Return Of The Jedi - a general Random Thoughts thread — Page 14

Another random complaint I have about ROTJ: it’s the first time we’re introduced to “lightsaber baseball bat syndrome”, i.e. when lightsabers stop being the deadly slicing weapons they’re supposed to be and turn into baseball bats you can whack people with. When Luke slashes at Jabba’s henchmen aboard the sail barge, they sort of just get knocked backwards and fall off the barge.

Lightsaber baseball bat syndrome also appeared in the recent Disney Kenobi series.

Clearly, this syndrome occurs because a lightsaber is really a rated R weapon in a PG universe. That’s why Lucas used battledroids as disposable Jedi fodder in the Prequels. But the whole “baseball bat effect” looks so dumb. Star Wars shouldn’t be ultra-violent, but surely there’s some compromise between turning ROTJ into a violent slasher film and turning the coolest sci-fi weapon ever conceived into a stupid glowing baton.

We can probably agree that someone didn’t feel like animating scorch marks by hand in that case.

Another thing… after the Prequels came out, everyone got a sense of what a Jedi was capable of doing. Taking out a room full of armed goons with a single laser sword seems firmly within a Jedi’s normal capabilities. But when ROTJ came out, we had never seen a Jedi do anything remotely like that. The most impressive thing we saw was Yoda lifting the X-wing, which suggested that a powerful Jedi would probably be able to use telekinesis to devastating effect in a fight. And Darth Vader does just this in ESB when he knocks Luke out the window on Bespin.

But when I first saw Luke just start flipping around and stabbing or slashing at everyone onboard the sail barge, it kind of just came off as completely unbelievable and silly. Like… why can’t any of Jabba’s guys just shoot him from a distance? He can’t reflect every single bolt, can he? (To be fair, he does take a hit in his hand.) Plus Jabba’s henchmen have the high ground! Luke is basically fighting an upward battle from inside a pit, with gravity against him. Regardless, I had imagined that Jedi were more about subtle mental trickery and telekinesis rather than just straight up doing backflips and stabbing people. I thought lightsabers were almost ceremonial, used mostly for Jedi vs. Jedi combat.

But after seeing the Prequels, Luke’s lethal acrobatics in ROTJ seem a lot less far fetched now. If only his lightsaber actually worked correctly, instead of turning into a baseball bat. (To be fair, he just constructed it. Maybe factory default settings are “baseball bat” mode.)

Vader brings everyone to the carbon freezing chamber because he’s trying to send out the max amount of pain vibes into the universe for Luke to pick up on. It’s why he tortures Han for seemingly no reason, too.

Simple as.

Kershner and Ford were way overthinking it.

ROTJ was my fav as a kid. I always loved the scene where Luke confronts Jabba one last time at the Sarlaac Pit, and does that cool jump off the plank and pulls himself back up. Also the speedbike chase was exciting to me.
I had these movies on vhs. I never saw the special editions until way later and I think its a shame that ROTJ is the one that was ruined the most with its changes.

I was just randomly rewatching Return of the Jedi the other day on Disney+. I noticed that Disney added a content warning that said: “Tobacco use”. What the hell? Is there some scene I forgot where Palpatine is smoking a cigarette while relaxing on the DS2 or something? I’m not sure why this content warning is there, but I can only guess it must be because of that brief scene where Jabba is smoking some kind of space hookah pipe (which may not technically even be tobacco).

Because I’m a ridiculous nerd, I looked this up on Wookiepedia, and found this article: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Hookah_pipe

Hilariously, the Canon version of the article doesn’t specify what exactly is being smoked in these Star Wars “hookah pipes”. But the Legends version of the article says it’s some kind of intoxicant called “Marcan herbs”, which is described as a “mild euphoric drug”. So the content warning should probably be more like “drug use” rather than “tobacco use”, if Marcan herbs are still canonical. Also, obviously I have no life.

EDIT: Just realized there’s also a shot of some Ewoks smoking pipes. I guess this movie does have lots of smoking in it.

Yeah, Disney’s anti-tobacco crusade is weird. They act as though banning cigarettes from their films will cause kids to not smoke, as if they won’t ever see someone smoking in public, or won’t learn about smoking later in life.

One of the Bad Batch episodes features a trigger warning for earthquake/tsunami depictions, which was similarly bizarre.