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

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'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.