TV’s Frink said:
CatBus said:
TV’s Frink said:
What the heck is film zero?
Star Wars. It doesn’t have an episode number. I guess (null) would have been better.
I get your point, and the point you’ll probably make in response to what I’m about to say, but it’s a little weird to not assign a number to one movie in a list full of movies with numbers.
Naw, you won’t see my next point coming. It’s like a panther. Rrrowwr.
When you assign an episode number to Star Wars, you assign it a chronology with respect to the other films. When Empire came out as Episode V, it was obvious to much of the Star Wars loving world that the previous movie had been Episode I, and that there were many exciting adventures that had passed in the intervening time between the films, some of which were alluded to in Empire (Ord Mantell). The next year, Star Wars was assigned the episode number IV, which dashed the hopes of those missing episodes ever coming into being.
So while I’d personally call Star Wars Episode I, because that’s what it really was until 1981, that would confuse matters even more, because it conflicts with the episode number of a later movie that would be horrible to confuse with or even associate with Star Wars. So if you assign it IV, you lose some of the magic and wonder of the pre-1981 film, if you assign it I, you confuse young people who think there’s a Star Wars film that already has that number. So the solution is not to assign it a number at all, because it doesn’t have one.
The essential problem with including it in a list of movies with numbers is that it simply doesn’t have a number, not that you must give it a number to make it fit.