star wars prequels: most embarrassing and hacky attempt at fan-service and plot resolution

https://jezebel.com/5703322/how-to-find-a-therapist

Boba Fett and the Stormtroopers are all clones of a random bounty hunter who is Obi-Wan's antagonist in AOTC

This is so atrocious I pretend it doesn't even exist (which extends to others listed above , but this above all.)

this is quite an achievement

most unnecessary: yoda meeting chewbacca. utterly inconsequential to the plot of any of the films, incredible needle-in-a-haystack odds, and tells you everything about lucas's opinion of you, the viewer. my friend argues that as stupid as this was, it would be worth it if lucas also edited "empire" again to add a scene where chewbacca tries to warn luke that yoda is a small green guy and not to be fooled.

stupidest and most logic-straining: the droids. they're all over these fucking movies and he clearly didn't spend more than five minutes thinking about whether it would make sense or be consistent with how people react to them in the original films. r2 keeping his memories, even... jesus.

most destructive to the cool backstory imagined by 10-year-old me: mostly not in this list as it comprises the general ambience and macro choices of the prequels, where "the clone wars" are inane and the "guardians of peace and justice in the old republic" are sleepwalking dummies who just talk all the time. but as a stand-in i might vote for the third-movie version of vader being "seduced by the dark side of the force" and having "helped the emperor hunt down and destroy the jedi knights," which turns out to mean the emperor tricked him into killing one guy, then ordered him to go kill a bunch of kids on the vague promise that later on they might work together on a project to save his wife from a convenient set of dream-sequence death premonitions. wow what a tragic fall, what a seduction, what a tale of hunting down and destroying.

It’s going to be impossible to vote for just one of these

Obi-Wan learns "certain point of view" defense from Anakin on a lava planet

So good. That bit of dialogue in Return of the Jedi is only there because the Vader plot twist hadn't been planned when A New Hope was written, and so they had to retroactively justify why Obi-Wan lied to Luke (it wasn't really a lie, u see!). But now it's so important that it has to have its source in the climactic exchange between Anakin and Obi Wan?

Padme childbirth bit has to be the worst, just arbitrarily deciding to tidy up the story completely so there’s no lingering question of her fate

Agreed
That was excruciating to watch

There’s a very creepy scene in the documentary about the 2nd or 3rd prequel - thank god I can’t remember the name - where Lucas talks about a dress he had designed specifically for Portman - and she describes it as uncomfortably tight around the mid section.

I would guess, even though I hate the thought exercise of “what were they thinking”, that the idea was she would go with Organa (and die at some point of heartbreak in the following year or two) and send Luke off with Obi Wan but they couldn’t envision her separating from one of her children, or Vader not being able to track her down

let’s just kill her off, since this is the “no lingering plot threads) script

list is missing Midichlorians and the Yoda fight, both of which are kind of shit torpedoes destroying all the magic of the middle of The Empires Strikes Back. the Yoda fight definitely belongs because George says at one point "We finally get to see him take out his little laser sword of his and fight". size matters not as long as you have double jump.

the Clone Wars ended up being the stupidest, most videogamey version possible, but that it was Boba Fett's clone I believe was actually canon back in the OG days. i have never understood the overarching political plot of these things, i guess robots are fighting clones, whether Lucas was trying to comment on drone warfare or just setting up some videogames i dunno.

Jabba as announcer was cool, that is something a mobster would be doing. C-3PO built by Vader was utterly pointless but it was cool to see him in skeletal form on Tattooine. not nearly as gratuitously tone deaf and cartoony as the cgi "robot factory" sequence.

Obi Wan's improv floating ball thing repurposed as official Jedi training shit was so indicative of the films having no imagination and just stealing from the OT. see also Jedi all wearing the same desert robes.

Emperor's face was really lame, since you kind of imagine he is just super old, like thousands of years old, from using dark magic. no, it's because this dune lightning thing. even though it happens to Luke in ROTJ and his face doesn't get fucked up. whatever. the Emperor the was best in the first cut of Empire, where they used a composite including chimpanzee eyes and a woman's face. very Lynchian. of course they had to go fuck it up like everything else.

tbh Star Wars has been ruined w this self seriousness need to over-explain ever since Return of the Jedi.

It made me so sad when fucking Yoda busted out the saber and became angry, childhood ruined , everything ruined

it kinda makes the Frank Oz original performance in Empire all the more special.

regarding padme's death, i should also have mentioned the "it's as if she's lost the will to live" dialogue, which i suspect was hastily added when someone pointed out that having her die from being choked to death by darth vader makes it a lot harder to buy his redemption at the end of ROTJ. actually everything he does in this film kinda wrecks that but that probably seemed particularly beyond the pale. (i almost said "icky" but...you know.)

i left out midichlorians because it didn't seem like it was trying to explain or set up any particular plot thread. obviously it's trying to explain "the force" so yeah i guess it could have counted. what's so amazing is that it's never, ever mentioned outside of that one scene. if that had been deleted along with the greedo scene, the waterfall scene, and padme and anakin starting their day before the pod race, i wonder how different the reception of the film might have been. people might have had to articulate their disappointment in terms of the general lame aimlessness of the film rather than the childhood-ruining i'm returning to in this thread.

i guess it's possible boba fett being the source a clone army could have been in some expanded universe shit before. i guess i figured that entire dumb plot, with the jedis being tricked into accepting a clone army because some guy ordered one back in the day (and palpatine's evil plan depending on obi-wan tracking the mystery to the scrupulously covered-up clone planet - what if he'd never found it?), was so stupid it could only be something lucas thought up on the way home from the premiere of phantom menace.

The entire character of Anakin and his conversion to a child-mass-murdering psychopath, if that were a single option. Its the central theme of the entire trilogy, it doesn't work psychologically or dramatically and it isn't sold to us in either script or performance.

The prequels in microcosm

https://youtu.be/KHCyDxxXog4

No-one was clamouring for Midichlorians, though.

My 'other' nomination would be the exaggeration of Yoda's speech from mostly normal with some odd loops in the original films to completely tortured in the prequels.

er, sorry, "jango fett." i have never been able to keep him straight as a separate character.

the one thing i can say for him is that temuera morrison does have some kind of fleeting screen presence in that weird scene when he meets obi-wan in his dorm room on the clone planet. i think this was pointed out to me by the griffin newman/david sims podcast series on these films. i just mentioned them on another thread, i guess they've been my main lowbrow podcast listening at work lately. they've got some really annoying running bits and juvenile humor sprinkled around (newman is so fucking young it makes my head hurt).... but also some gut-busting brilliance and real in-depth treatments of bad decisions in these films. love the 'performance review' episodes where they go all the way down the cast rating the most obscure walk-on characters, or similarly, the digressions into wookipedia for people like the "gorg-monger" who gets on jar jar's case for trying to eat some street food without paying. contrary to this thread, their operating conceit is that they don't know the original star wars movies exist, so when they encounter the stuff in this list they just mark them as bizarre out-of-the-blue developments. if you're the right kind of nerd it's good stuff.

we should do this ILM artist poll style

Django Fett-Reinhardt

i would support a ballot poll for the full list of crimes of george lucas but compiling that has taken the better part of a decade, with no end in sight. focusing on the hacky tying-everything-together bullshit is my attempt at a smaller task, achievable by this december 14 when - you may be surprised to learn - there's a new star wars movie coming out! wow!

Glimpses of the Death Star, first as a hologram and then early in its decades-long construction. Because the ultimate plan all along, even before the Clone Wars begin, has been to have a giant death ball.

Will watch with all progeny and will struggle to describe what the fuck is going and how it fits in with Empire

The cheap like-daddy-like-son foreshadowing where Anakin loses his arm

incredible needle-in-a-haystack odds

hey, it's like they say:
it's a small galaxy
(long ago and far away).

My 'other' nomination would be the exaggeration of Yoda's speech from mostly normal with some odd loops in the original films to completely tortured in the prequels.

Yes! During the big clone battle in ep 2, he's all barking orders and it's like dude, if time is of the essence here, maybe simplify your sentence structure so these Jango Fetts can blow up the droids more efficiently.

One Rogue One retcon that irks me is that when Leia tells Vader in ep 4 "we're on a diplomatic mission from Alderaan", it's turned into the most brazen bullshit line because her ship was seen just minutes earlier fleeing from the scene of the first major Empire/Rebellion space battle, which centered around stealing the Death Star plans.

ugh yeah hated that. it was so much cooler to imagine they'd been involved in some subtle stealthy plan with a carefully worked out "diplomatic" cover. i remain convinced the entire space battle aspect of rogue one was a late addition to make it more star warsy. and then in turn they have to add more stitching scenes with the rebellion deciding to go public with a big space battle.... lotta screentime and probably this is to blame for all the cutting-room-floor stuff with the character arcs.

So glad the prequels came out when I was a kid and was the target audience for Jar Jar Binks. I saw Episode I nine times in theaters, more than any other movie before or since. Still my favorite of the prequels.

Qui-gon invents force ghosts at the end of III. so random and tacked on.

I forgot about Yoda/Chewie. looked it up on youtube, thought it was some fan film at first. That CG animation has not held up.

I Mean really where did the first order come from, fake side shit was busted in Jedi
*FUCKING SIGH*
Who gives a fuck anyway

The diplomatic mission was to deliver evidence to the senate that someone within the government was creating planetary-scale weapons off the books

I mean, it’s not cover anymore because the ethical senate faction just got the info from a group that carried out a guerilla raid on an imperial data store, but the entire “if we show the senate what the Emperor is doing we’ll regain the government” was the pipe dream of every alliance member who kept voting to defer action

wait, i thought leia's specific mission from mon mothma was to go find obi-wan. jimmy smits and mon mothma talk about it earlier in the film, right? it's confusing...

a hilarious aspect of the force ghost thing is that they did prepare a scene with yoda being contacted by qui-gon, with a ridiculous temp-track vocal. unfortunately, most versions of the scene on youtube are fan edits where they've dubbed in qui-gon dialogue from a TV show or something, but you can watch the proper thing at 13:20 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-hFh35U3go

watching it again it seems pretty clear this was actually just a one-second shot of yoda sitting still before jimmy smits enters and the scene begins, and then for the DVD extras someone hit "pause" on it and dubbed in this nonsense. for what reason i cannot guess but clearly this is not "animated" at any level. i haven't watched all those scenes but the first one, with anakin and obi-wan cracking wise in an elevator, has another amazingly odd bit of dubbing which suggests that anakin has the power to make perfect R2-D2 sounds with his mouth. what the hell was going on?

"Your physical self will fade away but you will still retain your consciousness. You will become more powerful than any Jedi could imagine."

This doesn't seem all that distinct from the Sith desire for power + immortality.

clunky attempt to tie into obi-wan's line from ]star wars: "if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." apparently he learned all of his later zingers in the last half hour of revenge of the sith.

“The diplomatic mission was to deliver evidence to the senate that someone within the government was creating planetary-scale weapons off the books”
Exactly !

So then she's being pedantic just to pointlessly obfuscate the glaringly obvious fact that she was just part of a massive space battle that featured the Empire using the Death Star to nuke their own base. It doesn't take the Force to suss that out.

the most brazen and hacky thing is definitely anakin having built c-3po but there's something about the more incidental and tossed off laziness of the force ball being standard jedi training exercise that's really irksome.

special shoutout to the jedi temple being a grey government building in the intergalactic national mall with all the spiritual power of the meditation room from in the loop.

there's a case to be made that things like that are more offensive than things like jar jar because you can continue star wars forever and never mention gungans again but you'll never be able to change the fact that the jedi temple is sandwiched between the galactic history museum and the space dmv.

I haven't given a shit about Star Wars in years, but this idea of a Space DMV intrigues me.

the whole Anakin being seduced to the dark side because he has nightmares that Padme dies in childbirth was also really terrible. mostly because in the OG trilogy, Obi-Wan's vague references to Anakin's defection implied something more gradual and abstract. Not that he abruptly became Darth Vader cos he was having boo-hoo nightmares

like I think at one point they were toying w/ his reasoning being that he was brainwashed into thinking the Jedi were trying to take over the Republic, which would have made for a much more interesting story

Anakin building c3p0, Greedo & Vader being childhood pals, all the clones being Boba Fett, could be a kind of conscious or subconsciousness reaction to the expanded universe, a fuck-you to the people taking control of his idea. Everything within the first three films is connected & there is nothing outside of them - a contracted universe, so to speak.

Even the EU did this to an extent. Remember the time when the second Death Star became briefly self-aware because IG-88 uploaded his consciousness into it just before it was destroyed? Yeah.

It could be fun trying to one-up old George on this front. Like maybe Annie secretly built all of the prominent droid characters by hand. Maybe the Sarlacc was Boba Fett's abandoned childhood pet. Maybe ancient Jedi were shrunken to microscopic size and they now perpetuate their lineage as 'midichlorians'.

That IG-88 story is hilarious. Why is a single short story in an anthology allowed to entirely rewrite the significance of the main trilogy for the sake of elevating a random non-speaking droid character whom we saw in one scene? Something tells me they weren't taking the EU seriously.

it was like two seconds before it blew up. completely irrelevant

pulling the trigger for C-3P0 being a build-your-own model kit assembled by first-grade darth vader. just gets stupider and stupider the more i think about it.

This thread is so funny ty valuable poster dr c

hey man anivader can build anything

Voting for Yoda and Chewbacca being war buddies,

If they were gonna do that, they should have just committed and made an offbeat buddy comedy with Yoda and Chewie as forest detectives or something

yoda and chew-chew, always trying some harebrained scheme to swipe a picanic basket from the ranger

Nothing here's as embarrassing as starting and stocking this poll.

fucking amazing is what it is. the Lucas youth

I referred to the C3P0 origin in another thread as something I actually liked, which may even have spurred the creation of this poll.
Yes, it is incredibly forced, unbelievably coincidental - but I really don't mind that in this case, I think it's quite funny and adds something I find interesting to that idiot robot. Some dark, twisted roots to a naive, ever-present side character.
However, the R2D2 thing that is on this list, I do agree with and might even vote for!

The fan-service thing that annoyed me most isn't on the list: it's Yoda fighting with a lightsaber in Episode II. How it starts, with some kind of 'reveal' that, yes, even Yoda has a lightsaber; then you get a hyperactive ball of CGI flashing that thing through the screen. The entire thing screamed at me "IT'S YODA WITH A LIGHTSABER! IT'S COOL AND CUTE AND YOU HAVE TO LOVE THIS!!!". I didn't. It worked for me when he fought Palpatine in EpIII but not at all with that thing in EpII.

From this list, I think it's a toss-up between the 'all stormtroopers+Fett being a clone' thing vs R2D2. Or Yoda & Chewie.
What I always thought was even more stupid than Vader not checking up on Owen/Beru or Bail is Obi-Wan going in hiding and only changing his first name.

Padme killed in childbirth just to get rid of her; no effort made to cover Leia's memories of her mother in ROTJ

george had his extra large coffee, the greenbacks were rolling in, everything was fine

Wat if princess leah mum came back as jedi ghost

The reason Vader never went looking for his kids is because he didn’t know they were born before Padme died. No? Palpatine deliberately misled him.

it always makes me lol that one of vader’s kids got to go and live under an assumed name on a distant planet and the other kid kept his dad’s name and lived with his dad’s family on his dad’s home planet, watched over by his dad’s mate who decided to go undercover by changing his first name but keeping his own surname

it’s like obi-wan hid leia really well and then suffered debilitating brain damage before getting around to stashing luke

otoh Kenobi also was well aware that he had put the guy in a walking iron lung with four prosthetic limbs so

It's called 'hiding in plain sight' and it's a very effective tactic.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9NfJrACAAAzvjc.jpg

The Purloined Jedi

Obi-Wan's floating-ball Force lesson actually standard Jedi day-care exercise
Jar-Jar introduces motion to empower Palpatine and start Clone Wars while Padme is away falling in love with Vader

both of these are great

The cheap like-daddy-like-son foreshadowing where Anakin loses his arm

This was already canon in Return of the Jedi iirc.

Yeah, Mr. Binks haplessly enabling the advent of the Empire redeems most of the rest of the prequel trilogy.

I still don't get people's objections to the Tatooine stuff. The Emperor straight up tells Newborn Vader, "Hey, you accidentally killed your pregnant wife in a fit of rage." So he has no reason to believe he has living children.

And, being from that point on a creature made completely of anger, hatred and coldness, what reason would he have to swing by the planet where his most vivid memories are of a) being a slave and b) watching his recently-tortured mother die in his arms? Sentimentality? Old time's sake?

Who cares that Obi-Wan only changed his first name? Did he make the news a lot? Did anyone on Tatooine besides the Lars family and maaaaaaaaaaybe Jabba have much reason to GAF who he was?

Yeah, it's a perfectly valid point that Vader didn't even know Luke and Leia were born.
But he surely was aware that Obi-Wan survived, was actively searching out & killing all Jedi, I'd think that a bit of a thorough search might have had some results. If changing his last name didn't matter at all, why change his first name/if changing part of the name, the last name would be more obvious, right?

Obi-Wan was the Anakin part of his life that Vader wanted extirpated.

If I were Darth Vader, and was trying to think of where Obi-Wan might have disappeared to after leaving me to die on a lava beach, "Tatooine" wouldn't even be in my first 50 choices.

And, being from that point on a creature made completely of anger, hatred and coldness, what reason would he have to swing by the planet where his most vivid memories are of a) being a slave and b) watching his recently-tortured mother die in his arms? Sentimentality? Old time's sake?

Am I allowed to drop spoilers from the Darth Vader comic here y/n?

So far as I'm concerned, go for it -- I read them too.

I'll refrain but it's inevitably super hard fan service wrt character connections and that's more than reasonable when it comes to Expanded Universe canonicity.

I mean I don't think DV forgot how their last fight turned out either. I mean their battle on the Death Star is a bit like the Black Knight from The Holy Grail coming back as a dime-store Goth Robocop after Arthur is well over the hill, and still only winning because his foe is ready to retire and become a force ghost

I haven't read that recent short story collection but the funniest lede for a story I've heard of is Obi Wan telling Yoda that he's sending someone to train, and Yoda's like "finally, yes" but then gets pissed when he finds out he's getting Luke and not Leia

I want a cartoon version of that conversation where Yoda responds with "NOOOOOO!" and it's inexplicably just the Vader yell from the end of Episode 3

A minor one I forgot: Obi-Wan declaring "so uncivilized!" or whatever after he kills General Grievous (uggggggggh) with a blaster, so that we have a new understanding of his claim in the original film that the lightsaber was the weapon of "a more civilized age."

“Jar-Jar introduces motion to empower Palpatine and start Clone Wars while Padme is away falling in love with Vader”

this is one of my favorite things that happens in the prequels (i’m a fan)

worst of these is jango fett easy

http://i.imgur.com/ySqv56d.jpg

General Grievous is sort of redeemed in the Clone Wars cartoons, especially the one early on where they visit his creepy-ass lair

lol adam

general grievous is the worrrrrst. but has no connection to the original trilogy, unless you count the implication that vader's famous breathing should be understood as an incremental technical improvement upon the obnoxious wheezing and coughing of an earlier and more forgettable cyborg bad guy.

He's actually meant to ominously foreshadow Vader, so

it's hard to foreshadow a movie everybody's already seen though. tough remit for the prequels in general i guess. but really it all plays like dumb continuity insert stories, where some x-men writer in the 90s "reveals" that idk before he went to xavier's school, iceman went to a boarding school where his gym teacher....was apocalypse! like who will be moved by this or find it a troubling undercurrent that finally finds its payoff at the end when we see anakin now dressed in this strange, never before seen robot suit and then we hear him breathe for the first time.... oh my god............. it's all coming together!

(conor ratliff, in character as Lucas, on Grievous: "I was inspired by, I visited my friend in an old folks' home and they were really sick and it scared the shit out of me. I wanted the audience to feel like maybe the Jedi could catch whatever it is this guy has. He's a scary character.")

sick old people are scary. good 2 know Lukie

oh my god............. it's all coming together!

Who would have thought Anakin was Darth Vader?!

general grievous is the worrrrrst. but has no connection to the original trilogy, unless you count the implication that vader's famous breathing should be understood as an incremental technical improvement upon the obnoxious wheezing and coughing of an earlier and more forgettable cyborg bad guy.

― the pleather of pleather paul (Doctor Casino), Monday, December 11, 2017 7:43 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is where i feels like evidence that Lucas just threw the prequel series together at the last minute and had never planned things out before the prequels started production. Grevious could have been cool as a more developed baddie, maybe introduce him in the first movie, give him more character, maybe he was designed by Palpatine - make him more of a proto Vader, since he is already taking design cues from him w the melding of human and robot parts. "He's more machine now than man" and the whole anti-technology vibe from ROTJ that was a major theme in the original trilogy (Ewoks - no - E-Woke, dude) that entire side of Vader's fall is missing from the prequel trilogy.

rather it is (poorly) established that his human emotions are what turned him evil and the cyber horror aspects more or less glossed over. the most affecting scene in the prequels is Darth Vader's surgical dressing and ritual entombment by cybernetic overseers. i think Grevious could have been a better part of the story if Lucas hadn't just made it all up as he went along. instead he is a nothing character because he comes in midway through movie 2 and is dead in 15 minutes.

literally the only thing he accomplishes is capturing palpatine, which turns out to be a carefully orchestrated scam that he's not even in on. there's some serious fumbling going on between his underdevelopment and the clunky use of christopher lee, who's built up in the second movie but doesn't really do anything until he suddenly shows up at the end, and then at the beginning of the third movie they kill him off. both feel like afterthoughts and are easily forgotten if you're trying to summarize the movies, which is a weird space for the nominal villains to occupy.

DC i've been listening to those podcasts you recommended and i'm halfway through attack of the clones, they're really great. i thought i had heard everything bad there was to say about the prequels but something about their wide eyed incredulity at the choices made is really funny and charming.

there's a wealth of miniseries & cable prestige shows now that show how you can take a story where major spoilers are in tons of people's grade school education, or even living memory, and they still introduce drama and humor and joy and even action, and there were plenty of shows like that even before the prequels were an idea, but since those things aren't in the tiny mythic pulp biome of Lucas' imagination, he never considered them as a model. A set of prequels more like the Marco Polo Netflix series or even that Mongol movie about Genghis Khan's origin story would have been awesome, in retrospect. Looking for fellow ILXors to name some pre-1995 historical dramatization shows or films that he could have used as a model, instead of whatever middling flim flam he made up along the way.

IMHO, and I've spent like 15 minutes thinking this through:
TPM should have been a rip off of To Hell And Back starring Anakin as Audie Murphy, but the good guys don't quite win at the end.
ROTS should have been The Sand Pebbles but with clones in place of the coolies and Anakin as the insubordinate MM1 Holman. At the end he gets blown up by droids so Padme can get away; but when he awakens, Palpatine just tells his new Robocop Skywalker that the ship with his lady on it never made it home (it's a lie!)
That leaves room for AOTC to be all about Anakin getting busted back down to padawan or whatever because he's a dick and Obi-Wan doesn't have time for his shit, no matter how good he is at fixing robots and dogfighting.

hmm, well as far as models go, i maintain my theory that he should have more attentively ripped off stephen king's wizard and glass as a model for how to double back to the declining days of the old order of knights.

but it's always tough to 'fix' the prequels because you quickly get bogged down in, how much of the existing prequels do i have to keep? even the assumptions that all three are about palpatine's master plan, the second movie introduces clones, they all feature someone named 'amidala,' there's a jedi order that looks roughly like the one in the prequels... very quickly we're saddled with all kinds of boring crap that doesn't have to be there. OTOH of course i appreciate the workshop exercise of "given this stack of things, how few changes can we make to make this a good story?" but it's a different animal.

@ oiocha - awesome! yeah i've gotten a lot of giggles from those in my basement library job.

in my imagined revisionist prequels the only things you have to keep are the story elements explicitly referenced in dialogue from the original trilogy, while bearing in mind that the universe shouldn't look or feel completely different, given it's only a little over two decades prior.

The rest is "hmm have other people managed to creatively re-tell a story where the entire audience knows how it ends, but they really feel the stakes nonetheless? maybe I should try that."

yeah i'm on board with that.

it might also be helpful to spend just like maybe ten minutes on developing some actually interesting ideas, like why some Mos Eisley barkeeps practice Butlerian Apartheid and approximately a bazillion fearsome battle droids have all been decommissioned and scrapped while various protocol and maintenance robots can still get steady jobs as long as they wear their restraining bolts proudly. How does that work? How is IG-88 even a thing in such a paradigm?

tbf the battle droids appeared to have all the fearsome deadliness of macaroni sculptures held together with tape. another element it would have been easy to not base large swaths of the prequels around.

The droid soldiers have been installed as chips into the Stormtrooper's weapons, Rogue Trooper style.

Remember that watching just the movies is a little ahistorical to how these were meant to be consumed: there is a lot of Grievous in Star Wars: Clone Wars, where he is completely badass.

"Grevious could have been cool as a more developed baddie," same is true of Darth Maul. It's evident Lucas had zero idea about what was cool in the movies he was himself making.

also i read that list up above and thought you were taking the piss in 1/2 of them then realized you maybe aren't? like: "Vader and Greedo play together as children (deleted scene)" does this really exist? WTFFFFF

imo Vader should have turned at the end of the second movie (cos rhyming) and the third film should've just been a Darth Vader Goes Around Threatening The Universe Movie (and maybe throw in his struggles w the dark side). that one scene at the end of RO, there should have been an entire film like that.

I can't stand that completely nonsequitur jumpcut in ROTS where they cut to the product manager at Tosche Station putting in a huge order for power converters.

Or the scene where the mother learns from her doctor that there's no solvent in existence which can remove that thing that her young son Lobot glued to his head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao0eQZDsXUU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP5defnEQ8A

"The scene with Greedo is a scene not as much about controlling your anger as it is, placing your anger in the right place."

iow sadly i am taking the piss in none of the poll options

P much all of the Sith folklore which made Darth a title rather tgan a first name

somehow my brain turned "Darth a title rather tgan" into "Darth Tegan"

"You must be Master Sarah-Tegas, here to pick up your clone army!"

darth as title totally worth it for the bonkers-ass character name "darth plagueis" and you all know it

I prefer all forms of fan service to use of the phrase "fan service"

never forget

A similar situation arose with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed’s protagonist, Starkiller. “[That name] was only supposed to be a nickname or call sign, not a proper name from the beginning,” a former LucasArts employee says. The development team hoped that Lucas would give Vader’s apprentice a Darth moniker, which at the time, was something that didn’t happen often.

“The team threw a Hail Mary to George, saying the game would have more credibility if the apprentice had a ‘Darth’ title,” a Force Unleashed team member says. Lucas agreed that this situation made sense for Sith royalty, and offered up two Darth titles for the team to choose from. “He threw out ‘Darth Icky’ and ‘Darth Insanius.’ There was a pregnant pause in the room after that. People waiting for George to say ‘just kidding,’ but it never comes, and he just moved on to another point.”

Darth Grody

https://morbotron.com/meme/S07E06/60060.jpg?b64lines=IEkgYW0gRGFydGggU3Ryb3llci4KIA==

I've always said Lucas has a better sense of humor than people give him credit for. He does love trolling both his fans and his employees.

Jesus Christ that Greedo scene, it's like a Lifetime channel movie. Imagine it being your job to defend garbage like that, "I was really disappointed to lose the Greedo scene ..."

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i still find the "qui-gon contacts yoda" deleted scene the most laughable. another great one that Blank Check turned me on to: anakin and padme have an awkward dinner with her PARENTS in "clones." it is as pointless as you might think.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

nice turnout! can't argue with any of the top placers.

i never really got around to hating on jabba and the pod-race here but really that was dumb. i agree that i can see jabba emceeing a race, but having darth vader be from tattooine and a star participant in a sport overseen by jabba is just as uncreative and world-shrinking as anything else here. if we had to see his childhood at all (hint: no), he could have been from anywhere in the whole galaxy! but coming up with new planets is hard i guess.

the insistence on the tattooine tie-ins is ruinous i'd say. because you could delete that entire act of the movie if anakin was just like, some force-sensitive teenage understudy space pilot on planet naboo. or fuck it, teenaged pod racer, sure - they could race pods just as easy on naboo. he's got big dreams but he's impatient, always looking for the way that's quicker... easier. got it. now use the forty minutes you've just saved and devote them to giving the movie an actual plot and interesting character scenes.

Shoulda just had him be a farmer from Wyoming that stumbled into a new galaxy by sheer chance

what's up with palpatine's homies who watch the ballet with him before anakin shows up. who are those people

Cultured

Palpatine contributed to Partisan Review, knew Sontag, disagreed with her taking photos with the NVA.

Not only was Cornelius Evazan a doctor (?!), but his cosmetic surgery shop was across the street from a restaurant called ADMIRAL SNACKBAR?!

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Admiral_Snackbar

wookiepedia is fucked up

lol #1 is hilarious because Anakin building 3PO is introduced in TPM as evidence he's a child prodigy yet about 5 seconds after being introduced to 3PO in the first Star Wars you see many similar units wandering around in the background so it's obviously a standard form factor. and yes the last minute mind-wiping is lazy as fuck even in that montage where they realized all the shit they should have made the prequels about they have to wrap up in 5 mins.

concerning palpatine's buddies: according to wookiepedia, mas amedda, the big blue guy who says "this is a crisis!," has no backstory at all. and then suddenly circa the end of Sith he becomes an incredibly important figure in the history of the galaxy, mysteriously held offscreen for the original trilogy - manages the entire civilian side of the imperial bureaucracy, survives the second death star, becomes some de facto ruler in the empire's last days. he's the guy who ultimately signs terms of surrender with the rebellion!

Palpatine has his little coterie in Return of the Jedi too. The beau monde of the Empire.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/4/44/Inner_circle.jpg

sith goals

I am on board for every theory claiming those dudes are important
all of them are Snoke now

blue horns crisis dude being snoke would rule. really deflate the entire enterprise, with no survivors. i have not seen the new one yet tho so no spoilers if this in fact turns out to be the case. i would also accept jocasta nu and maybe sebulba.

there's a Star Wars marathon tonight at an AMC starting at 10 pm and all I can think is they started it then so that everybody can catch some ZZZs during the prequels and wake up when A New Hope starts

jocasta nu is in the marvel comics right now

*further outs self as complete nerd*

one of the best things the new movies will do for star wars, long term, is just crowding out the later lucas films, even just at the level of airtime in marathons. as many problems as i had with rogue one it is wayyyy more appropriate than "clones" as the kind of movie one should find on at 3 PM the day after christmas on spike TV while everyone's slumping around on a sugar crash.

the cheezmo style of the prequels, as mentioned upthread, is really the big problem with it. I forgot just how cheesy Eps 1-3 looked in comparison to the OG trilogy until Force Awakens last year, which used more practical effects and looked more earthy and lived-in than the cartoonish universe of the prequels.

or as one of my friends aptly said about AotC, "where the fuck was this shot? Toontown?"

I have fonder feelings for the prequels than for Rogue One. They're at least fun to laugh at. Rogue One is more generically mediocre.

o_O

re: the crappy digital look - yeah. it's all interrelated... chicken and egg problems with building a movie in computer-world versus lucas not giving a shit about stuff you'd normally have in a movie to give it meaning and depth. one thing that struck me a while back thinking about this (which i don't think i've posted?) was that, after shmi and anakin's house in the first one (which is on a real set with real lighting, and looks good) you never see anybody's domestic space again, except padme's incredibly bland CGI apartment. wouldn't we have more of a sense of this character from his home and his stuff? even if there's no room in the film to show him interacting with anybody about anything not strictly related to advancing plot points or covering holes... surely it'd help? but now also imagine someone had had to locate or build, then dress and light, mace windu's jedi monk chambers. wouldn't having stuff to pick up and interact with, light to step in or out of, things to lean against or stand free from, give us a sense of this one guy's particular ways of moving, ways of thinking, how he inhabits a space with other people... all this little stuff that actors on set normally get to bring to a movie are just not available. and lucas, thrilled at the possibility of compositing together different actors' takes against different green screens, has no idea it's even missing.

Huh. The C3P0 thing I liked & mentioned elsewhere which probably spurred the creation of this poll actually won.
Whatever, I still like it.

or as one of my friends aptly said about AotC, "where the fuck was this shot? Toontown?"

This USA Today clickbait column is actually kind of great

Why Anakin Skywalker should’ve been removed from the Jedi Order for sexual harassment

Maybe if the Jedi were more concerned with gender equality, and less concerned with balancing the force, then they would still be around today.

wow that is for real the best thing i have ever read in a USA Today. promote that writer to the Onion!

the set design in the phantom menace is genuinely awesome imo

the insistence on the tattooine tie-ins is ruinous i'd say.

Ugh, so many myopic, lazy creative choices attached to this. It's supposed to be a dusty backwater on the edge of civilisation and suddenly it's promoted to the most important planet in the galaxy where all the significant shit went down.

If The Last Jedi doesn't feature a desert planet, it will only be the second of nine movies not to.

third, right? empire and sith...

Empire and Force Awakens - he returns to Tattoine to kill sand raiders in Sith iirc

that's kind of a big hole in the middle of return of the jedi -- if han's trying to dodge jabba while he gets the funds to pay him off, why the hell was he on the planet where jabba's main home is?!?

xp Oh right, a desert planet.

that is, he was on some backwater planet in Star Wars, and then when ROTJ rolls around we find out that same backwater was Jabba's home base

the awful tusken raiders massacre sequence is in Clones, not Sith - but your confusion is understandable since it takes real effort/detachment from reality to take this as a youthful oopsie from which the character can recover. logical that memory would put it in amongst his other arbitrary atrocities, in Sith.

Tatooine is probably the best place to network with other scum and villainy and pick up smuggler work.

Yeah, you're completely right - the Tatooine appearance in Sith is right at the end when babby Luke is taken there.

really jabba could have been on any planet. unclear why it's tattooine now that you mention it. would be nice to go someplace else, tho that might have foiled lucas's orientalist urge to create a harem/opium den kinda thing. i do like the like/han "I was born here, you know!" exchange.

empire has the best environments. hoth's surface and ice caves, dagobah, cloud city's front and back of the house spaces (incl the whole factory setting of the climax) plus landing platform and dangling-underneath-space, asteroids, various imperial interiors (especially vader's emo sphere)... just great.

and duhhhhhhhh of course yes, baby luke arriving on tattooine. which one of my poll options complains about! silly me.

somehow in the midst of all of the weird technical and direction choices, the fact that Anakin runs off and kills a shitload of people mid-prequel series and no one is really the wiser still stands out as an odd choice

(extremely pedant voice) strictly speaking Hoth is also a desert, like Antarctica

hmm yes

In retrospect, Jabba on Tattooine makes zero sense. Why would a creature composed entirely of mucous membrane hang out on a planet covered with sand, why.

What, was the salt planet full?

he drew the short straw when it came to dividing up hutt criminal territory

it's like the member of the mob who runs a couple outfits in like, vermont

can't I come hang out in an actual city? no, sorry man, you gotta make the maple syrup protection money

I don't mind them going back to Tattoine in Jedi to sort of bring the OT full circle. But it should've been left alone after that.

empire has the best environments.

Easily the most well designed and beautiful of all the films. Up there with best of any SF/fantasy in that respect.

Jabba actually spent most of his weekends on his golf planet.

Isn't there an outtake in New Hope with Jabba on Tatoine? But no, it doesn't really make sense.

xp irl lol

Fred: yes altho at that stage jabba is just a human doofus, possibly just passing through mos eisley and taking the chance to hassle han solo. very odd, bad scene, wisely cut, then later slathered over with CGI to put slug-jabba in, for the 1997 special edition.

That was worse than anything in the prequels.

https://media.giphy.com/media/b0ZFy6vNVveeI/giphy.gif

eurgh

'97 jabba looks like the dancing baby from ally mcbeal

also, is jabba yelping in that clip because Han is stepping on his slug tail?

Well, we can at least applaud the breathtaking craft involved in making the newly-inserted Jabba a dead ringer for the version we'd seen previously.

iirc they digitally added some weird skip-jump thing to han's motion so he would step over the tail but i have also avoided watching that scene again for many years. have hatewatched the redone song at jedi's palace more recently and it might be the nadir of lucas's entire directorial career.

also, is jabba yelping in that clip because Han is stepping on his slug tail?

― porg and bess (voodoo chili), Thursday, December 14, 2017 9:18 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes. it was a way for lucas to account for the spatial difference between jabba the human actor and jabba the cgi slug. iirc had lucas not included the tail stepping han would've stepped right through the surface of jabba

obv even as a lover of the prequels i think the special editions are a travesty, any artist should know better

i just did a forum dive on this tail stepping thing in a fit of pique and people seem to have been divided at the time on whether it's dumb or badass that han brazenly steps on the tail of one of the ostensibly scariest gangsters in the galaxy

I sometimes wonder if Lucas is too embarrassed to admit that tried to incorporate the tone of Spaceballs into the prequel trilogy because he forgot that it wasn't an actual Star Wars movie.

Apart from the terrible execution I hate the SE Jabba scene for ruining the mystery of Jabba. It's way better if you hear his voice in hushed tones and have no idea he's a massive space slug till the final movie.

tbh i like the fat 70s space pirate Jabba. they should have kept him in and had him be a new bounty hunter or something. otm on him looking like the dancing baby.gif

i think the prequels were heavily influenced by the work done on the Rebel Assault games. these were CD-ROM showcase games that were on-rails and were the first filmed new Star Wars footage since the Ewok movies. in the 90s they worked out the groundbreaking digital movie making techniques invented for the prequels and now used for everything with a superhero or Star War in it.

to make the games they used original props and costumes as well as experimenting with digital video & new blue screen techniques. they created cgi digital backgrounds for some scenes and superimposed the actors just as they did with the prequels. not saying it was the same team but that they probably used all the technology and documentation created by a sister company (Lucasarts>Lucasfilm) to do the SE and prequels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnA380gHqSM

i just did a forum dive on this tail stepping thing in a fit of pique and people seem to have been divided at the time on whether it's dumb or badass that han brazenly steps on the tail of one of the ostensibly scariest gangsters in the galaxy

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, December 14, 2017 8:28 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to someone who never saw the original versions it completely undercuts the whole Jabba reveal in Return of the Jedi, which is pretty good. how does he go from a comedy slug to a fearsome evil gangster? a question that should never have been asked.

i think also the CGI addition of stormtroopers on Tatooine ineptly riding around on Tauntauns (i think?) while looking for the droids is just as bad.

i think also the CGI addition of stormtroopers on Tatooine ineptly riding around on Tauntauns (i think?) while looking for the droids is just as bad.

― omar little, Thursday, December 14, 2017 11:05 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this sucks too. basically all of the changes suck. having a bunch of bullshit in the windows of cloud city really interrupts the visual continuity of empire

banthas. those are banthas. tauntauns live on hoth.

i guess blending and upgrading some of the practical effects probably didn't suck very much but it's been a v long time since i watched the special editions

i watched the despecialized editions last month and i really love that those exist even though i have my own issues with them. it was a really interesting experience bc i don't think i've ever seen a version of the original trilogy that lucas hadn't somehow fucked with (my first star wars vhs box was the release that he added "episode iv: a new hope" to iirc)

oh nm i just looked it up and the "episode iv" appellation occurred much earlier, in a theatrical rerelease

Manny Banthas?

they were riding dewbacks iirc

Yeah, those were dewbacks, and there's only one in the un-specialized OT. One of my favorite SW toys as a kid because he just had a little hinged flap in his back to stick a stormtrooper's legs in.

i gave my friend a VHS box set of the untouched original trilogy in the '90s. I wonder if the tapes still play.

I love these old commercials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg3U3rjoGW4

morbs when i was home last Xmas we watched the original SW on VHS, i had the widescreen untampered-with trilogy boxset (which still goes for a decent amount on eBay iirc.) still played nicely.

whoa really?

I need to check, think I reclaimed at least the original VHS special edition release, might have been dumb and gotten rid of the originals because I had pan&scan

sick bastards can't believe they cut off the top and bottom of the movies like that

kind of, as the name implies sometimes they'd use the left/right side and then move across the frame during scenes

or in some really weird moments, distort a scene to get everything in frame

wait, I read that sideways

less letterbox, very rude

the worst movie i've ever seen for distortion on VHS was Die Hard

imagine when movies were broadcast on TV that way, and you had no other option

god i still remember when WGN would air nothing but colorized versions of White Heat and The Maltese Falcon, as if it was the way they were meant to be seen.

Now imagine when the latest Star War was simply narrated through a paper megaphone by a vaudevillian in shortpants.

Shorty Lucas

oh man, I have never seen a colorized Maltese Falcon and I just involuntarily cringed at the idea

Not only was Cornelius Evazan a doctor (?!), but his cosmetic surgery shop was across the street from a restaurant called ADMIRAL SNACKBAR?!

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Admiral_Snackbar

― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Thursday, 14 December 2017 00:37 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i kind of love the tone-deaf completionism of this, like if someone decided we needed to compile thorough histories of all the gag shops in the simpsons

https://s21.postimg.org/aatah6w8n/1941_The_Maltese_Falcon_57m27s.jpg

sorry mh

The arc of Palpatine ascending to power by duping possibly the dumbest Senate ever was fun

that’s even more ridiculously funny than I could have hoped xp

Should've voted for Palpatine's face, only decided now. I assumed as a kid sitting around bathed in the hideous power of the dark side made him that way, no it was um, to get sympathy from the Senate? Or something? Way more powerful as I imagined.

I don't think it's so crazy that Han's hanging out on Jabba's planet - I mean it's a planet! It's huge! It's like saying "it's crazy he'd still be hanging around America even though he's trying to avoid that American guy"

I mean I get that it's just a Sci-Fi convention that planets are just treated like "cities", there's only ever one culture and climate etc, never Hoth and Tatooine and Dagobah all just parts of one planet

Naboo has 2

it’s not jabba’s planet, it’s a franchise in the hutt criminal syndicate

it’s like saying a cali cartel associate in like... oklahoma... was from oklahoma because he was the coke guy

Just reread the list, is it better to poll the isolated snippets of the prequels which *weren't* embarrassing and hacky attempts at fan-service and plot resolution?

https://fsmedia.imgix.net/00/53/34/fa/fb49/441e/a1ef/17db16f152f2/jar-jar-tongue-candypng.png?auto=format%2Ccompress&w=700

Imagine how the prequels could have been redeemed if they'd had the cojones to stick with the Jar-Jar-is-Sith plotline from Ep 1. Phantom Menace indeed.

Mr. K, I like your ideas. The long pole in this tent seems to be: can we rely on friendly neighborhood Doctor Casino to curate the isolated snippets of the prequels which were not embarrassing, hacky attempts at fan-service and plot resolution?

I wouldn't wish that fishing expedition on my worst enemy

s/fishing expedition/dumpster dive/

really wish this hadn't been totally overhyped as 'BEST STAR WARS MOVIE EVER!' but definitely not terrible

(Wrong thread)

i enjoyed the American Graffiti diner fan service

well not really

(d'oh! that's what i get for going to see a midnight showing then posting pre-coffee)

if lucas still owned these and were issuing a "clones" special edition i have to assume diner scene would be "enhanced" with CGI Young Harrison zooming by the diner in a souped-up space car, cowboy hat and all.

unwinding at a hotel and "clones" is on TNT. uglier even than i remembered. with regard to this poll: sad to have missed obi-wan and anakin's terrible "why do i get the feeling you're going to be the death of me?" repartee. also the entire business of them going into a colorful bar together. barf.

lollll these digital sets. i feel like i'm in a screensaver. or a terrible rendering of the new lobby interior that will be coming soon - pardon the inconvenience while we the jedi council work to better serve you!

there's an exterior shot of padme's apartment, right before the scene where she's packing her Target luggage set and anakin is bitching unprompted at length about obi-wan and then he's being all creepy.... ugh but anyway this exterior could be the worst-looking shot i've ever seen in a movie. it's totally static and there's not the usual array of flying crap so there is NO reason this could not have been done with a miniature and/or matte painting... i can't find a shot of it online but it's soooooooooo bad.

oh boy now we're at Dex's Diner

with the alien buttcrack and the Brooklyn accent

i gave my friend a VHS box set of the untouched original trilogy in the '90s. I wonder if the tapes still play.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Thursday, December 14, 2017 2:36 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i bought the pre-SE VHS box at a thrift store this year for $2.99. still plays fine. maybe a little VHS distortion here and there but this is late 70s/early 80s pulp sci fi if anything that only makes it cooler.

my $3 widescreen VHS box set is one of my best thrift scores ever, viewing-pleasure-wise.

my friend still has the laserdiscs. and a laserdisc machien to play them on

tried to watch ROTS last night. I was so far removed from the OG movies when I originally saw the preeks (can I call them that?) in the theatre, so it didn't affect me at the time, but after getting three modern SW movies which had more faithful design, I couldn't get over how ugly everything is. It feels like watching a screensaver at times.

around the time where Anakin kills Dooku then rues "I shouldn't have done that" with a delivery one would use if he woke up naked in bed after coitus with Palpatine...and I had to flip it off.....

yeah that's why I can't take any of the "oh well ROTS actually isn't that bad" talk (let alone any of the really crazy "it's actually good" talk)

it's just so ugly to look at

i love it but i wouldn’t try to convince anyone lol

I loved them all when i first saw them lol

that’s weird, i hated attack of the clones when i was a teenager but loved it when i revisited it last month (it’s bonkers space noir that takes place in completely artificial environments, idk, i adore it)

i’ve always enjoyed phantom menace though

AotC is my favorite of the 3 prequels.

seriously though a whole fuckin galaxy to play around in and lucas writes it so that uncle owen, at the start of star wars, buys *the exact droid his father acquired as a bundled add-on when he purchased darth vader's mother as a slave*

it’s like poetry it rhymes

The fight between Jango Fett & Obi Wan on the water planet is surprisingly well staged.

There’s some cool imagery and design in AOTC.

Rewatched the Phantom Menace after watching the original trilogy recently and it’s kind of amazing how miscalculated so much of it is. Jar Jar looks about as real as the General from those car insurance commercials.

it’s my least favorite of the prequels (not by much) but, as pretty much anyone who’s come to its defense has said, the pod racing sequence is still incredible

i guess it's been a long time (and happy for it to stay that way) but i don't remember the pod racing being any less cringeworthy than any other scene featuring copious jake lloyd.

the fight with darth maul is pretty great, right up until he decides to just stand and let obi-wan cut him down in the slowest and most obviousy telegraphed move.

can just imagine the argument with Lucas and the fight choreographer

"This fight, it seems to be going on a while."
"I know, right? Do you like the choreography? We worked several hours yest--"
"It's kind of taking away from my movie."
"George, if there's something..."
"That's Mr Lucas to you..."
"I'm sorry, Mr Lucas, if there's anything you don't li--"
"I just...why can't they just parry a few times and then one of them gets his arm cut off and falls down a hole, like we used to do?"
"With due respect sir, there's been next to no action in this movie, so I was thinking maybe..."
"People don't want to see a 20 minute light saber battle! They're here for the mystery, the political intrigue!"
"But Mr Lucas..."
"Find a way to end the fight sooner. Also when Maul dies I want him cut in two..."
"Wait wha--"
"I want to show the audience how the dark side tears people apart"
"...You know what, you fuckin finish blocking the thing. I'm out"

*remains in deck chair holding coffee*

i don't remember the pod racing being any less cringeworthy than any other scene featuring copious jake lloyd.

That's probably his best scene, because he doesn't speak in it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBlhgAkJBos&

poor Jake Lloyd, that role kinda ruined his life

now this is pod racing!

only kind I remember from the movie, really

This is (in?)TENSE

"are you an angel?" NEVER FORGET

I hate the pod racing sequence because it's just the furthest plot digression from a flimsy plot that can't bear such a strain. It's so completely unearned that it may as well be watching strangers play a video game.

I always assumed the pod racing was in there to justify Obi-Wan's "your father was already a great pilot when I met him" line in the original movie

And for the video game potential obv

I like the pod race, at least in theory, and I think it's there as a futuristic chariot race to connect to sword & sandal / fall of Roman Republic themes. Same reason AotC ends in the arena with people getting sacrificed to wild beasts / gladiatorial battle.

I hate the pod racing sequence because it's just the furthest plot digression from a flimsy plot that can't bear such a strain

come on, it’s spectacle

I just don't care for action sequences in general

It's supposed to establish how Anakin has unique special abilities most others don't, but they were able to do that by just mentioning it. Overall, it never occurred to me that the pod racing was a pointless sequence because the movie overall is so stupid it doesn't necessarily stand out as a particularly dumb detour.

it’s there to answer the question “what is pod racing, anyway?”

Watching Phantom Menace for the first time since it was in theatres and i am bored out of my fucking gourd

thread could use a liveblog tbqh

Let's clap go clap

all the complaints about the humor in the new one got me thinking -- were there ANY jokes in any of the prequels? i remember them being suffocatingly humorless and dull.

jar-jar was intended to be funny and there are other horrible physical/slapstick/baby jokes. the tertiary pod racers and the two-headed commentator are the kind of thing that would be funny in a good movie. there are also dreadful imitations of dry "banter," mostly between obi-wan and anakin in AOTC. the romance is unintentionally hilarious.

my 20-year-old cousin told me over christmas that she didn't like the new star wars films "as much as the original six," and i swear my instant reaction was "wait, six? there weren't six...oh, right."

Phantom woulda been better with 2 hours of Darth Maul just doming people with his light saber.

most badass dude in the movie and he gets short shrift

I didn't finish the movie (but I bought these motherfuckers as part of the Complete Saga Blu-Ray set so I'll finish it one day)

There's some lousy slapstick with C3PO in the droid factory in II, and in fact I suspect we're supposed to find the regular droid army funny every time that they say "roger roger" as well as being a terrifying threat (which might have been an interesting collapse of dichotomy to explore but oh well)

The droid factory scene reminds me of a level of Mario Bros.

slightly better graphics tho

...in mario bros.

Tru

I did enjoy Padme having a decoy there to take bullets for her

"Phantom woulda been better with 2 hours of Darth Maul just doming people with his light saber.

most badass dude in the movie and he gets short shrift"

I said elsewhere but the prequels are evidence the lucas has no clue what is cool about his own shit.

the thing I'm surprised about - Darth Sidious is only referenced in the prequels obviously cos the concept of Darth being a title for Sith wasn't really in the OG trilogy, so despite him going by Darth Sidious and being a Sith Lord, everybody just calls him the Emperor in the OG movies.

I would have expected Lucas being Lucas to go into each moment the word Emperor is uttered and dubbed his voice saying "DARTH SIDIOUS" over it.

ok watching Attack of the Clones now....

lol yeah. also would have been a great chance to further glitch up yoda's dialogue to better match the prequels. "estimate under, Sidious Darth not do; or suffer must you, fate of your father."

oh cool more screensaver looking spaceships. what is this, Wing Commander 3

"I guess there's no danger at all" - terrorist attack right on cue

Jar Jar sighting!

oh man that sad rose byrne scene

yay Jimmy Smits!

christ Anakin's already horny af and he hasn't even left the elevator

"she hardly even recognized me Jar-Jar"...he says after she smiles and says "ANI??!!!" moments after seeing him

"I can sense what's going on in that room...trust me"

"I'm much rather dream about Padme. I'd rather dream about Padme...just being around her again, is intoxicating."

Christ this is skeeving me out more than it did the first time.

yeah i'd forgotten how MUCH there was of that stuff until my recent viewing.

lol Obi-Wan leaps out the window!

this is still more entertaining than Phantom was by this point...

good god how the fuck do traffic partners work in the sky in this city

*patterns

this space car chase is pretty fun! other than the dialogue

tbf this is a problem in all flying-car movies - blade runner and fifth element for example.

my feeling with this movie is that the 'mystery' plot with obi-wan (to which i'd assign the opening chase etc.), despite turning into a complete fizzle, does the best job of creating the illusion of a real plot and a real movie, with something unfolding and stakes to the action and dialogue. anyway it was what i most latched onto when seeing it in the theater, and compared to the anakin/padme stuff or the later droid factory antics, it's shakespeare.

is this the first vehicular speeder wreck in STar Wars history?

do the police have to come to the scene? are there insurance claims?

"why do I have the feeling you're going to be the death of me?"

Laurel and Hardy territory

"Jedi business, go back to your drinks..."

ahh Yoda being matchmaker...

prequel buns

(hair, I mean)

"your life is in danger, Padme, so I will spend 5 minutes talking about my plight"

the "sand" speech gets all the attention but anakin in the bar/interrogation scene reveals just as much about what's wrong with christensen's performance and lucas's direction. just laughable; it feels like teenagers in a homemade movie. also lol at how nobody remembers their jedi mind control powers when they're desperately trying to extract information from their one lead.

"Please don't look at me like that. It makes me feel uncomfortable."

so fucking lecherous, I need an oil bath

xpost haha yeah I didn't even think about that (the mind control non-usage)

why the fuck would a Jedi Master place a Senator in the care of a horny teenager who has made skeevy comments about her in the presence of Obi-Wan. jeezus.

a dick joke in the SW universe, lovely

in general all three of these films hinge on the jedi making incredibly stupid decisions especially with regard to assigning officers to cases. they seem to have hundreds of agents running around doing random shit all the time; at the start of this movie obi-wan's just getting back from settling a peace negotiation or something. maybe put like five or six of these people on a special squad to figure out who the mysterious sith lord was from the first movie? or once obi-wan finds out kamino's been erased from the archives, organize a think tank to figure out who did that?

these seem like small quibbles maybe but it's like, if you want me to accept that the characters are smart, maybe don't spend a ton of time establishing that there are really huge, serious mysteries and suspicious intrigues going on and then show them doing nothing at all about any of them. but anyway you basically have to accept the jedi organization being totally incompetent as an intentional premise; kudos i guess to rian johnson for having this actually be stated explicitly in TLJ.

there's a Sith Lord Senator in the room with them many times and they don't sense it, yet Kenobi gets faint in ANH when everybody on Alderaan is killed, light years away.....

"please, sit in this toilet"

Sifo-Dyas!

Stormtroopers!

Jesus Christ find a real waterfall, George, CGI waterfalls come the fuck on

You're at the scene where Anakin flirtatiously mentions his alt-right sympathies?

ugh yes.

"they should be MADE to..."

"it's time to inform the Senate that our ability to use the Force is diminished".....wtf? why? because two Sith lords show up? there are like 1000 of you

but anyway you basically have to accept the jedi organization being totally incompetent as an intentional premise; kudos i guess to rian johnson for having this actually be stated explicitly in TLJ.

yeah, RJ took the canon as presented and made some interesting outsider observations that GL never would have been able to

the thing is nothing in these films feels intentional or under control, lucas is just doing stuff. if the idea is that the jedi have lost the true path of the force, why not throw in one of them who says as much? this would have been a good role for yoda tbh - not the president of the jedi convention association but a monkish guy off to the side who keeps saying stuff in the "wars not make one great" tradition, pooh-poohing all this focus on lightsabers and combat training. then when the galaxy gets undone by a super-violent killer jedi they created you might have something. but actually the jedi get undone because they get snookered by the clone army and "order 66."

back on Tatooine, half expecting Anakin to say "my name is Anakin Skywalker...and this is for YOU" while cutting his former slavemaster with a saber

Shmi was sold to Luke's uncle. of course she was...

wait n/m he said lars

lol Obi-Wan fakes an explosion, v deft

JOEL EDGERTON!

the scene with debauched, down-on-his-luck watto in a hat is so odd. if we didn't know how much lucas was micromanaging these films i'd imagine it was just some production designer goofing around that slipped through because he didn't give a shit.

and then obviously the dialogue there is so labored. lines and lines, all to get us to a point where shmi (with whom anakin has apparently not communicated since he left?!) ended up with the lars family. lot of unnecessary legwork created by the bad decision to have anakin living in slavery with his mom in the first place, and the hacky plot-resolution decision that the lars family are his actual in-laws (if not blood relations as i fumbled it in the poll options). if he just wanted to get to a scene of anakin doing some atrocity that comes out of his fear of losing loved ones or whatever there are sooooooo many more efficient and convincing ways to get there.

Count Dooku more like Count Doodoo amirite

Anakin loses his arm and merely yelps

there was a partial cartoon season that is 90% Yoda’s quest to determine what is going on, learning how to reach out beyond death, and going on a journey, where he learns he can’t stop what’s in motion but must continue monk-like ways

it’s exactly what we wish was hinted at in the prequels. so much connective crap in them, but all we wanted were a few hints at that!

btw I remember the other question the prequels answered we didn’t want — is Yoda unique or are there others of his species? we get background character... Yaddle

i absolutely lost my shit at the early Blank Check ep that goes into Yaddle's backstory. "how is this not the main plot of the movie?!"

oh god, I am going to look that up now and have regrets

so neanderthal what's the verdict??

P dumb overall. Actually paused it to do work.

Better than Menace tho.

Anakin Lechwalker still nauseating

My daughters ASKED to watch Ep 1 yesterday (on a surge of fandom triggered by Ep 8). We all sat and watched it disintegrate into tedium and aimless stuff! happening! all! the! time! My insightful 11-year-old looked sympathetically at me and said "and I supposed you were pretty excited about this before you saw it?"

*suppose - Cal would never make such an egregious grammatical slip.

hahaha aww

Revenge of Sith time.

This at least has the cool Order 66 massacre

Random shit I remember:

-the film stopped 4 times when i saw it opening night

-i was still living w my parents

-this is the only preq i had seen multiple times prior to today

Battle droids are comically ineffective

An important question answered:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk1wx5h-P_8

ANAKIN NIPS

pro-wordless gazing through windows on coruscant

Omg Obi-Wan riding the iguana-looking thing

Kinda enjoyed this for all its clunkiness and bad acting! Idk i just enjoy movies where everybody dies i guess

it'd be better if they died faster though, or died better, or if there was just more death and less "general grievous."

Boba Fett and the Stormtroopers are all clones of a random bounty hunter who is Obi-Wan's antagonist in AOTC

i mean--i'm sorry--look this is the worst because it's also so fucking lazy, it's a way to quickly deal with the rise to power and the creation of an army. why bother with anything interesting like the emperor being a charismatic leader who riles people up and manages to get a volunteer army of disconnects and sociopaths and psychopaths (it would be obvious but yes like any fascist state in history!) let's completely avoid all that and just make them Clones, sure. when Lucas came up with the phrase "Clone Wars" i'm sure it sounded amazing but god it should have been left to this vague mention in the dusty history books. i suspect he made it this was for the kiddos, clone stormtroopers is more palatable than regular folks worked up into a lather by a demagogue.

except he thinks he's making a profound bush-era political allegory! which may be the saddest aspect of all.

well, the Emperor did woo enough non-clone zealots to fill the Imperial ranks.

except he thinks he's making a profound bush-era political allegory! which may be the saddest aspect of all.

the "Sith and Jedi are really not that different, maaaaan" angle means that Michael Mann shoulda gotten one of the sequel films

oh oops you're right - it's ROTS that has the ham-handed "so this is how democracy dies" stuff

from my point of view the jedi are evil

I mean at least the Sith recruitment process involves consent

except in the case of Darth Maul

I get the impression though that Sidious was kind of a 'bad' Sith for many reasons (including setting up his apprentice to be killed without giving him the opportunity to kill his master by defeating him in battle as is the usual)

The endentured clones make total sense as the oarsmen and spear carriers serving an officer class of entitled elites, it’s how thalassocracies such as the Empire have filled their ranks throughout history; it’s also a decently ironic foil against the Jedi who basically just kidnap extremely young children and indoctrinate them into a life of compulsive martial bureaucratic service.

― El Tomboto, 31. december 2017 07:33 (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, this is kinda good, but the prequels didn't do a lot with it. Make the Clones a part of the Republic as well, have the Separatists be a Clone uprising, go full Spartacus with it.

idk assuming the clones are the proles of the republic era it would be cool if the jedis were on their side, and they lose and that's the rise of the empire. i guess. tbh it had never once occurred to me before the prequels that "the clone wars" had anything directly to do with the rise of the empire - just some preceding conflict that was a big deal that everyone's heard of and the jedi fought in them. basically once you decide to do prequels you're stuck doing clone wars though since it'd be weird to start AFTER a war that obi-wan and anakin fought alongside in. as it is, of course, the prequels barely show them fighting together in the clone wars at all. so whatever.

I'm reading the Empire comics now (Legends), even though it's no longer canon, fun little look into post-Order 66, fledgling Empire.

also the Darth Maul Sons of Dathomir, while not really essential or anything, shows his post-resurrection life (around Clone Wars time)

The Clone Wars happening between eps 1 and 2 might have been the way to go - or maybe set ep 2 at the tail end of them, perhaps Palpatine is taking advantage of the turmoil to plant the seeds of the Empire.

INT. DAY - JEDI TEMPLE CORRIDOR

OBI-WAN KENOBI and ANAKIN SKYWALKER enter from screen left. They are both wearing their Jedi robes and look haggard and disheveled.

ANAKIN:

Boy, those were some Clone Wars, weren't they, master?

OBI-WAN:

They certainly were, my young Padawan.

followed by OBI-TWO and OBI-THREE returning to their home planet

I believe you mean 'Oobi-Waan' and 'Ooobi-Waaan'.

(That may be among the most unforgivably-nerdy of the nerdy references I've dropped here.)

Oh-A-Wan and Oh-C-Wan

Old Ben Four

(If my 'joke' went over your head, please consult the Holocron entries for 'Luuke Skywalker' and 'Luuuke Skywalker'.)

Oh I got it instantly

:(

"Begun the Clone War has."

Does Yoda coin the name 'Clone War' in that moment? He sounds like he just knows that that's its name.

He should really check if everyone else is cool with calling it that.

If you listen closely at another point he says "Welcome back to episode 2 of Star Wars'"

I like the idea of all Clone Wars happening in between episodes.

"We must go now, my young Padawan. The clones are at it again."

Is Lucas responsible for 'youngling'? Because I swear I never encountered that abominable combination of phonemes before the prequels, but I've been encountering it with increasing frequency in non-SW works, and it just needs to stop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nffOJXcJCDg

SOED records it (of plants) in 1559

He was drunk when he came up with it

https://dydza6t6xitx6.cloudfront.net/ci_yuengling_lager_6f82d7ee4e6dba1a.png

feel like i might have seen "youngling" in Kipling or similar

lol, inevitably william morris -- the king of bogus olde english -- uses it in his fantasies

(kipling apparently once in faintly biblical a poem; tolkien not at all that i can find, commentators on tolkien a LOT; it's in the wycliff bible but not the KJ)

And yet, in AOTC Yoda says, "How truly wonderful is the mind of a child" rather than "a youngling" FFS LUCAS COME ON.

At least have someone ask 'what the fuck is a child?'

In keeping with the frankly shocking number of casual f-bombs Lucas sprinkled throughout the prequels.

younglings in cantinas

^^^ Chingy's best hit

I think it would be cool if one of the aliens from ET that appeared in the prequels was named Yi Tee or Yi Tee Daeggstraderrestriel or Buddy Zimmerman.

he'd be a good teammate for Ahmed Best as Achk Med-Beq and Anthony Daniels as Dannl Faytonni.

the prequels should have literally just depicted the galaxy as this hipster hangout with sporting events, concerts, etc, and basically having war break out when clones realize they're fake people and start trying to kill their creators

The Seven Samurai Who Are Clones
Rashoclone
Clone of Blood

kylo ren = y r klone?

☐ Han Solo gets his blaster and the Millennium Falcon, meets Chewbacca and Lando, completes the Kessel Run, learns of Jabba the Hutt, and learns the importance of shooting first, in a single adventure instigated by a crime boss answering to Darth Maul

lol, i stll haven't seen solo but that's my fault for reading this thread. sounds like a hell of an adventure!

Some other people show up, but possibly not long enough for them to justify their own spinoff comic books

oops, sorry karl!

haven't seen Solo but am surprised they didn't put Jabba in there. i guess you have to leave some toys in the bottom of the bucket for Solo 2

it was cutesy, and stupid - "i hear there's this guy on tattooine, pays good money, looking to put together a team for a job..." kinda thing. which i hate because it implies that following this film, han began working for jabba and stayed in his employ up through shortly before ANH, when he dumps his cargo... whereas he's a lot cooler as a freelancer who's worked for all kinds of scummy characters.

Like Scummy Scumbagano?

Solo 2: The Death Stick Prerogative

Nothing in Solo suggests that Han & Chewie were in Jabba's employ up until Star Wars. It's only mentioned a crime boss on Tatooine pays well, they could've completed that gig and continued as freelancers, working for Jabba every now and then. Certainly the OG trilogy implies Han and Chewie have a long history with Jabba (even moreso if you count the cut scene that was added to the Special Edition of the first movie).

sure, just given all the other tie-a-bow on it stuff, it really feels like, okay, han's life story is complete now except jabba, well we'll be cute and withhold that one but tell you he's heading straight there now... and once he gets there he's pretty much complete. (obviously his personality is entirely different from the guy in ANH but the film gives me no sense that its creators were aware of that.)

Surely the betrayals of Emilia Clarke's and Woody Harrelson's characters are supposed to be read as first steps on him becoming the cynical smuggler he is in ANH, as opposed to the fairly idealistic guy seen in Solo?

One might think

oops, sorry karl!

haha, oh no problem! tbh everything you mentioned i kind of assumed would be in a new disney han solo film, which is why i find the new ones to be satisfying in the moment but then i immediately forget about them afterward

the problem - and i basically said this in the solo thread so sorry for the rehash - is that it's AFTER at least one and maybe both (can't remember) of these two betrayals have been exposed that han does his most idealistic/altruistic deed in the film, presumably because someone thought that made for a happier ending. he finishes *less* like ANH solo than he starts. so at best they made a tedious, accoutrement-by-accoutrement origin story that ends still in need ("need") of another origin story. they shouldn't have made any origin stories for this character, but why do one that obsessively ties all his bits of business into a dead corner of the filmic universe but still isn't an origin? it's so dumb.

ehh, I took it to mean he’d pick an underdog if they tugged his heartstrings. pretty in-character

getting a little more guarded over the next decade would make sense

Is Han busting Chewbacca out of that pit this supposedly legendary "life debt" that makes him stick around forever or is that something for the next movie?

pretty sure that was it. it doesn't take much in star wars, cf. jar jar binks.

I took it to mean he’d pick an underdog if they tugged his heartstrings. pretty in-character

yes this. Dr C do characters really have to follow an exactly motivated arc in order to not be "dumb"? I'm retroactively anticipating the criticism of han joining in the death Star battle in star wars. so out of character! where did THAT come from? the audience hasn't been prepped etc

someone repeatedly making the same mistakes, learning from them, and then forgetting or ignoring the lessons seems at least as if not more human than "...and that is how i became the man i am today."

if it worked for you that's cool! for me the han movie felt like an embarrassing and hacky attempt at a fan-service cash grab so this character arc thing feels like a calculation that they bungled because they didn't understand or watch their own movie(s). not unprecedented in star wars prequels ("and he was a good friend"), and here we had a character who already went through an arc in the original star wars (and yes, a satisfying one) so shoehorning in another one was always going to be silly; i was far from the only person to predict that or to notice that the finished film fulfilled that prediction. ymmv!

it's almost as if you'd made up your mind beforehand

but yes i think that is what I'm saying, that my mileage is varying

"if this hacky, embarassing cash-grab resonated with you, that's cool i'm not judging"

haha sorry that's a fair response to my post. but really we've been over this on the solo thread: both of us walked in wanting to have a good time (in my case with a strong "in spite of what i feared likely" kind of thing, but still). the movie proved for me to be a hacky embarrassing cash grab, and for you to be a good fun time with your family. that probably colors how each of us responds to praise and criticism of any of its individual elements, like character arcs.

definitely. still.. just thinkin.. wouldn't it have been way more fan-service-y to end this movie on some sort of "and that's how he became bitter" beat? exactly the sort of loose-end-tying you decry elsewhere?

can't remember if i said so on the other thread but as the lights were coming up my 9-y-o said "dad i thought you said this wasn't going to be that good"

and i was like, i seriously thought it wasn't going to be!

i get where you're coming from but...idk. is fan service quite the right word for that? that's sort of "doing a competent origin story." all prequels are inherently fanservice of course. but clearly we can identify more or less satisfying attempts at the concept. what i wanted from solo, once they'd committed to making such a beast, was that they not make it an origin story - just have it be some caper centered around young han solo doing han solo stuff. maybe have it center on ONE of the things we already know about him (kessel run, or befriending chewbacca and lando) but not ALL of them. that could be a good, fun, afternoon's entertainment in the star wars universe. i guess. i also like the suggestion that's been made that it should have really been a lando movie (or more of an ensemble picture) since we know less about him and they have more room to do unexpected stuff.

but if it's gonna be not just a prequel but an origin story, and you're burning all this screen time to fill in the origins of all these other bits and pieces, but don't get around to the origin of the character we know as han solo, it feels to me more like you screwed up and didn't know what you were doing (consistent with a movie with a famously troubled production and two directors) than like you said "you know what, let's avoid the easy fanservicey thing, and leave this character in a totally weird, counterintuitive position! that'll shake things up!"

I thought this Solo was a reasonably fun adventure movie, but I also thought it went too far in the prequelly need to tick all possible boxes of an iconic character's past. What was especially pointless was Han learning the lesson to shoot first... It's like Indy's hat in The Last Crusade or Hal Jordan's jacket in Geoff Johns' Green Lantern: all these things already made perfect sense as part of how those characters were originally established, there was no need to come up with an actual origin story for them.

What did work, however, was setting the path for Han idealism turning into cynicism. The fact that he did still do a good deed after Tobias' betrayal isn't that big a deal; as Tobias himself pointed out, Han should've expected a man like him to betray them. But Qi'ra's betrayal must've cut deeper, because Han had idealised her in his head for all those years, and finding her was the reason that made him do all that shady stuff... And then it turned out she was not that different from Tobias after all. So that works perfectly well for me as the beginning of a character arc that's finalised in ANH.

(x-post)

So according to Warwick Davis his cameo character in Solo is the same person as his cameo character in The Phantom Menace. Apparently he gave up life as a professional gambler and became a freedom fighter.

https://i.imgur.com/2PhrbUH.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DiKdRHwVQAEcVlE.jpg

and his sympathies for the rebel desert bikers is a nice seed to plant deep down, eventually flowering at the precise moment Darth Vader's special tie-fighter gets knocked into a spin

dr c maybe it makes more sense if you figure a couple more movies were slated in this set? i.e. it's an origin story, but only the first part of one

xpost nice!!

☐ The guy who stood next to Watto at the pod race later battles Darth Maul's crime syndicate, and participates in an attempt to recruit Han Solo to a proto-Rebellion

have to say i loved the open-ended vibe of Solo, felt like there was a lot more story to tell, a lot still to happen before Luke meets him in the cantina. even if it never reaches the screen. slightly LOTR in the way lots of other story is suggested but not told.

i wonder if i'd like the movie better if i'd never seen a star wars movie before and could genuinely see this guy's life opening out ahead into the unknown, filling it in with my imagination. i have to assume the answer is yes. like even valerian which was pretty much a garbage mess i was like "hey this is kind of a fun bit here," "ooh i like this alien" etc.

Hah, for me Valerian was pretty much the opposite, I was gringing every time they took elements and aliens from the comics which had provided me with genuine sense of wonder ever since I was a kid and dumbened them down to Hollywood sci-fi clichés.

yeah the comics look amazing.

maybe we can all agree that the best way to approach these movies is to watch them black-out drunk so that that every installment presents a fresh set of possibilities

It's kinda funny, with 5th Element Besson actually did a better job with bringing the sensibility of Valerian & Laureline comics on screen than with his actual official adaptation.

Surely the betrayals of Emilia Clarke's and Woody Harrelson's characters are supposed to be read as first steps on him becoming the cynical smuggler he is in ANH, as opposed to the fairly idealistic guy seen in Solo?

oof this sounds lame. he was great in SW because he was a random scumbag in a hive of scumbags who would rather shoot someone than argue with them. he was the cool outsider, he was this universe's rocker with a leather jacket smoking cigarettes. he helped Luke & pals because they personally went through shit together. by the end of they became a little family. that it was actually because he is secretly a rebel guy just like every other person in the universe is the most boring possible take.

xxp "What will happen next? No, I mean as regards my feet; I can't feel them"

I'm going full cynic now -- do we know how long Watto's species lives? he could totally be in the next movie

"Skywalker, Skywalker... *strokes chin* I owned -- I mean, knew -- a Skywalker once"

I hope in Solo 2 we see all the crazy stuff he’s seen while flying from one side of the galaxy to the other.