ATMachine

I wonder how the same sort of people that said Star Wars was overly simplistic in its good/evil duality (a charge particularly relevant in the murky moral climate of 1970s cinema) could also say the film had “no moral, no message”. Is it a film with too simple and didactic a worldview, or is it not simple & didactic enough?

But Luke wasn’t planning to appear before the Emperor - Vader took Luke to Palpatine when he initially refused to turn back to the light side as Luke asked him to. Luke wanted to surrender to the Imperials to avoid having Vader sense what the Rebels were doing through him, and to have a face-to-face talk with his father. If he failed at turning his father, he might be killed, but his friends would no longer be in danger from his Force link to Vader.

And besides, why would Luke think it was his job to kill the Emperor anyway? The Rebel fleet destroying the Death Star was supposed to be responsible for that.

Or maybe we would’ve seen Obi-Wan training Luke during the middle of ESB, and he would’ve accompanied Luke to Cloud City and sacrificed himself there.

Broom Kid said:

“Fan Forums” are one of the worst possible ways to “know” anyone, or build any sort of accurate picture of a person. Conversations about Star Wars aren’t a great basis for determining what a person’s character is like, and there’s not a lot of upside to looking at those conversations in that light, anyway. It doesn’t really make the conversation any better, usually doesn’t increase any understanding of the movies, and mostly just leads you to put way too much weight on something (disposable conversations with strangers about space movies) that just isn’t built to carry that much weight.

I don’t know that I agree that ‘toxic’ needs to stop being used as a descriptor, if only because it CAN apply very well… the problem is that a huge part of WHY it applies is because people DO approach disposable conversations with strangers about space movies with such misplaced energy and importance that it ends up warping perspective, to the point where real toxicity can occur. But usually it’s a pretty long walk between “jeez, that guy is annoying” to “jeez, that guy is TOXIC.”

But even then, that doesn’t mean anyone here can paint a really accurate picture of anyone else’s personality based solely on the very small, focused, and mostly inconsequential (and anonymous) glimpses being given through “Star Wars” talks. Most everyone here has a whole LIFE outside of liking Star Wars that is bigger, and way more important than this, and we’ll never really know about it beyond the surface. Toxicity can be a temporary condition, too, and if you find yourself getting upset at other people’s opinions on Star Wars, in my experience, that just means its time to stop and reflect on what you’re putting into this, and what you’re getting out of it, and whether there’s an imbalance that needs to be tended to on YOUR end.

Apologies for being off topic. Just wanted to speak a little from my perspective, having seen (and been in) so many of these sorts of scuffles and fights over the years.

To sum up: Ewoks are awesome, Yub Nub is the best, “Return of the Jedi” is referencing Luke, celebrate the love, keep balance in the Force.

Well said. 😃

It’s also worth asking exactly how much chance Luke has of killing the Emperor in a straight-up fight. Vader’s betrayal clearly took Palpatine by surprise. But if Luke just raised his lightsaber and tried to cut him down, I’m sure he had some Force lightning up his sleeve even if Vader was out of the picture.

SilverWook said:
As Vader never says Leia’s name out loud, does he only sense Luke has a sister, but not her actual identity?

Apparently so. Which is interesting.

It sounds like the storyline where “Han dies, Leia becomes queen, Luke wanders off” was Kurtz trying to find an ending to ROTJ that wrapped up the series, but matched the darker tone of Lucas’ previous ideas from the ESB era for the third SW film (when it was supposed to feed into the ST).

Not to mention it would also allow an opportunity to return to the Sequel Trilogy at some point. Luke would basically be the same lone wanderer as in the earlier Sequel Trilogy conception, and Han and Leia would both be out of the picture, which also fits the earlier plan.

But it seems Lucas wanted to tie up what was then supposed to be the final film with a definitely happy ending. Particularly one that resolved the Han/Luke/Leia love triangle in a less dour way. Han sacrificing his life for the Rebellion was all well and good as a story idea back when Leia could end up with Luke instead, but ESB basically killed that idea (no doubt drawing on Carrie Fisher & Harrison Ford’s real-life intimacy). So Lucas kept him alive.

Or they could’ve founded a new homeworld for Alderaanian refugees, the way Old Spock does in the Abramsverse nuTrek films (which basically turn Vulcan into Alderaan). Maybe it could be some backwater Outer Rim planet nobody else would want, like Tatooine.

Back in the days of writing the original SW, there was a point where Lucas depicted the rise of the Empire as a more gradual decline and fall of the Republic, rather than a power grab by a single dictatorial Emperor figure.

This was the idea in the January 1975 second draft, and it evidently persisted for a while - hence in 1976 Lucas had to tell Alan Dean Foster to take out references to it in the novelization. One slipped through, though: a mention of “the later corrupt Emperors”.

In the same conversation Lucas apparently mentions wanting Leia to become Empress at the end of the trilogy, and says he would have to discard or modify this idea if he kept to the storyline of a single evil Emperor figure instead of a more gradual transition.

So Kurtz’s idea here of Leia becoming a “Queen” does seem to derive from early SW concepts. (Including also the 1974 rough draft, where Leia becomes queen of her planet at the end, in a finale sequence much like the Triumph of the Will-style ending to SW 1977.)

A marker of how much the story had shifted to revolve primarily around Luke by the time of ROTJ is that in the story conferences there Larry Kasdan suggested having Luke, not Leia, become the new Emperor. (Lucas’ apparent idea during ESB of having both Han & Leia die in the third film, to clear the way for a Sequel Trilogy featuring Luke’s sister, likely boosted this marginalization.)

I think killing off both Han & Leia was part of George’s plan for ROTJ back during the ESB days, when he was still thinking about continuing with a Sequel Trilogy set immediately afterward.

And I’ve said before, the “Han dies, Leia becomes queen, Luke wanders off” idea is basically the ending of Mad Max Fury Road, in regards to the Nux/Furiosa/Max character arcs.

ZkinandBonez said:

ATMachine said:

This Twitter trailer for the May 4, 2020 Star Wars marathon on Disney+ features the film titles scrolling backwards in a crawl, much like how the title of SW 1977 was at the top of the crawl in the storyboards & early test footage.

And then afterward the text turns from yellow to white. Again much like early test footage of the SW 1977 crawl, which had white text.

Backwards? I’m assuming you meant the warping of the text (or “angle”, not quite sure how to describe it) being similar to the test footage?

I just meant it was receding into the background at an angle, the way the text crawl does. Nothing to do with the particular degree of inclination. (Though I really should look at the test footage again.)

This Twitter trailer for the May 4, 2020 Star Wars marathon on Disney+ features the film titles scrolling backwards in a crawl, much like how the title of SW 1977 was at the top of the crawl in the storyboards & early test footage.

And then afterward the text turns from yellow to white. Again much like early test footage of the SW 1977 crawl, which had white text.

red5-626 said:

ray_afraid said:

On From Star Wars to Jedi you can hear the original English vocals.
It’s a workout song, for sure. I’ve always wondered why. AFAICT, the song was written for the movie, so… ?
Actually, after thinking about it today, weird exercise songs were kinda popular around this time…
Still makes no sense for the setting, but.

Like I said Jabba has gotan so fat he can’t get off his “Hoversled”
So he is trying to lose weight. But he keeps eating frogs so it never works.

Back when Jabba was Leto II Atreides, they called it “the Royal Cart”.

I read that as “temporal avenging” and now I’m falling down a rabbit hole about the logic of using time travel to avenge something as opposed to preventing it.

No Australians?

LUKE
Do the Sith know the ways of the Force?

BEN
They use the Bogan Force.

LUKE
Like Bogan weather, or bogan times. I thought that was just a saying.

- Star Wars August 1975 third draft

😄

I had a weird dream where I was talking to Gary Kurtz. He told me that he’d always wanted George to fix the blue door on the escape pod, but George said “it’s good enough” and decided not to fix it. He said that back in the day George didn’t want to spend the time or money to make things like that as good as they could be, but now that SW is a massive success he’s going back and fixing those things.

DuracellEnergizer said:

ATMachine said:

Disney’s always been this hypocritical and ridiculously puritan. It’s just easier to notice nowadays.

I dunno. The harpy tits in Fantasia paint a somewhat different picture.

Maybe so, but if we have to reach back before the Manhattan Project for such examples, is it still relevant, or just a historical footnote reflecting a worldview that hasn’t survived in Disney as it’s existed for the last 70 years?

Disney’s always been this hypocritical and ridiculously puritan. It’s just easier to notice nowadays.

Only the latest example of why Disney can’t be trusted with its own history.

In the annotated edition of Heir to the Empire Zahn admitted that that idea was based on Sauron from Lord of the Rings.

DID the Death Star II have a “huge TIE fighter/bomber complement”? Since the station was unfinished, its fighter defenses might not be at full capacity.

Thanks for the info about Dan Perri! It looks like he designed the logo to be skewed so it could fit at the head of the title crawl (where the film title is placed in Alex Tavoularis’ storyboards). It doesn’t look very practical for that purpose, though, considering the text blocks in the crawl are rectilinear and simply filmed at an angle.

Early test crawls in the eBook versions of Rinzler’s Making of SW have a different logo, but that one is also placed at the start of the crawl. In those versions the (white) logo starts out upright, then folds down to the plane of the crawl and recedes as the text (also white, with fonts varying in different tests) scrolls up.

Also, somebody ought to tell the editors of Dan Perri’s Wikipedia page about Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.

Excellent! I had been wondering myself if the absence of Yavin in the original shot was due to that very consideration.

The logo that appears at 0:39 is custom-drawn, though it’s obviously related to the logo used in much of the original marketing. I wonder if it was a candidate at one point for the logo to be used with the title crawl (which had white text in early test versions).

Also, those white lightsaber sticks are what the original in-camera lightsaber effect (using glowing sticks powered by electric cords hidden up the actors’ sleeves) looked like. It just didn’t work very well.

Excellent!