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An Experiment in Inducting a SW newbie. — Page 3

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ray_afraid said:

twooffour said:

that one line about Jabba's intolerance for lousy smugglers is really the only "sore thumb" in the whole business.

ALSO it ruins the big reveal of who and what Jabba is in Jedi.

 

it also shows the Millenium Falcon before it´s actual "introduction"

Did Lucas put ANY thought in this before making the changes ?

 

@OP

interesting read !

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Kurt said:

ray_afraid said:

twooffour said:

that one line about Jabba's intolerance for lousy smugglers is really the only "sore thumb" in the whole business.

ALSO it ruins the big reveal of who and what Jabba is in Jedi.

 

it also shows the Millenium Falcon before it´s actual "introduction"

Did Lucas put ANY thought in this before making the changes ?

 

@OP

interesting read !

Yeah, especially considering that when Luke and company walk into the see the falcon for the first time, the big swelling reveal music which reaches it's height only to be cut of by "what a piece of junk" is completely stupid since we just saw the damn thing like 2 minutes ago.  

"George, we hate you for making more Star Wars movies.  Please make more Star Wars movies."

-The Internet

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I want to read a lot of these long posts, but then I can't bring myself to. We need to start doing tl;dr's here.

Keep Circulating the Tapes.

END OF LINE

(It hasn’t happened yet)

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zombie84 said:

 I showed my girlfriend the OT ...She had never seen it

-ANH: We watched the 1977 GOUT version. Overall, she liked it

-ESB: I'm not sure if she liked this better or not

-ROTJ: ...Most of her comments were made in relation to this film, mainly because of its flaws. ...she noticed that the acting and dialogue was bad....Leia being Luke's sister and the whole romance triangle, made her laugh....she said at the end that "it's like they didn't take it seriously anymore"

I love her.

 

;-)

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For a piece on structural repercussions of the way the prequels were joined up to the originals--essentially the 1-2-3-4-5-6 or 4-5-6-1-2-3 debate--I wrote something about it here:

http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/structuringtheprequels.html

I also looked beyond Star Wars for examples, since Star Wars is not the only series with prequels attached to it. In fact, one of the examples I looked at was a Chuck Norris film. :p

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Darth Bizarro said:

Kurt said:

ray_afraid said:

twooffour said:

that one line about Jabba's intolerance for lousy smugglers is really the only "sore thumb" in the whole business.

ALSO it ruins the big reveal of who and what Jabba is in Jedi.

 

it also shows the Millenium Falcon before it´s actual "introduction"

Did Lucas put ANY thought in this before making the changes ?

 

@OP

interesting read !

Yeah, especially considering that when Luke and company walk into the see the falcon for the first time, the big swelling reveal music which reaches it's height only to be cut of by "what a piece of junk" is completely stupid since we just saw the damn thing like 2 minutes ago.  

 This is a perfect example. John Williams wrote that music specifically to create the comedy moment, which is based on the fact that no one had seen the Falcon before. It was written knowing there was no Jabba scene, and had the Jabba scene been included this music piece would not only be different, it would probably be completely absent, because the joke wouldn't work. The music was never meant to be heard with a Jabba scene preceeding it. It is areas like this where other artists involved in the film have their work distorted and misrepresented--what would otherwise be considered a violation of their "moral rights". But it also highlights what happens when you go back and put stuff back in; this is just a scene, but it works the same way as a whole film does (think of the Jabba scene as a "prequel scene" and the piece-of-junk scene as the "original scene"). But the effect is that the film had not been structured to accomodate such material added before, voiding a lot of the structural changes that were originally made. If you watch the scene after the film is over, as a bonus feature, the film is fine; just like if you watch a prequel as the sequel it is, then it is fine. Place it before the original material, you make the original material now act as the sequel, which undermines its entire structure.

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This whole discussion is now reminding me of the whole debate on whether the Chronicles of Narnia should first be read in release order or chronological order. Based on what apparently C.S. Lewis himself preferred, I chose to read it in chronological order. Now, in hindsight, in light of all this George Lucas-related Star Wars stuff, I wish I had read the books the other way around =(

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Yea, it's somewhat of a hard one with Narnia.

The written order makes more sense, in terms of exposition etc. - but the Magician's Nephew is just way cooler overall, and it doesn't hit you over the head with Christian allegories right away... that is, by the time you get to the horrendous "creation" of Narnia, and the Eden allusions, you've already been lured in with cool magic rings, flying through space between worlds, a world where everyone's a monster, and dead, Jadis wreaking havoc around London, the crazy scientist cartoon - and the unbearable Narnia chapters just kinda flow from there.

Lion&Witch just starts off as this cheesy fairytale adventure, so it may not make for the best first impression :)

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Or you could just go back in time and read them in written order like I did as a kid, when this wasn't an issue. ;-)

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YYYYYOU CAAN ALWAAAAAAAYS, BRING IIIIIT, BAAAAAAAAACK!!!!!

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twooffour said:

Yea, it's somewhat of a hard one with Narnia.

The written order makes more sense, in terms of exposition etc. - but the Magician's Nephew is just way cooler overall, and it doesn't hit you over the head with Christian allegories right away... that is, by the time you get to the horrendous "creation" of Narnia, and the Eden allusions, you've already been lured in with cool magic rings, flying through space between worlds, a world where everyone's a monster, and dead, Jadis wreaking havoc around London, the crazy scientist cartoon - and the unbearable Narnia chapters just kinda flow from there.

Lion&Witch just starts off as this cheesy fairytale adventure, so it may not make for the best first impression :)

Honestly, I never found TMN to be a very interesting book - It's by far my least favorite of them. That, combined with your point about exposition, makes it very easy for me to say Written Order.

ROTJ Storyboard Reconstruction Project

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Well, YMMV on that, it's been more than 5 years since I last looked into it, and I'm not going to anywhere in the near future.

I just thought it was a pretty cool "mystery adventure" book until it turned into religious fairytale cheese towards the last third.
No fuckin' Fauns, no fuckin' talkin' animals repressing their first laughter, no stupid grasshoppers, no Apples of Teh Life - could've turned out so differently, had it been written first :(


But yea, the creepy mad scientist guy, the arrogant, impulsive boy and the wiser cheeky girl who turns out to be right, that book's full of annoying tropes.

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twooffour said:

I just thought it was a pretty cool "mystery adventure" book until it turned into religious fairytale cheese towards the last third.
No fuckin' Fauns, no fuckin' talkin' animals repressing their first laughter, no stupid grasshoppers, no Apples of Teh Life - could've turned out so differently, had it been written first :(

Perhaps you know nothing else of C.S. Lewis' work? Most of his books are Christian theology. Heck, even when he wrote sci-fi, it was explicitly in a Christian context.

ROTJ Storyboard Reconstruction Project

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timdiggerm said:

twooffour said:

I just thought it was a pretty cool "mystery adventure" book until it turned into religious fairytale cheese towards the last third.
No fuckin' Fauns, no fuckin' talkin' animals repressing their first laughter, no stupid grasshoppers, no Apples of Teh Life - could've turned out so differently, had it been written first :(

Perhaps you know nothing else of C.S. Lewis' work? Most of his books are Christian theology. Heck, even when he wrote sci-fi, it was explicitly in a Christian context.

If one doesn't particularly like being preached religious messages in a fiction book, does it really matter whether it's something the author does all the time, or just thought would be fun this one time?

But yea, I obviously meant it from the perspective of someone who didn't know ahead ;)


Just to clarify, I don't have any problems with Christian, or religious themes as such - and the version of Christianity, along with its values, detectable in the Narnia books is certainly of the better kind.
Still, there are some rather backward ideas in those books, mostly concerning questions of "faith", and yes, they do get kind of annoying.

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As far as the Narnia thing goes, as far as I know at any rate, there isn't any definitive proof that chronological order is what C.S. Lewis would have preferred.  From what I've heard, that comes from one correspondence from one little girl who told him that she had decided to switch the books around and read them that way, and he told her he had never thought of that before and that it was a good idea.  And apparently his estate picked up on that and decided, based on that one comment, to fuck everything around.

But, yeah, The Magician's Nephew is pure exposition, pure prequel, pure sequel.  I mean, its opening line is something along the lines of, "This is the story of how Narnia came to be."  What the hell is Narnia?  Why should I care how it came to be?  Well, if I've read five other books about the place, then that's a pretty compelling reason, and that's obviously the context under which Lewis wrote that opening and that he expected his readers to have when he wrote it.

As for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there's a reason it's consistently been the first movie adaptation of the series to be made.  It's the most popular, it's the most well-known.  It's probably the only one that's made such a strong impact on popular culture.  It's the one that everyone has read.  It's the one that I read and watched as a young child before I ever knew there were any other books.  Just like the original Star Wars, it stands alone as a separate story while all the other sequels simply do not and cannot.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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Not really - as far as I remember, TMN was pretty much a rounded, self-contained story, aside from these occasional OOC remarks by Lewis (which I found about as annoying as his constant food descriptions).

This, boy, he meets the girl, then they start exploring haunted houses and bump into the crazy uncle (forgot his name, do not want to look up), he talks a bunch of gibberish, then they start world-travelling, bump into Charn with some Giant Queen (who cares if the becomes the White Witch later on?), then there they wreak some havoc back in London, and... well, it's pretty much this neat, intriguing mystery plot that has nothing to do with Aslan, Jesus, or Narnia, or any talking animals, up until... well, until they beam into Narnia while it's being sung into existence by Aslan.

It's from this moment on that it starts to kinda suck, and maybe it doesn't stand alone well after that moment. But I'm not sure.

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Yea, fuck that shit now, back to the topic... SO WHAT DID SHE SAY ABOUT THE CHARACTERS IN A NEW HOPE??? :)


PS: Sometime you'll have to confess to her that a bunch of creepy basement nerds are secretly dissecting her casual opinions on a bunch of space movies, all because you felt the need to make this thread :PP

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twooffour said:

PS: Sometime you'll have to confess to her that a bunch of creepy basement nerds...

Not I. I iz the sexy.

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Ziggy Stardust said:

twooffour said:

PS: Sometime you'll have to confess to her that a bunch of creepy basement nerds...

Not I. I iz the sexy.

Down, boy.  She's way out of your age group, which at your age, is pretty much limited to your age.

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No way! I just watched it!

And Frink, I'm just saying that I'm not a creepy basement nerd. Nor are you.

2/4 just thought that everyone on here was like him*....

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Ziggy Stardust said:

And Frink, I'm just saying that I'm not a creepy basement nerd. Nor are you.

Well, I don't have a basement...