wan could actually mean “OB1” and might stand for “Old Ben #1”, meaning he might be a clone. So it wasn’t just you.
To be fair, it’s pronounced “saVAGE”, so it’s all sophisticated. (Apparently Lucas had a habit of offering ‘suggestions’ during the making of the Clone Wars show, and some of the extra-silly stuff came directly from him.)
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the rise of skywalker? I thought we’re trying to get away from the skywalkers?
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This is the 9th and final chapter of the Skywalker saga. There’s lots of theories in this thread about who or what the Skywalker is the title’s referencing.
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“…and ‘Skywalkin’ on Sunshine’ continues to rise in the charts to the number 3 hit song in the galaxy!” — DJ-R3X, Top 40 Droid
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all i can think of when i hear “the mandalorian” is something like this:
it’s like “manimal” meets “back to the future” meets “star wars”.
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The admonition to show don’t tell is not direction to lay information out directly to the audience on screen or on the page. It means that information should be conveyed to the audience through action, implication, character’s emotional responses, and image. Rather than through exposition in dialogue or narration. Its a rule about subtlety and depth.
The film actually contains a whole bunch of scenes exactly like what you say would be necessary. In fact the scene with Han you describe as Rey “fangirling out” is exactly that, its just showing us rather than directly telling us. That scene informs us that Han, Luke, and Leia are figures of popular legend. But that the details of how the Empire went down aren’t broadly known. That the Jedi and the Force are distant enough ideas that the general populace may not broadly consider them to be true. It even does directly tell us some stuff about Luke and why he went away and where he might have gone.
In fact the movie also contains multiple scenes of Leia arguing with some one about how things aren’t really the same. One of the scripts bigger shortcomings is all it really has for Leia to do is act as an exposition monster. All of her interactions with Han involve the two plainly describing exactly what happened with Ben and how they feel about it. This is bad writing, and its mostly crammed into there to fill us in on Kylo Ren’s back story and a bit of Luke’s. Directly telling us what happened in the interim through dialog rather than conveying that more organically and subtly.
And I would not for a minute praise Lucas’ original ANH script in this direction. He rewrote the thing so many times because what he put out there was famously difficult to shoot. Loaded with plain exposition and clumsy, nearly impossible to deliver dialog. What we see on screen is a product of alterations and adlibs by the actors, on set re-writes by others, and heavy, heavy, heavy editing. There’s no end of interviews and accounts of the production outlining exactly who it was besides Lucas who finalized what we see on screen. And the various versions of the script are source-able online, so you can see the differences and problems with your own eyes.
And frankly I can’t see how it “worked” for the OT but didn’t for the TFA given that we saw the exact sort of curiosity and drive to know more about the preceding events with the OT. That’s why the EU existed in the first place. Its what damn near 42 years of constant geeking out has been about. That sort of thing is just the out growth of proper world building and a compellingly put together piece of media. The sense that there is an established pre-existing world, and that events happening there were interesting. Along with the desire to know more about them, this is a good thing. And a sign of good writing. Unless you started a few days or weeks immediately following Jedi, short enough that “yeah we all took a nap and ate some snacks” plausibly covers the gap. If you do the job properly, and change the circumstance at all from the last time we saw these people, you’re going to be starting this way. There will be something that feels like it could be filled in, a sense that something interesting happened while we were away. Trying to cram that all into a scene of negotiations with the Trade Federation, gives you a movie about negotiations with the Trade Federation.
The approach of putting it all up there on the screen and explaining it all is what lead to the prequels. And that insistence that everything have a backstory, and that backstory should be directly explained is a huge reason the EU was often so bad, so weird, and such a god damned mess. That approach is how you get Midichlorians.
You can not chew scenery that effectively if you’re not a decent actor. And you absolutely can’t mix the scene chewing with the quieter, creepier stuff if you aren’t an excellent actor. The guy has a 50 year list of stage awards. The insistence that “he’d only been on TV” is both insulting to a storied theater actor, and pretty fucking dismissive of the really good work that gets done on TV ( and for back then particularly on British TV).
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100% agree. Absolutely fjording epic, and IMO a perfect way for Luke to go. It’s like Johnson saying, “Oh, so you think the original Star Wars is a love letter to Kurosawa films? Hold my beer, buddy!”
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You’ve just defined the core issue with human discourse on the internet.
Er, probably strike “on the internet” from that sentence.
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You’re right, no one could survive that…
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considering they were spelling out droid names like see-threepio and artoo deetoo that wasn’t a huge leap to make that guess!
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I do feel it reasonable to say so after the pitted Palpatine not only exploded himself, but whatever remains were then—overkilled?—on an exploding Death StarII™ (which thereafter became an inexorable cascade of biocidal events as debris and exotic matter impacted on Endor’s forest moon).
Say what you will, but them Death Stars™ obviously live up to the name.
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Right, unless he had, I dunno, like weakly explained magical powers or something, that could allow him to briefly survive in the vacuum of space.
Or if escape pods or small personal space craft were a common occurrence in that universe.
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Can’t say anything’s impossible with grizzled space wizards, but I’ll put a loaf of french toast on it being the case that he’s dead, Dave.
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I will gladly accept your friendly wager of a loaf of french toast.
I’m not arguing it’d be a better story or essential to the plot. And he could come back as a force ghost, or a clone. I think the laugh pretty clearly signals Snokes and/or Palpy is coming back, in some form. I think if it’s only Rey vs. Kylo Ren throughout the movie, Rey has already shown she’s big dog, and anyway, the one on one has too much of a Coyote/Road Runner vibe, so they need an additional big bad, and introducing someone in the third act only to knock them down by act 3.1 doesn’t allow them to develop the threat level.
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Second tier theory:
Either Jabba the Hut or Jar-Jar have been the big bad behind the scenes the entire time. Or both, and they’re in cahoots.
BAM!
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Well, the “piss poor writing” has been part of the franchise since “A New Hope”, and hasn’t shown much let up since then 
@coherent_light Based on what I’ve seen on the internet, if anyone dislikes a Star Wars film they are more than happy to be very vocal about it, so maybe the silence implies that your Dad enjoyed it after all. Thank you for sharing your lovely account.
@sosumi That footage from the Mandalorian looks cool; though I’m vexed by the gap in the centre of the iris valve on the door. The wind would whistle through that in a most irritating manner. I like the Mandalorian’s ship, and look forward to the toys coming out.
@squeakyanimal I liked the whole Rashomon thing in TLJ.
@snigs, I thought that the laugh at the end of the trailer was actually Mark Hamill.
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These sound about right: The Star Wars Random Name Generator
I got Tarth Marr which was also oddly accurate. (I have Marr’s in the family and always thought my great aunt Zelma Marr had a badass out-of-world-sounding name.)
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