You know this in all detail from a single line of a trailer? Oooookay.
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Always keep in mind these movies are pretty much the modern equivalent of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, The Phantom Empire, etc. There will be good, there will groan inducing bad, but on the whole it should be a very fun time cheering the hero and hissing at the villain.
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exactly, just like in the originalsācheer for darth vader and hiss at luke (those are the hero/villain, right?)
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So yeah I am a dork, showed this to my kid just now and he was like get tickets now, so early showing on the 17th at 7:30pm. Woo,
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Well, to be fair, The Jedi Council wasnāt exactly a low-profile operation, and the Jedi would have been fairly noticeable operatives during the Clone Wars to anyone who happened to survive standing near the battles. The thing is, as far as anyone would have been able to know, the Jedi were wiped out in their entirety by Order 66, so anyone who took their existence for granted would have assumed they had been utterly eradicated. And that would have been true, with the exceptions of Yoda and Obi-Wan, who went into hiding as hermits on remote backwater worlds, and Anakin Skywalker, who did something else. Actually, as far as I can tell, up until the events of TESB, absolutely no-one except Yoda and Obi-Wan ever knew that Darth Vader had once been Anakin Skywalker, with the possible exception of Owen and Beru Lars and R2-D2. (C-3PO gets his memory wiped, so tough toenails for him.)
And so Return of the Jedi refers to Luke, as the first living, practicing Jedi knight anyoneās seen in public since Order 66. But except for whatever public-relations press release the Alliance might have issued after the destruction of the second Death Star, pretty much every living citizen of the galaxy would still be under the assumption that the Jedi are extinct and have been since Palpatine ordered them all executed as traitors with Order 66. Thereās no real good reason why Lukeās legend would have grown in the past 30 years; that would only make him a target. I expect the Rebel rank-and-file were kept largely ignorant of his stature and importance after the Battle of Endor.
Still, even though Han Solo surely wasnāt alone in thinking the Jedi were largely mythical phonies, the fact remains that the Clone Wars happened only fifty years ago, and a great many sentients still breathing (or whatever bioprocesses they require to survive) would remember when the Jedi were still the official guardians of peace.
So Iām curious to find out just how buried the mythology of the Jedi has been allowed to become. I feel pretty confident that Luke himself has had a hand (however mechanical) in keeping the Jedi mythology on the down-low while he looks for apprentices to train. If notā¦ well, I look forward to what the explanation is for why Han Solo (of all people) has to reassure people that the Force and the Jedi are real.
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Bail Organa?
Hmm. Not sure. Obi-Wan left Anakin for dead on Mustafar. By the time Bail Organa spirits Leia away to Alderaan, I donāt think anyone realized that Anakin was still alive and being screwed back together by Palpatine. I am not sure when Obi-Wan realized that Darth Vader was Anakin. Was there any mention made during ROTS? Maybe it was later on, when the general public became aware of their new Emperorās new right-hand Sithlord, and Kenobi read about it in the Anchorhead Times-Picayune.
And then maybe Kenobi sent an email to Organa. Or maybe Organa figured it out for himself. I dunno. I havenāt seen ROTS recently enough to remember, and Iām damned if Iām gonna bother to look it up. Somebody else fall on that sword, please.
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But again - the Jedi Council was a high profile operation pretty much only on Coruscant. Off Coruscant, Jedi were (generally) sent out in ones and twos during peacetime, as negotiators and the like. Anybody who was an everyday schlub on a backwater planet in the middle of nowhere (which, if weāre being honest, is likely the a majority of the galaxyās population) would never have encountered one during peacetime. And the clone wars would have been whatā¦ 60 years before the time when the new movie takes place? Any survivorsā stories at that point would likely be considered nothing more than exaggerated stories told by grampa.
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Though he hadnāt heard of the Force, and indeed grew up in a household that actively withheld information about his birthright and recent galactic history, even backward farm boy Luke Skywalker had heard of the Clone Wars, and part of what heād heard may well have included tales of the exploits of the legendary Jedi. āFor over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic.ā Sure, their HQ was way over there on Coruscant, but they werenāt portrayed as any kind of undercover operation. 30,000 years is a long time for an institution to establish a sizable footprint in the cultural memory, and Palpatine would have had his work cut out for him to completely erase it.
By my count, around 55, if you assume the Clone Wars ended with the birth of the Skywalker twins. Luke and Leia are 20 at the beginning of ANH, ESB takes place three years later, and ROTJ six months after ESB. (Has that timeline been revised in the past 25 years?) And this new movie ostensibly takes place some 30 years after the Battle of Endor.
I doubt it. Chewbacca the Wookiee was already 200 years old at the time of ANH, so would well remember the Clone Warsā¦ and would remind you forcefully if you doubted his memory! And Iām sure, despite all the Empireās propaganda, that there were plenty of species long-lived enough to keep the memories of the Old Republic alive. Luke and Han are not presented as educated sophisticates when they display their ignorance of the Force and the Jedi. The highly educated and cultured Princess Leia, however, is well-informed about the importance of General Kenobi and the order he represented.
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