Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/24/trippy-cold-war-era-hungarian.html
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OMG spoiler warning!
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What’s that… tentacle dragon in the first one? Did somebody dig up Sarlacc?
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so in Hungary, Star Wars was spliced with The Dark Crystal and a medieval bestiary? well, Now I feel short-changed…
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What’s striking is that the Darth Vader doesn’t look anything like the one on film. That would be completely extraordinary on a Western movie poster, not because the studio wouldn’t permit it, but because of our whole, like, epistemic framework; Darth Vader’s appearance is a “fact”, even though it’s fictional, and if someone paints him differently, that doesn’t make sense to us, even though the poster artist’s fiction is no more or less true than the prop department’s.
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I would argue that him having R2-D2’s head as a shoulder pauldron is indeed “less true”. Though I kind of like this hypothetical version of Star Wars where Vader has a head that looks like a building from the World’s Fair, caught and sliced apart R2-D2 and is wearing him as a trophy, and Han Solo is some kind of tusked lizard man space pirate with six fingers on each hand and a rigid needle-shaped tongue. It looks like it came from an alternate reality, and that always gets the imagination going.
EDIT: It also occurs to me that the fan-made Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back where it’s made entirely of fans filming 5-second long segments of the movie and then editing them all together are similar in concept to what you were saying. Many of the contributors put their own spin on it, from R2-D2 being a trash can to Luke being a Ren and Stimpy-esque trippy animated character, but the movie is still Star Wars.
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I wasn’t sure if these were actual period posters or just posters made in the style of what someone might have come up with at the time – but it seems these are legitimate.
The detail in Vader’s eyes in the first image make it look like he’s rolling his eyes furiously.
Previously:
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Love the ATAT.
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I disagree.
You are suggesting that because fictional characters don’t actually exist, that all statements or representations of those characters are equally true (i.e. they aren’t). But that’s a very extreme view of the truth value of statements about fictional characters (or other non-existent or abstract things). Most people, including very smart people who think much harder about such things than most people can, believe that you can make true statements, or that you can make statements with differing degrees of truth, about things that don’t exist.
Consider:
Queen Elizabeth is English.
Sherlock Holmes is English.
Hercule Poirot is English.
Most people would agree that the first statement is true in a way that the second isn’t, and perhaps even that the first statement is more true than the second, because Queen Elizabeth is a real person and Holmes is not.
But most people also agree that the second statement is more true than the third (because Poirot is Belgian), and that definitive descriptions of the relative truth of these statements are entirely valid and sensible, even though they refer to made-up people who do not actually exist.
There’s quite a lot of scholarship on this, among the sort of philosophers who study language and ontology. I’m not clever enough to follow the arguments very deeply, but as far as I know, they pretty much all agree that statement 2 is “more true” than statement 3. They argue quite a lot about why that’s the case, and about the ontological basis for the truth of statement 2, but very few dispute the assertion that “Holmes is English” is true in a way that “Poirot is English” is not.
In a similar sense, “The mouthpiece on Darth Vader’s helmet is triangular” is true in a way that “His mouthpiece looks like the radiator grill off a Lincoln Navigator wrapped around his whole lower face” is not. Indeed, I would argue that there is a greater case to be made for the differential truth of these statements, because the helmet David Prowse wore on his head was a real tangible thing that exists (even if Vader himself is not), and it doesn’t look anything like the helmet in that poster.
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