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

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