I'm a homosexual but perhaps there would be less heterosexual virgins on these boards if you guys kept the thoughts but kept quiet about them.

Some ladies love to be seen as sex objects but a lot of them don't.

Just a serving suggestion ;-D

Bingowings said:

I'm a homosexual but perhaps there would be less heterosexual virgins on these boards if you guys kept the thoughts but kept quiet about them.

I haven't had sex yet and proud of it. 

Waiting for the wife:) 

Seriously, everyone thinks they want their questions answered.  Believe me, you don't.  The sequels will be terribly disappointing if LFL/Disney continue this practice of grinding away every last detail of the people and places we already know.  Do we really want to know the mechanism of the force?  How Bespin stays in the air?  How long it took for the Falcon to make it to Alderaan?  There's no better way to kill all the intrigue than to mire in the details.  That's how we end up with monotone senatorial sessions, midichlorians, incomprehensible storylines, naked robots, virgin births, etc.

I seriously hope that the sequels explore new worlds, new alien life forms, new ideas, new characters, new personalities, new spaceships, new weapons, new friends, new wars... in short, expand the universe, stop shrinking it.  I want to leave the theater with MORE wonder, not less.

Trooperman said:

Bingowings said:

I'm a homosexual but perhaps there would be less heterosexual virgins on these boards if you guys kept the thoughts but kept quiet about them.

I haven't had sex yet and proud of it. 

Waiting for the wife:) 

While leering at the naughty cosplay Œ:-O

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

I seriously hope that the sequels explore new worlds, new alien life forms, new ideas, new characters, new personalities, new spaceships, new weapons, new friends, new wars... in short, expand the universe, stop shrinking it.  I want to leave the theater with MORE wonder, not less.

That's what Star Trek is meant to be for.

Exploring an expanding universe.

Star Wars is space opera.

It's conflict focussed on a series of characters who are to some degree related to each other (like real Earth Opera without the singing).

It makes sense we would see Tatooine and Coruscant more than once because that is where one half of the 'family' lived and where the other half worked.

It's neither new, nor really overused, but I was thinking about it, and I wouldn't mind seeing the Kaiburr Crystal.  I know it gets some EU attention, but as most of us aren't huge fans of the EU, and even there it hasn't gotten a lot of attention, I'll bet a lot of Star Wars fans, both purists and newbies alike would be relatively unexposed.  It's an idea that deserves expansion, and it brings the Force more to the mystical side rather than the biological/midichlorian side.  It's a classic MacGuffin that could drive home a fairly simplistic adventure tale, simply set in a galaxy far, far away.  What made the OT so wonderful was not their complexity, but rather their unique retelling of very old motifs.

As it hasn't been raised in the films how can that be a question to be answered?

The Force Ghost thing was introduced in the first film as was the Slave/friend/utility relationship between even the nicest humans and droids and the implications of Death Star Technology.

Yeah, I know, I'm using this thread as more of a wishlist than a lingering question thread.  Maybe I should start my own wishlist.

Here's another one that bugs me.

Threepio refers to Luke as a human being.

How did humans get to be in a galaxy far far away that long ago?

Were they kidnapped by aliens?

We are the inevitable epitome of evolution, and no matter where in the universe you are, all roads lead to Rome ;)

darth_ender said:

It's neither new, nor really overused, but I was thinking about it, and I wouldn't mind seeing the Kaiburr Crystal. It's an idea that deserves expansion, and it brings the Force more to the mystical side rather than the biological/midichlorian side.

Too late. Just this season of the Clone Wars there was an arc involving Jedi in-training being attacked by pirates to steal their lightsaber crystals. Sadly, they referred to all lightsaber crystals as Kaiburr crystals. So that about seals the deal for George level canon. Though I'm sure Leland will take the stance the Wookieepedia has and will make up an explanation about how only the pirate leader called them that and he was clearly mistaken.

I sure hope so.  I hate it when the EU lame-ifies interesting concepts....like the nature of Sabaac in the Jedi Academy Trilogy described as a game with less skill than Go Fish.

In this case it would be the EU save-ifing a concept. =P Also, Sabaac is wholly an EU creation so how could it ruin itself?

I want Sequel Trilogy to stay away from just about everything OT-related. That will eliminate the chances to screw things up a la midi-chlorians.

Bingowings said:

That's what Star Trek is meant to be for.

Exploring an expanding universe.

Star Wars is space opera.

It's conflict focussed on a series of characters who are to some degree related to each other (like real Earth Opera without the singing).

No.  The 1-2-3-4-5-6 "saga" is a space opera.  More specifically, the 4-5-6 sub-segment is a pretty good space opera, and the 1-2-3 sub-segment is a crappy space opera.

BUT, in my personal opinion, Star Wars (SW-the movie- the movie subsequently known as IV, to use "Prince" lingo) is an expanding universe, told through the eyes of a boy.  That's what made it so intriguing.  It started becoming an opera in ESB, but it still had the expanding universe feel - particularly with the travel to meet Yoda, the exotic new planets, etc - heck we didn't even revisit Tatooine!

It was the conversion to a full-blown saga/opera when things started falling apart, and ultimately became boring and crappy.  Star Wars needs to get back to what made it great.

CatBus said:

I only have one question I'd want answered by a sequel trilogy:

what exactly is the point of adding to a story that's already done?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0291082/

Tobar said:

In this case it would be the EU save-ifing a concept. =P Also, Sabaac is wholly an EU creation so how could it ruin itself?

Alright, perhaps I'm being too harsh.  I give the earliest EU much more legitimacy in my own mind than the later stuff--not saying that's right, but I tend to.  When younger, I considered Sabacc a legitimate part of Star Wars lore, but when I finally got around to reading the Jedi Academy Trilogy, I was deeply disappointed at the "rules".  Oh, and "Sabacca" was initially developed in the ESB 2nd draft, which also lends it legitimacy in my mind.

As for EU, I really like the idea of the Kaiburr crystal, as it's truly a mystical, magical gem, and it brings the Force more to that level.  The lightsabers are fairly common and need no Force enhancement to be used.  As much as I like a number of ideas from TCW, I don't like that it turned this rare magical stone into little more than a glowing quartz.  I hope Mr. Chee, with whatever godlike powers George has granted him, officially declares that to be hogwash, but if not, I will choose to disregard it.

In any case, I worry enough about VII-IX adhering too closely to existing EU.  I hope it will create its own mythology.  If they were to choose to use the Kaiburr Crystal (though my guess is they will not), then the idea that there are many dime-a-dozen crystals might be preserved for the new films.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Bingowings said:

That's what Star Trek is meant to be for.

Exploring an expanding universe.

Star Wars is space opera.

It's conflict focussed on a series of characters who are to some degree related to each other (like real Earth Opera without the singing).

No.  The 1-2-3-4-5-6 "saga" is a space opera.  More specifically, the 4-5-6 sub-segment is a pretty good space opera, and the 1-2-3 sub-segment is a crappy space opera.

BUT, in my personal opinion, Star Wars (SW-the movie- the movie subsequently known as IV, to use "Prince" lingo) is an expanding universe, told through the eyes of a boy.  That's what made it so intriguing.  It started becoming an opera in ESB, but it still had the expanding universe feel - particularly with the travel to meet Yoda, the exotic new planets, etc - heck we didn't even revisit Tatooine!

It was the conversion to a full-blown saga/opera when things started falling apart, and ultimately became boring and crappy.  Star Wars needs to get back to what made it great.

Really?

To me Star Wars (1977) is the least Luke centred film of the whole OT.

The first characters we meet are the droids, then Vader, then Leia it's ages before we meet Luke and he is pulled into the story by the droids and Leia to Ben who makes the quest personal by underlining how horrible Vader is by telling him he killed Luke's father.

The locations are telegraphed throughout the film.

The Death Star and the Rebel base are mentioned in the opening crawl.

Tatooine is in the opening frame and Alderaan is mentioned in the first few minutes.

It's a great film but it's not about exploring places.

It's about exploring the networked connections of a small group of people.

The scenery is epic but the saga could very easily be transplanted into a soap opera (owing what story it does have to courtly mannered stage plays of the sort Shakespeare pinched ideas from Sophocles to write).

Star Trek is more like Homer.

You have a defined group of characters who come from a stable republic who journey from one savage land to another and we learn more about the crew through how these strange new worlds change them.

Bingowings said:

It's a great film but it's not about exploring places.

It's about exploring the networked connections of a small group of people.

You're right that the story isn't about exploring.  But in the movie, that is exactly what we the viewers are doing.  Indeed there are only a few actual storylines that occur over and over in movies, Star Wars included.  I disagree with you though, in that I don't think that the SW storyline has anything to do with exploring the networked connections of people, either.  The only relationship of consequence in the movie is between Obi-Wan and Vader.

And I also disagree with you in that I think the story is totally Luke-centric.  It was the story of "a boy, a girl, and a universe."  At the beginning, Mos Eisley was far away to Luke.  The galaxy unfolds for him, and he ends up saving it.  That was the heart of the story, not some soap opera with sister and dad.

It was ep. V and VI where things started getting all interrelated. 

You have a defined group of characters who come from a stable republic who journey from one savage land to another and we learn more about the crew through how these strange new worlds change them.

That's true in that they aren't exploring just to explore.  I should have used the word 'adventure'.  The main storyline is that there is this huge galactic thing going on, and a farmboy finds himself at the center of it.  It leads to a series of dangerous adventures, and his having to learn quickly.  A number of good people help him, and he ends up saving the day.  It's an uplifting story of how even the smallest of people can do great things.

It's a classic story.  But what made it have such an impact, is that this great story is placed in a huge setting of space, planets, stars, battles, and wildly unimaginable things, realized on the big screen in a thrilling way.  The soap opera came later, and it's just my opinion, but I think the sequels should go back to the basics of what made the original movie so great.

We will have to agree to disagree.

Lucas' pals were worried as witnessed by the deleted Luke/Biggs material about his robot driven plot.

Star Wars is more about the crew of the Tantive than it is about Luke (the shipwrecked servants and the captive Princess take up more screentime).

When we meet Luke he is obsessed with his father but family secrets are being kept.

He want's to learn about him and be like him but he held back.

It's why the ESB retcon works so well.

In the original telling Beru and Owen want to keep Luke safe and conservative.

But adding that twist they want to keep him sane and good too.

Ben is the gatekeeper of the past (that's why fans don't mind so much that he is such a manipulative fibber)

But it is all about family and courtly politics.

Even Han is telecast as a future love rival/friend conflict device.

The locations are not that exotic.

They are single feature environments.

Ice, sand, forest, metal, sky.

You don't have a planet like Vulcan or Krypton until the PT.

Bingowings said:

We will have to agree to disagree.

Yes, we can agree to disagree.  None of the items in your list strike me as fundamental to the story, which is the development of Luke.  Han's redemption is a great subplot.  None of the other characters develop or change; they are all there in support of Luke's development.

As far as the "unusual-ness" of the worlds, I think Lucas did what he could while still making it look believable.  I think he wanted to take the viewer as far away as he could, and make the viewer really believe he was there. As technology improved, he made the worlds increasingly strange while retaining the impact of realism.  The cantina, for its time, was extremely bizarre while still being convincing.  Star Trek, by contrast, didn't worry about making its worlds convincing... and many of its stories were centered around moral quandries.