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'Merge' Article- Lucas in his own words — Page 2

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they werent marketed as ep 4 5 and 6 except in the title crawl. blame lucas for allowing them to be marketed that way for so long. even he called it star wars up till ep1
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Well, when they saw that it did, then they should have called it A New Hope. And when Lucas released the prequels, he should have advertised them as The Phantom Menace, Attack of Clones, and Revenge of the Sith. That would keep consistancy in advertising.
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i wish they had been marketed as phantom menace and so forth. i dont like that episode tag at the front it makes it sound to pretentious and i dont like seeing star wars on every packaging. maybe he didnt think the merchandise would sell if he only used the prequel titles . though i did notice revenge of the sith on merchandise more than the others. probabaly because it had the best title
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Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
Why were they called that, anyway? Didn't people ever reallize that they were episodes of a series, even if they were 4, 5, and 6? I mean, why in the hell did people once refer to Episode IV as simply "Star Wars?" And then people called the next two by their subtitles. Huh?


The same reason people used to call Cassius Clay by that name- because before he changed it that WAS his name. As many of us mentioned elsewhere the movie I saw on my birthday in 1977 was called 'Star Wars' and nothing else. The crawl didn't even reflect 'A New Hope' at all until the re-release, and then it was basically considered kind of a serial-referencial 'joke'. And granted most sequels are referred to by just the number (not many people would know 'The Quest For Peace' as a subtitle by itself by they might know a 'Superman 4' was made.) Further as I've quoted elsewhere from IMDB when the 'Star Wars' sequels were released they were NOT officially titled 'Episode 5 and 6' but merely 'Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back' and 'Star Wars: Return of the Jedi'. Audiences really didn't *care* that there were 'episode' numbers as part of a grander scheme and most of the bazillions of people who saw the Star Wars trilogy was sure it was over with ROTJ and didn't care past that point.
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Yeah, that makes sense. But, now, with all six finished, I can't believe that there STILL are people who don't call them by their episode titles. It is no longer a "serial referencial joke." It actually is a six-part serial now.
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Originally posted by: battlewars
i wish they had been marketed as phantom menace and so forth. i dont like that episode tag at the front it makes it sound to pretentious and i dont like seeing star wars on every packaging. maybe he didnt think the merchandise would sell if he only used the prequel titles . though i did notice revenge of the sith on merchandise more than the others. probabaly because it had the best title


I totally agree with battlewars here. When I first started seeing ads for The Phantom Menace (well, back before it even had its title and beyond), and it was only referred to as Episode I, I knew it was simply a marketing ploy. We'd seen these little numbers in the crawl all the time, and there were so many casual fans who kept on asking, "Why is the first one Episode IV?" So they started calling them by their episode numbers so people would give a double take, "Ooh, so that's the reason!" And then, of course, Star Wars was thrown around a lot too because of its name value. So, at the end of the day, the real title had no real place in it anymore, so they were all relegated to a tiny little font at the bottom of the logo. And suddenly, the rest of the movie industry decided, "Wow! That's an awesome idea! We should make movies like that too!" And so the world ended...

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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Hold on a second. The film's title was officially changed on the opening crawl in 1981. PLUS, ESB and ROTJ were only advertised with their subtitles, they ALWAYS had their episode number in the opening crawl.

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I know it was always on the crawl, but as you guys have stated, not until the PT, did Lucas market the movie, Star Wars Episode I. Even though A New Hope was under the crawl since 1981, I never called it that, I always called in Star Wars til the PT, but now many new fans think you are talking about the saga, not the movie.

The funny thing is after ROTJ, there were more speculation on 7,8,9 then 1,2,3 in the 80's. They were all just rumors, but I remember every summer hoping to hear Episode VII in production, and Han, Luke, and Leia, were back to continue the series. Then we thought sometime later Lucas would go back and do the adventures of ObiWan and Anakin in 1,2,3. It was never, I can't wait til they do the story of Anakin Skywalker and how he becomes Vader, that wasn't the main story, that was just part of the prequel story. That is what gets me mad when people say older fans had the story of the prequels in their minds for 20 years, I didn't, I wanted the sequel trilogy, I never wanted the prequels, cause there would be no suspense, cause we already knew what happened.
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“It's the one thing that I don't want to do. It's strange: I don't think that I'm very good at it but I can do it better than most people.”
HahhaHAHahHAHhahHAHhahhahHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

OK, now I’ve got that off my chest….

Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
I think he means that Anakin's story is the central theme, and that Luke is part of that story. Lucas sees Luke as merely a step in redeeming his father. I really don't think he thinks the OT is about Luke, that would be silly to pretend, as it's not.

Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
I think he means that Anakin's story is the central theme, and that Luke is part of that story. Lucas sees Luke as merely a step in redeeming his father. I really don't think he thinks the OT is about Luke, that would be silly to pretend, as it's not. Whatever, Neophyte. Believe what you want. You are being lied to.

Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
Hold on a second. The film's title was officially changed on the opening crawl in 1981. PLUS, ESB and ROTJ were only advertised with their subtitles, they ALWAYS had their episode number in the opening crawl.
Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
Why were they called that, anyway? Didn't people ever reallize that they were episodes of a series, even if they were 4, 5, and 6? I mean, why in the hell did people once refer to Episode IV as simply "Star Wars?" And then people called the next two by their subtitles. Huh?

OK, I’m gonna try and talk real slow so maybe you finally understand. Stop me if I’m going too fast. Ok, here we go – The original idea for Star Wars was to make a space opera similar to the ones Lucas grew up with and loved as a kid. In order to give the viewer the feeling that they were watching a space opera and had been thrown right into the middle of a story of galcatic war, George decided it would be cool to call the film episode 4, of an imaginery serial. When George was a kid he would go to the cinema on a Saturday morning and watch whatever happened to be showing, and he wanted the viewer to feel like that when watching Star Wars. That is the one and only original reason for the ‘Episode 4’ subtitle. The problem is, when George told the studio he wanted to call it episode 4, they were like ‘episode 4? But this is the first movie!!’ They just didn’t get it, and they feared the viewer wouldn’t get it either, so they prevented him from doing it. A few years later George is rich and powerful, and still thinks it will be cool to add the episode 4 subtitle, so he does it. People then start asking questions about episodes 1-3, and George thinks it might be neat if one day he actually made these missing episodes. So basically, the episode 4 thing was just a novelty, a throwback to the old serials, but the idea gradually developed into the 6 part saga we have today. That IS how it happened, whatever bullshit we are getting fed these days about a grand vision. Adam, I would have thought that you of all people wpuld have come across this explanation at some point. You seem to love searching out facts and watching documentaries and makings of and stuff, and this explanation appears in so many places. In one documentary they even show a title crawl from an old black and white sci-fi serial that is pretty much exactly the same as the star wars crawl, complete with episode number, and shows what George was shooting for.

Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
Yeah, that makes sense. But, now, with all six finished, I can't believe that there STILL are people who don't call them by their episode titles. It is no longer a "serial referencial joke." It actually is a six-part serial now.
You make it sound like all six were planned from the start, and now the grand task is complete. Are you listening to anything we’re saying???? Read this post again:

Originally posted by: CO
At least you guys understand that Lucas has changed him mind of 28 years, because alot of newer fans think this was always his vision. Now I dont' have a problem if Lucas only wants to do 6 episodes now, I even don't blame him, I mean who wants to do SW for the rest of their life? But don't keep lying and saying everyone is lying, except himself. Just say, "you know what it was always about Luke, and in 1980, I had the hunger to do maybe 12, 9 episodes, cause I saw this huge galaxy out there, but I had to raise my kids, and I got older, and to be honest I just have the hunger to do SW for the next 20 years, so I paired it down to six movies, and just gave a backstory to the OT, focusing around Vader/Kenobi and Luke & Leis Mom, and if you want to watch it 1-6, it may work, but since it was filmed 4-6,1-3, it will probably work better that way. People change, I may have said alot of things that contradict now, but I have changed too."

I would be fine with that, cause it is at least honest, now gives us the damn O-OT on DVD, so we don't have to read any of this crap about you hoping in one sentence you're gonna say you're releasing the originals!

War does not make one great.

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Actually the whole opening scroll thing is 'merely' an homage to the old Buck Rogers shows (who had a similar opening scroll) - so even that is an homage. The whole plotline of ANH is one big homage to Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress". The 2004 dvd set even contains that information directly from George Lucas' mouth (check out the ANH director's commentary and the bonus dvd).
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Originally posted by: Yoda Is Your Father
OK, I’m gonna try and talk real slow so maybe you finally understand. Stop me if I’m going too fast. Ok, here we go – The original idea for Star Wars was to make a space opera similar to the ones Lucas grew up with and loved as a kid. In order to give the viewer the feeling that they were watching a space opera and had been thrown right into the middle of a story of galcatic war, George decided it would be cool to call the film episode 4, of an imaginery serial. When George was a kid he would go to the cinema on a Saturday morning and watch whatever happened to be showing, and he wanted the viewer to feel like that when watching Star Wars. That is the one and only original reason for the ‘Episode 4’ subtitle. The problem is, when George told the studio he wanted to call it episode 4, they were like ‘episode 4? But this is the first movie!!’ They just didn’t get it, and they feared the viewer wouldn’t get it either, so they prevented him from doing it. A few years later George is rich and powerful, and still thinks it will be cool to add the episode 4 subtitle, so he does it. People then start asking questions about episodes 1-3, and George thinks it might be neat if one day he actually made these missing episodes. So basically, the episode 4 thing was just a novelty, a throwback to the old serials, but the idea gradually developed into the 6 part saga we have today. That IS how it happened, whatever bullshit we are getting fed these days about a grand vision. Adam, I would have thought that you of all people wpuld have come across this explanation at some point. You seem to love searching out facts and watching documentaries and makings of and stuff, and this explanation appears in so many places. In one documentary they even show a title crawl from an old black and white sci-fi serial that is pretty much exactly the same as the star wars crawl, complete with episode number, and shows what George was shooting for.


YIYF, that's my point. He wanted to make a story in the middle of a war. YET, in order to do this, he needed (as all good storytellers do) to write a backstory in order to know where exactly everyone came from, what the origins of the war were, etc. That's where the PT comes in. Now, I know very well that it wasn't completely planned out and that it was merely about seven written pages. As we all know, he wrote the main story as Eps 4-6, as that was the one he was primarily interested in telling. HOWEVER, later on he decided that he wanted to tell the backstory in the form of Eps 1-3 so that Vader's story would reasonate better. He explains in "The Chosen One" documentary on the Ep 3 DVD that originally he wanted to do one movie, Ep4, which would include the stories of what we now know as Eps 4-6. But he couldn't, as it would have been too large for one movie. So, he instead cut it into three parts, so he could tell the entire story. BUT, as a result, people didn't get to see the entire "movie" (Eps 4-6 as one), SO they saw Vader as pure evil until Ep 6, where they reallized he was once Anakin Skywalker, a good person who fell from greatness. But he explains that people still saw Vader as pure evil, despite ROPTJ. That's why he made the PT, he explains. He says he made it to HELP the story of Eps 4-6. Now, whether or not it actually helped is based solely on opinion. But that was his goal. And, of course, he had to stretch out his backstory into three Eps for the PT because, as he said at Celebration III "I could have made TPM and AOTC as Episode I and ROTS as Ep 2, but then I wouldn't have material for an Episode III, would I?"
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Yeah, you're right, but why didn't he at least stick to the aspects of that backstory that had already been hinted at by characters such as Yoda and Obi-Wan in the OT? The fact is that Lucas basically forgot the true heart and spirit of his own creation, gave into current trends and fads, had one eye on marketing at all times and, basically in my opinion went insane.

War does not make one great.

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Originally posted by: Yoda Is Your Father
Yeah, you're right, but why didn't he at least stick to the aspects of that backstory that had already been hinted at by characters such as Yoda and Obi-Wan in the OT? The fact is that Lucas basically forgot the true heart and spirit of his own creation, gave into current trends and fads, had one eye on marketing at all times and, basically in my opinion went insane.


The world may never know.
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Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi

YIYF, that's my point. He wanted to make a story in the middle of a war. YET, in order to do this, he needed (as all good storytellers do) to write a backstory in order to know where exactly everyone came from, what the origins of the war were, etc. That's where the PT comes in. Now, I know very well that it wasn't completely planned out and that it was merely about seven written pages. As we all know, he wrote the main stopry as Eps 4-6, as that was the one he was primarily interested in telling. HOWEVER, later on he decided that he wanted to tell the backstory in the form of Eps 1-3 so that Vader's story would reasonate better. He explains in "The Chosen One" documentary on the Ep 3 DVD that originally he wanted to dop one movie, Ep4, which would include the stories of what we now know as Eps 4-6. But he couldn't, as it would have been too large for one movie. So, he instead cut it into three parts, so he could tell the entire story. BUT, as a result, people didn't get to see the entire "movie" (Eps 4-6 as one), SO they saw Vader as pure evil until Ep 6, where they reallized he was once Anakin Skywalker, a good person who fell from greatness. But he explains that people still saw Vader as pure evil, despite ROPTJ. That's why he made the PT, he explains. He says he made it to HELP the story of Eps 4-6. Now, whether or not it actually helped is based solely on opinion. But that was his gole. And, of course, he had to stretch out his backstory into three Eps for the PT because, as he said at Celebration three "I could have made TPM and AOTC as Episode I and ROTS as Ep 2, but then I wouldn't have material for an Episode III, would I?"


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CO Reply:

See this is where Lucas is being alittle dishonest Adam, and that is what he said now. When he made the original SW, he didn't know if Darth Vader was Lukes father yet, he may of thought about that angle, but this whole nobody had the real idea of Darth Vader in 1977 is baloney. Darth Vader would have had alot bigger role if that were the case, the only thing he had in mind was keeping Vader alive just in case he could make a sequel. The true star of the movie, and the OT for that sake, is Luke Skywalker.

He wrote one movie, and had more ideas, mostly used in ESB, that he could use for a sequel. But Yoda was only invented because he killed off Kenobi, Leia was never Lukes sister, but Lucas says it was always about these twins and their father. Remember by the time of ROTJ, he ran out of new ideas, that is why there are so many recycled plot points, most of his great ideas he couldn't use for the original were all in ESB, so that dispels this huge three story synopsis. Just watch the original SW again, there isn't a hint of all of this stuff. If Lucas was going to go with the story of Leia & Luke sisters, he would have never played up the love triangle that was hinted in the original, and the Kenobi/Luke conversation about Lukes father would have been different than what was said. Remember, basically in ROTJ, Kenobi had to tell Luke he was lying about that whole conversation to cover up the story they didn't have in the original.

The funny thing is, the scene where Biggs is talking to Luke right before they board their X-Wing fighters before they embark on the death star, part of that scene was cut out for the SE, cause Biggs brings up Lukes father, who wasn't Vader then. Now the whole scene was never in the original cut, but just the fact that they filmed that dialogue tells you Lucas didn't have Vader as Lukes father.

Now I agree with you that Lucas had some sort of backstory, but nothing other than random notes. Maybe a few notes on the duel, how the Empire was formed, and other minor details. But in ROTJ book, Uncle Owen is ObiWans brother, and Leias mom original took Leia in hiding, and never lost the will to live, that is why the Leia/Luke ROTJ conversation doesn't make sense now. If he didn't have an idea on Anakins wife and her fate, how the hell did he have any story for the PT, cause she was central to everything that happens in 1-3!

Did Lucas have this master plan, no way, did he have a plan, no way either. Did he have certain ideas for more movies, I think he did. But after the original, the saga makes such a left turn, that I think after ANH, that is when he really started developing 6, 9, or 12 episodes cause it made so much money. Remember SW was the highest grossing movie at the time, a sequel was a no-brainer, so I think Lucas just started saying to himself, "OK, now I can do whatever I want with this hit movie,"and then realized it was harder than it looks making everything fit. That is why the PT has so many things that just don't match the OT, cause things like QuiGon and Jango Fett, and Padme losing the will to live were never there.

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And now because nothing matches up nicely, people blame the OT for "not fitting in with the PT puzzle pieces!" Those fools.
"I am altering the movies. Pray I don't alter them any further." -Darth Lucas
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BUT, the whole love trianlge present in ANH is actually bery reallistic, given the fact that Luke and Leia didn't know they were siblings. It's only when someone says "You two are bro/sis" that people say "What? We can't be doing this!"
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Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
BUT, the whole love trianlge present in ANH is actually bery reallistic, given the fact that Luke and Leia didn't know they were siblings. It's only when someone says "You two are bro/sis" that people say "What? We can't be doing this!"


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I agree Adam, cause there is an answer to every possible plot hole. The out to that Luke/Leia kiss to everyone was they didn't know they were siblings, and that always worked for me. But again, do you really think Lucas would have played that up from what was a possible love triangle for Luke/Leia/Han in the first movie if he had them as siblings in mind? It he did, he is a real sick bastard!

Remember she was a princess in the first movie, every character was not specific, it was more of the general heroes in every movie: The ultimate good guy: Luke, the swarmy pessimist: Han Solo, and the damsel in distress princess: Leia. By the second movie, the characters were much more developed than the first, because of the larger story. Remember Leia was more the leader of the rebellion than the typical princess in ESB.

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And for that matter GL recycled Leia's character (or paralled or whatever you want to call it- half full/half empty) into Padme in the pT but much less effectively IMHO. She started off as a queen, then a political leader then finally (via deleted scenes) one of the creators of the rebellion.
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Originally posted by: CO
Originally posted by: Adamwankenobi
BUT, the whole love trianlge present in ANH is actually bery reallistic, given the fact that Luke and Leia didn't know they were siblings. It's only when someone says "You two are bro/sis" that people say "What? We can't be doing this!"


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I agree Adam, cause there is an answer to every possible plot hole. The out to that Luke/Leia kiss to everyone was they didn't know they were siblings, and that always worked for me. But again, do you really think Lucas would have played that up from what was a possible love triangle for Luke/Leia/Han in the first movie if he had them as siblings in mind? It he did, he is a real sick bastard!


Well, the idea there was supposed to be that, according to Lucas, they always had feelings for each other, but they couldn't quite place them correctly. I can accept this.

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I can accept it too, but seriously, do you really think he would have introduced this weird 'I have a sexual attraction to my sister' angle in what is essentially a film for children/young people if he had planned it? I mean, seriously?

War does not make one great.

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Why then does Luke have a force connection with her in ESB, which was the same film that had Leia kissing Luke and (in a cut scene) they had a passionate kiss?
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You know how kids are... "What's that I'm feeling???" "That's the 'force' baby... wanna ignite my lightsaber?"
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I dont believe a word Lucas says about it being Darth Vaders story all those years ago if you watch the OT without bias it clearly isnt, and that had everything planned from the 70s and didnt make it up as he went along, horsecrap, he has such ego he cant even admit he has changed his mind over the years and had no grand plan but instead lies his ass off, and his gullible followers believe every word.