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12-Jun-2005
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26-Apr-2024
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Post
#284278
Topic
Revenge of the sith is the shite and the flies upon it
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/284278/action/topic#284278
Time
Originally posted by: CO
...I really don't revisit them years later unless they are on cable and I am channel surfing. But when it comes to popping in a DVD, I can watch BTTF, SW, ESB, Raiders, Jaws endlessly cause they have that magic everytime you watch them.


I'm on board with that and have actually taken it one step further. I don't watch sequels to films I really love. I don't want any unnecessary images in my head, any unnecessary story. I learned my lesson with Empire and Return. I didn't want to know any more - I didn't want any blanks filled in - any questions answered. They tarnished the magic and adventure or Star Wars for me. It took me years to purge them from my psyche.

Here are some of my top movies (that had sequels) and how I've handled them. Some I learned my lesson the hard way, others were never even a consideration.

Star Wars - Saw Empire and Return, was disappointed. Saw TPM and was sickened. Haven’t seen the last two films or any SE versions of the OT.

Jaws – sequels aren’t an option.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark – saw both sequels. They’re OK, but I won’t bother with them in the future unless they're on cable late at night. I'll most likely go see the next one unless I get a thorough review and find out it's crap.

Alien – sequels aren’t an option.

Back To The Future – saw part of the second one, it sucked. Won’t bother with three.

Planet Of The Apes – saw most of the second one, it sucked. Won’t bother with the others.

Post
#284096
Topic
Star Wars Radio Drama - *update in 1st post* - completed review
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/284096/action/topic#284096
Time
I’m just three chapters into it so far. I don’t want to give anything away because there are definitely spoilable areas. The entire program is 6-1/2 hours, so there are a lot of scenes that are expanded, as well as parts that were not in the movie at all.

I will say, however, that I’m really enjoying it. It’s much more than I expected. The sound effects, music, etc. The reading is terrific. They really put a lot into it and several scenes were very emotional. Only Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels reprise their roles, but so far I’m not having any problems with getting used to the new voices. After a few minutes of each, I’m settled in and they become the character. That surprised me.

It is safe to mention one part on this board though. We’ve all seen the deleted scenes with Luke and Treadwell out in the desert looking up at the opening battle( that ultimately gets him involved in the story), then going back to Tosche to tell Fixer and Camie and urging them to go outside, seeing how he’s an outsider in the group, seeing him meet up with Biggs again, etc. That scene was nearly an entire chapter and it’s done very well. It was nice to hear it really fleshed out.

I’m listening to an hour each day. Each chapter is 30 minutes, which happens to be my work commute almost exactly, so it’s a chapter in the morning and a chapter in the evening. It will take me until sometime next week to hear them all. I’ll give a full review afterwards.

Anyway, great stuff so far. I’m out of here, fellas. Chapter four starts in a few minutes.

***********************************

*update* - April 27th. No spoilers.

Thanks to some heavy traffic and one day of bad storms, I finished the last episode on the drive home today.

It is really incredible. I can’t tell you guys how much I enjoyed it. I really looked forward to the commute everyday and had a hard time not listening to it all the way through after about the third or fourth episode. I normally ride a motorcycle to work but after 14 hours on the road coming back from vacation only a day before, I was just too fatigued to suit up and ride, so I decided to drive. I took the radio drama with me for the commute. I liked it so much, that I drove every day this week. I could hardly wait for the next episode every morning. I had the thing playing before I was out of the driveway every day.

The entire production is first rate – sound effects, music, acting – everything. I’m shocked at how deep it feels - how thorough. There’s so much more when there isn’t a two-hour time constraint. I really enjoyed the added chapters. Some of it is taken almost verbatim from the early film scripts.

I thought everyone did an outstanding job with their characters. They really get a chance to get deep into them. It goes without saying that Mark Hamill makes the whole drama, but the rest of the cast did great work as well. Ann Sachs is awesome as Leia. She brings a lot to the roll. Very emotional in spots. Perry King was a great Han. Less likeable than in the film because you get a chance to see just how smug, self-centered, and untrustworthy he really is. He’s just not a likeable guy. Brock Peters was fantastic as Vader – again, more depth to the character. Everyone else was great also.

This thing is up there with the film in my world. I enjoyed it that much. It’s a giant adventure and I felt like I was going on it for the first time. It felt far away - the universe felt endless again.

C3PX, I can’t thank you enough for bringing the thing to my attention. My Star Wars universe grew substantially this past week. I also have the published script now. I'll start reading it soon.


http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f20/stonetriple/StarWarsRadio.jpg
Post
#284000
Topic
'Kryptonite' discovered in mine
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/284000/action/topic#284000
Time
Originally posted by: Moth3r
The mineral cannot be called kryptonite under international nomenclature rules because it has nothing to do with krypton...
Aw come on, can't they bend the rules just this once?


You know how Geology Fanboys are. Probably have their own forums....


"I think we should call it kryptonite, in honor of Superman."

"Dude, it's not a mineral - it's sedimentary. Typical of all you tectonic fanboys"

"Fuck you - it was discovered in a rollover anticline on a growth fault"

"Bullshit, it clearly came from a faulted anticline"

"You're a troll anyway. I remember you from the igneous board"
Post
#283980
Topic
Don Imus and the race issue thread.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/283980/action/topic#283980
Time
Article on Sharpton

"1987: Sharpton spreads the incendiary Tawana Brawley hoax, insisting heatedly that a 15-year-old black girl was abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a group of white men. He singles out Steve Pagones, a young prosecutor. Pagones is wholly innocent -- the crime never occurred -- but Sharpton taunts him: "If we're lying, sue us, so we can . . . prove you did it." Pagones does sue, and eventually wins a $345,000 verdict for defamation. To this day, Sharpton refuses to recant his unspeakable slander or to apologize for his role in the odious affair.

1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin's funeral he rails against the "diamond merchants" -- code for Jews -- with "the blood of innocent babies" on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, "No justice, no peace." A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting "Kill the Jews!" and stabbed to death.

1995: When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy's Fashion Mart, Freddy's white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. "We will not stand by," he warns malignantly, "and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." Sharpton's National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy's are spat on and cursed as "traitors" and "Uncle Toms." Some protesters shout, "Burn down the Jew store!" and simulate striking a match. "We're going to see that this cracker suffers," says Sharpton's colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters bursts into Freddy's, shoots four employees point-blank, then sets the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno."


I lived in New York City when two of these incidents took place. I'm sorry mainstream media and the rest of America don't realize who Sharpton really is. He's just a hate mongering racist who travels around starting racial fires and keeping black\white race relations stirred up. Jesse Jackson and Spike Lee are more of the same. There's plenty of money to be made and plenty of fame to be had if they keep race relations in a constant state of unrest.
Post
#283929
Topic
Splinter Of The Mind's Eye - review and thoughts.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/283929/action/topic#283929
Time
Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
Interesting aspect, though, that anybody can simply say, "Shut down," to a droid. One, I would think that a droid would only obey his master's directive to do that.


In fact, Vader tells Luke that's why they obeyed him, because he had just become their new owner.



Funny, when I first read it, I thought to myself - that's where Lucas probably came up with the idea to further shrink the universe in TPM. Honestly, he doesn't seem to ever have an original thought in his head. Everything he's ever "created" has really just been borrowed and tweaked from someone else's work - Star Wars Origins
Post
#283918
Topic
Splinter Of The Mind's Eye - review and thoughts.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/283918/action/topic#283918
Time
Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
But obviously that plot point did not exist in any way at the time this book was written, so how exactly would Darth Vader be so intimately aware with 3PO's programming?
3PO mentions it in passing, but it's never used. It's just his usual blathering on while people are trying to have a conversation.

The book was written 21 years before TPM, by someone other than Lucas. It's a coincidence, nothing more.

Is it explained at all?

No. It's not even bothered with in the book. In fact, when Vader shuts both droids down, he simply tells them to shut down. Since they're programmed to follow orders, they just shut down. No code words are needed or used and the command is just the phrase...shut down.

Post
#283836
Topic
Splinter Of The Mind's Eye - review and thoughts.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/283836/action/topic#283836
Time
Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
I didn't read the spoiler section, but reading the opening really makes me want to read this book. According to your previous thread, this book is no longer in current publication, right? (probably because, like you said, it devalues all of Lucas's comments now, therefore he has no desire to see its existence) That means I'll have to go to somewhere like eBay to track it down, like you did. But it might be worth looking into.


I'm not sure when it went out of print originally, but I have seen some newer copies. It has a slightly different cover and says Star Wars now, but I think it's back in print.

I got my copy, in good condition, on ebay for 2.50 + 2.00 shipping. Very cheap.

Post
#283800
Topic
Splinter Of The Mind's Eye - review and thoughts.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/283800/action/topic#283800
Time
As promised, my review of Splinter Of The Mind's Eye, read while I was on vacation.

I liked it. It’s certainly from the original Star Wars universe. It feels like Star Wars. By that I mean it feels in line with Star Wars. The characters we already knew from the movie are directly continued in the book. No surprises, and some of their dialogue and responses are comfortably familiar. It differs, however, in that it’s not a deep, vast, outer space adventure. It’s a smaller, more intimate story and it takes place in one location. I can see where fans of Star Wars EU wouldn’t dig it if they were expecting an action-based, space battle adventure. It’s not like that at all. In fact, there’s almost no space travel. Just enough to start the story.

It was published in early 78, written in 77, before Star Wars became a summer blockbuster. Because it was written as the sequel to Star Wars, it should hold a position of importance in the Star Wars entity for at least one very important fact - it is proof there was never any grand vision or story beyond Star Wars. If Lucas really had 12\9\6 stories in the form of 1\2\3\4 trilogies, he would have certainly used one of them as the sequel and not commissioned someone else to come up with a story. He wrote A script and made a movie out of it. Period. No grand vision, no starting in the middle of the second trilogy, no saga, no 12 movie quadruple trilogy, nothing.

Splinter works because it’s written by someone other than Lucas – someone with imagination and the ability to move a story along without having to needlessly and poorly explain the back-story of every character involved just to come up with some sort of substance. It’s a second story about the characters we already knew – a farm boy who has matured somewhat, a beautiful princess he’s smitten with, and a bad guy that ranks fairly high in the military. They aren’t related to each other, nor were they ever (only when Lucas had writer’s block, did he sink to that level). If they had been, Lucas wouldn’t have Ok’d the story. Foster didn’t need that sort of cheesiness to create tension or suspense. He used story instead. I’m sorry it wasn’t used as the second film. It could have been done really well.

Anyway, it’s a good story, albeit a small one, and it’s worth reading if you dig Star Wars of the 70s and are interested in seeing what it could have been before Lucas started trying to get creative. There’s some interesting twists, tense moments, and a little expanding on the characters we already knew. It’s a Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia story only. You get a deeper look into her character too. I particularly liked the Temple of Pomojema portion of the book. It would have made for great stuff in a movie. I’ll read it again. Probably wait until my vacation next year – make it my annual summer adventure novel.

*Spoilers below*

I found it very interesting how many things from Splinter made it into future Lucas films. Some vague and some blatant.

The crash landing onto the swamp planet of Mimban was almost completely duplicated as the crash landing onto the swamp planet of Degobah in Empire.

The Wandrella, a giant worm with several rows of teeth all around its circular mouth, makes an appearance in Return.

Vader falling backwards, out of sight, in a light-saber battle – Empire.

Luke in a jail cell with giant aliens – Return.

The princess as a servant girl – used as a cover in Splinter, becomes reality in Return.

The primitive Coway tribe surprising\ambushing the Imperial stormtroopers with crude weapons and nets is very similar to the Ewoks doing the same in Return.

The overall story of the book – good guys (man and woman with sexual tension) racing to get thing with special power before bad guys get it and use the power for evil – is Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The ark taking the place of the crystal, the Nazis taking the place of the Empire, and Indy & Marion taking the place of Luke and Leia.

I’m sure there are others I may have missed. These are not criticisms, by the way. I just found it interesting that Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye ended up scattered all over Lucas’ world for years afterward.

Anyway, like I said before, I enjoyed it and will read it again.

Next up – my review of the Star Wars radio drama. I’m one chapter into it and really liking it so far. Maybe a week from now.


Post
#283615
Topic
My first step into a larger world.... Splinter Of The Mind's Eye
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/283615/action/topic#283615
Time
I walked in the door less than two hours ago, after just over 14 hours on the road. Man, I'm exhausted. Just surfing to unwind from the drive. I'll post my Splinter review sometime tomorrow or the next day. I liked it. Haven't listened to the radio show yet. I'll start on Monday or maybe tomorrow. Might get one of the chapters in before the Yankee game.

Later, fellas. I have to hit the sack. I swear I can still feel the car moving. May have to have a glass of whiskey - as a sleep aid.
Post
#282699
Topic
Anyone else totally disregard Leia being Luke's sister?
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/282699/action/topic#282699
Time
Originally posted by: Wesyeed
and i don't understand how you say you weren't discussing them in terms of the story when you typed these words "It's not only cheap - it serves absolutely no purpose in the story. "


"Dude", I was referencing how it didn't fit in either - the 1977 time frame of the original movie - or - the story that was written in the 70s. His ham-fisted attempt at creating story where there was none didn't work on any level. Not only did it not fit what we'd seen and been told, it had been done so haphazardly, that it just couldn't be made believable. Not only are none of the characters related - an alteration, backed by documented lies, doesn't work. It's crap writing. My whole point was that because the original story was comprised of non-related characters, that all the revisionist history there is, created or believed by whomever, doesn't make it true, nor does it make it believable.

Luke Darth, and Leia aren't related. No amount of revisionist history, lying, covering up or ignoring of 1977 interviews, DVD extra features, etc, etc, are ever going to change that for me.

When you're my age and someone tries to tell you how things were when you were a kid, and you know what you saw and read that proves otherwise, you aren't going to suddenly forget the truth and see someone else's memories and visions.


Post
#282592
Topic
Anyone else totally disregard Leia being Luke's sister?
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/282592/action/topic#282592
Time
Originally posted by: Wesyeed
I was a kid when tpm was released.


That's why revisionist history and years-later-changes-on-the-fly to the main story work on you.

No matter how hard you try, how thorough your research, how open-minded your discussions, no matter how broad your imagination - one thing you can never be, or truly understand, is someone who was there in 1977. You just weren't.

That's also why you misunderstood the point of my statement about revisionist history not working. You automatically assumed I meant story-wise because that's the only point of reference you can have when speaking of 1977-era Star Wars.

For me, the changes don't work because they can't. I was there.

Now, if you guys will excuse me, I'm two days into my vacation and reading Splinter Of The Mind's Eye. And digging it, by the way.
Post
#281783
Topic
Star Wars DVD Covers
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/281783/action/topic#281783
Time
Originally posted by: Coov
The nasty smells that a sandwich, chips and an apple could create would never be reason enough to sink to the level of a brown paper sack. It is all about going back... not "art".

And eating that lunch in the Cafetorium, sitting at the big folding tables, with the lunch box sitting upright - door opened toward you, so no one could see inside. Oh yeah, and trying to come up with trades so you could get rid of the apple and get someone's chocolate milk instead.

Great idea and execution. Glad I could be of assistance. I got a kick out of bringing my lunchbox to work so I could scan it.