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Join date
12-May-2012
Last activity
7-Feb-2022
Posts
1,708

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Post
#919280
Topic
Do you think Disney will remake the prequels?
Time

It may be an unpopular opinion round these parts, but I agree with GlastoEls – in part.

Lucasfilm’s failure to preserve the OOT is an attempt to erase true warts-and-all classics of film history and replace them with shiny, sanitized, plasticized versions.

Whereas, although the PT are undeniably bad movies, making fanedits of them isn’t a task of the same urgency that preserving the OOT is. I see PT fanedits more as glorified fix-it fanfic of sorts.

Post
#916462
Topic
What don't you like about TESB?
Time

Yeah, “Moff” basically means “Governor”, I think. The Grand Moffs are kind of like the Nazi Gauleiters (regional governors) who headed the various provinces of Germany under Hitler’s rule.

IRL the title “Grand Moff” derives from “Grand Mufti” and was originally applied to Tarkin back when he was some sort of priest-like figure (a Friar Tuck?) who sat on the high command of the Alliance in the 1975 SW drafts.

Either way, the job of a Grand Moff/governor is likely unrelated to the military duties of a Grand Admiral – though that doesn’t explain how Tarkin gets to command the Death Star. Possibly it’s because of his personal pull with Palpatine (a factor that also counted for much among the higher echelons of Hitler’s regime).

Post
#916153
Topic
Star Wars: The Costume Thread
Time

Ralph McQuarrie’s helmet for Han was definitely inspired by Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, as he himself said. You may be right about the similarity being too obvious for film, though.

The August 1975 third-draft script for SW states pretty clearly that Leia is bloody and bruised from Vader’s torture, so much so that she remains unconscious until the garbage compactor scene and Chewbacca carries her around.

The idea of a barebreasted Leia isn’t explicitly mentioned in the third draft – but then the idea of the second draft’s Luke Starkiller being turned into a female protagonist also didn’t make script form, and Ralph McQuarrie made half a dozen color drawings of girl-Luke. And of course THX 1138 had onscreen nudity.

In the second Ralph McQuarrie storyboard storyboard in my first post, Leia appears to be covering her bare chest with her right arm, and holding a blaster in her left hand:

A detail from another McQuarrie drawing of Leia and the torture robot shows that her dress has fallen down to expose her left breast:

John Mollo in the Star Wars Costumes book states that Leia was going to have a “Tarzan-like” outfit at one point. Of course Johnny Weissmuller wore just a loincloth, but earlier Tarzan movies had the Jungle King wear a garment with one shoulder strap, so that he only exposed half his chest.

Either way, it’s very likely that GL wanted Leia doing a French Revolution Liberty Leading the People cosplay:

This goes back to the 1974 rough draft, which describes Leia as “half-naked” after being assaulted by the Ureallian trappers (of the same species as green-skinned swamp thing" Han Solo).

It seems that GL abandoned the idea of on-screen nudity around the January 1976 fourth draft, which is right around the time he was becoming desperately afraid that his film was going to flop at the box office. Making sure the film got a PG rating instead of an R was one way to maximize profits and increase the chances of him being able to make SW sequels. Of course in the event he didn’t need to worry.

Post
#915924
Topic
Star Wars: The Costume Thread
Time

A small strange mystery:

JW Rinzler in The Making of Star Wars erroneously describes the third image in my previous post as a sketch for a droid “in the bottom-left corner” of McQuarrie’s painting of the Death Star prison-block elevators. But one look at those threatening mandibles (not to mention the needle in the droid’s right claw) reveals that this is an early iteration of the torture droid used on Princess Leia.

This seems to be deliberate obtuseness (or censorship?) on Rinzler’s part… since the droid’s two pincer arms in McQuarrie’s sketch were almost certainly inspired by the early Christian legend of the martyr Saint Agatha (a frequent subject for Renaissance painters). During the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, Agatha, a convert from a Roman noble family, was tortured and had her breasts cut off by red-hot pincers.

And what’s on the very same page of The Making of SW, in the bottom left corner? Ralph McQuarrie’s pencil storyboards of a bare-breasted Princess Leia.