Not to mention all the DC-3s that are still out there. You can still get a newly rebuilt one modded to your exact specifications even though the model has been around for almost 80 years. And the U.S. Air Force plans to keep using its fleet of B-52s until 2045, nearly 90 years after they first entered active service.
Of course, those examples are still small potatoes compared to how long the U.S. Navy can keep a ship in working condition.
Let’s see them beat the Space Battleship Yamato.
Heh… would it help if we got out and pushed?
“Already begun has.” Ahem.
It might!
Actually I think there you have it. Once the tech fits the need, no need to try to improve it, except by making it more convenient. And more robust. Maybe smaller.
Interesting though that the Empire never figured out that the Falcon is the fastest craft in the known universe. They’ve impounded it, and failed - the idiots - to analyse it.
Honestly, some folk.
That was the scene which clearly established Solo as the Space Fonz.
Just came across the George Lucas Special Edition of this trailer:
Any organisation big enough to build Death Stars and the like will be a bureaucracy. Imagine the paperwork!
Lucas is gonna need a lot of bacta for that burn.
Ouch!!
Hey, it beats trying to get the Senate to pass anything.
Aw man, that actually makes me sad.
So much hope, we had. The return of so much childish wonder.
Trashed, all that hope was.
So, it’s derivative of the previous Star Wars movies, or it’s a distinct contrast from previous Star Wars movies?
I iz confuzzled.
It’s a distinct contrast in that it’s that derivative of the previous movies (which weren’t as derivative themselves).
So, if it stuck to the ol’ tried-n-true, it would have been completely different. But its breaking new ground by reusing things, yes?
Let me rephrase this – the original movies had “must be original at all costs” as their mantra. The new movie has “let’s avoid being ‘original at all costs’ because that’s been done before again into the ground once or thrice already”.
Well, to be fair, it’s the seventh movie of the franchise. Before the Daniel Craig reboot (and even afterward, to a certain extent), James Bond movies had begun to crumble under the weight of all the obligatory callbacks to the previous movies, what with the theme song and opening credits choreography through the “Bond… James Bond” and the vodka martini “shaken, not stirred” and the Aston Martins and the run-through with Q’s gadgets and the flirtations with Moneypenny, etc., etc. At a certain point (particularly, I believe, following a nine-year hiatus between installments) the odds are high that a new installment’s teaser trailer is going to include plenty of elements that are recognizably part of the canon. Star Wars showed us Tatooine, the wreckage of Alderaan, the first Death Star, and Yavin IV. The Empire Strikes Back went for some variety in location and tone, with wintry Hoth, the swamps of Dagobah, the asteroid field, and Cloud City on Bespin. And Return of the Jedi tried to keep things reasonably fresh, too, to an extent. The return to Tatooine was kinda necessary since that’s where Jabba lives, but they got out of there as soon as possible, and afterward we swing by Dagobah briefly to dispense with Yoda and then it’s on to the forest moon of Endor and the big space battle.
Tatooine didn’t become tiresome until Phantom Menace, since it seemed to be the least credible possible origin for Anakin Skywalker (but apparently Tunisia’s always happy to see Lucasfilm come back!). And though the prequels presented varied biospheres (garden world, underwater kingdom, Rainsville, Hole-In-The-Groundistan, LavaLand, and a somewhat overdone Coruscant), the thematic echoes started feeding back on themselves: double-ended lightsaber! Stormtroopers are clones… and Boba Fett is cloned off the same genotype! Darth Vader built C-3PO out of junked parts! Kashyyyk looks a lot like the Endor moon! And “always two there are… a master and an apprentice.” Bleaaarrgghh.
Well, anyway. It’s been nine years. (Or thirty-one, depending on how you count.) If you have a minute and a half of screen time to fill, and approximately two VFX shots in anywhere close to presentable shape so far, how will you fill that time? It’s easy to have some ominous voice-over and a black screen. You might as well show off a couple of new characters, particularly if they’re obviously new and paired with something familiar (such as Person-Of-Color-Who-Isn’t-Billy-Dee-Williams in a stormtrooper outfit, in a desert that looks for all the worlds like Tatooine but maybe isn’t… or a sinister-looking black-clad guy with a slightly-cooler-looking lightsaber… or an R2 unit’s head on a very different body), and toss in the greatest space freighter in the history of space opera to the stirring tune of some John Williams.
They wrapped principal photography less than a month ago. They got nothing else to show yet. I’m not gonna judge the quality of the eventual movie based on this stuff yet… nor am I going to accuse it of being “derivative” when we’re seven movies in. It’s a Star Wars movie. It’s no sin for it to resemble a Star Wars movie.
I am quietly praying that that is actually Gwendoline Christie.
That would be awesome.
“Firefly” did okay with its special effects, and the rare uses of shakey-cam didn’t do too badly. But I hated the special effects in Serenity. Awful. It took all of the fun out of it for me.
