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

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"