Bingowings

Make Fett die because he is very drunk (replete with comedy hiccups and slurred singing).

Focusing on a core group of characters isn't universe shrinkage.

Falstaff appearing across a group of plays doesn't make Shakespeare's oeuvre smaller. It's enriching it with detail over brevity.

It is 100% fan service but fan service can be done well it doesn't have to be to the general PT level of naffness.

Adding new characters however is universe enlargement.

I just saw a few minutes of it and the idea of cutting out the force field door barrier thing worked really well.

It makes that duel pacier and less confusing.

Gods! Why was the dialogue in AOTC is so clunky!

One line stood out for hacking, When Anakin talks about being nervous about not seeing someone for 10 years he could be talking about a planned visit to see his long freed mother.

That makes Anakin feel less creepy about Padme and more human in his relationship to his single parent.

I think it's possible to imply that Qui-Gon freed her but he wasn't allowed to bring her with him or that she opts to be employed by Watto because she doesn't want to hold Anakin back.

Leaving the planet with his mother still enslaved seems weird and awkward let alone never freeing her.

An interstitial PT might work.

You could have a 0.5, 1.5 and 2.5 story with different major characters set in the spaces between the existing PT films which try to tell the same story and hopefully bend by association the existing PT films into something of interest that sort of makes sense.

You could have the Star Destroyer at the beginning piloted by a Gungan and crash onto the surface using the downed ship shot from the TFA trailer.

Just before the crash you could have Vader escape from the scene in a shuttle (presumably with Leia on board) reaffirming his hatred for sand.

He didn't get the, "I know" line either.

The first two films work because they mirror each other.

A small pod carrying a droid is launched from the hanger of an Imperial Stardestroyer and lands on an extreme wilderness world.

After successfully completing it's mission an attack is launched to take down a power reactor.

The droid is hit by enemy fire.

Waves of defender craft are launched and pick off the attack craft one by one until the remaining attacker hits the target.

Only everything is in reverse, the Imperial ship is pointing ahead, instead of a hot desert we have a frozen ice world, instead of the Rebels attacking the Death Star it's the Imperials attacking the Rebels.

Instead of happening at the end of the film it happens at the beginning.

It can't be accidental it's clearly and deliberately staged that way.

So this sort of patterning in the whole sequence of films may well be deliberate. The difference is the first two films are almost perfect films with strong acting, tight editing and astonishing production values.

The other four films are not.

I like it as is too.

I would consider adding creatures to the training sequences on Dagobah but not if it delayed the release much.

I have a slipped disc, due to the weight of my dentures and hair dye. I want see these edits before I become all wrinkle :-D

Their reproductive system being wholly evolved and lacking any technological elements could work well.

Cloning on it's own for a galactic level civilisation would be a bit of a no-brainer so it needn't be connected to Gungans as a narrative component.

I bolted it on so that the Naboo conflict could be called a Clone War (and to give Jar-Jar a slightly better origin story).

The one technological aspect that the Naboo could be guardians of is the Gungan's accelerated learning and growth.

Natural accelerated physical growth is also very plausible (on Earth very few species have childhoods as long as ours) but accelerated learning would be tricky to put down to some sort of biological mechanism.

Unless the Gungans are strong enough in the Force to be born knowledgable. Which would make them an obvious target for Jedi and Sith alike.

S&M Thursdays have a 10th anniversary?

You could have him sound like Jason Wingreen and explain it away as either a voice modulator upgrade or a mysterious man with no name has killed PT Boba and is trading on and advancing his reputation as a badass bounty hunter.

I never saw any actual character rivalry between Fett and Solo.

Solo knew that Fett was the best at what he did so Jabba would eventually hire him.

Fett takes jobs seriously.

That's the limit of their actual in narrative enmity so far.

Fett does represent a mirror of Solo. He is an outlaw, he has the cool look and the fast ship but no rebel friends. In fact he is more solo than Solo which serves as a comparison to Han's character arc.

I suspect if they knew each other personally they would probably get along reasonably well.

Here's an expansion pack on my Gungans as Clones idea.

TPM has many narrative problems.

There are plenty of references to a treaty the Queen must or must not sign but no real specifics.

The Naboo conflict has to fit in a larger galactic canvas and yet none of the major political players are too concerned.

The Chancellor wants to help but his hands are tied, the Senate are prepared to play to the Federation's tune for a while and the Jedi seem more interested in the chosen one and the return of the Sith.

Meanwhile (because of the limits of CGI technology back at the turn of the century) the Gungans look almost the same, no females in the films and seem to have an uneasy relationship with the Naboo.

Scientifically speaking (even space fantasy science) cloning alone is not complicated enough for a galactic republic capable of FTL. There has to be more to it or everyone would have a clone army in much the same way that secretly the Federation have a droid one.

Making the Gungans a clone race could be the Rosetta stone this narrative sorely needs.

Imagine a race of humanoid amphibians that have a natural lifespan of about 20 years.

They could have the capacity for a degree of civilisation but not progress much. There wouldn't be the time to pass on enough knowledge.

If they were discovered by an advanced race that gifted them with the knowledge to not only reproduce via cloning but also the maturation and programmed learning techniques it would cut years of growing and learning out of a Gungan's life. Allowing them to have a full 20 years as an educated adult. They could build cities under the sea and they would venerate their alien benefactors as Gods. Conventional reproduction may be considered taboo and they may banish any hatchling to the surface where they would be denied programmed learning.

The Naboo have for centuries guarded the planet's secret with a small military force so as to not draw too much attention to their role. The Chancellor knows but can't make too much of a noise should the galaxy go into a clone arms race. Some of the Jedi see Naboo as a potential flashpoint and may have access to some of the history of the world and it's alien visitors. But with so much of what the Jedi do and did shrouded in myth not everyone on the council believes the stories. Master Dooku does and when his former pupil is killed he leaves to seek his own answers.

The Gungans are resentful of the Naboo because they feel the Naboo are outsiders keeping them from making colonies on other watery worlds. Even though doing so would make their secret obvious.

The Sith know something of the history of the place too, they place one of their number on Naboo and he elevates himself to the role of Senator for that sector of space. A full on armed attack would proliferate the technology too widely. The chaos would bring down the Republic but building the Empire would be more difficult.

The treaty would transfer guardianship of the planet and allow the holder rights to study Gungan society and learn how they pass on knowledge so quickly. Something Palpatine/Sidious wants for one side of his manufactured Galactic conflict.

He knows if the Feds win he gets the treaty, if the Feds lose the grateful Gungans will give him the technology. This is how the Sith work by engineering situations where they can not lose (until they do).

So TPM would become a war on a planetary scale but of Galactic significance enough to be remembered as the first Clone War.

With the Gungans assistance the Republic make the Clone Armies that will go to war again.

Ergo Obi-Wan and Anakin both fought in The Clone Wars and TPM gets a richer backstory.

Thankfully we have points where this sort of slant on what is seen onscreen can be tweaked.

The crawl can be re-written, the Gungans and the Feds mouths don't sync too much to be a problem with when replacing dialogue. The droids have no mouths. Senators and Jedi could be added to scenes and drop small nuggets of exposition around the PT.

It might work.

As always this is a free idea that anyone can play with adapt or ignore as they like.

Tough crowd.

One line which is worthy of hacking is VADER: "Have you found any droids?"

You could run this line throughout the R:OT and change the last word with whatever James Earl words you can find.

eg. "Have you found any shoes?"

"Have you found any American Dollars?" etc

^RIGHT PHOTO!

TMBTM said:

We don't know if Solo is married. I hope he is not and that Leia is married to someone else. That would be a way to still make their relationship interresting without too much focus on them.

It does seem with this and the Clone Wars series we are seeing some of what many of hoped the PT would have been like.

Suited Vader hunting down Jedi was sorely missed in the films and yes I too get a hint of Ralph.

The oldster Clones are rather sexy :-D

If the Gungans are all clones (other than love child Jar-Jar) the TPM battle could be the end of the Great Clone War and their gratitude to the Republic and the passing on of their cloning techniques could be the beginning of Clone War 2.

I was directed to read Warb's post about his father (I have him on ignore at the moment) mentioned here on a feature suggestion thread.

I replied here because I the only time I've posted on off-topic since Christmas was in anger over nonsense written about the minority sexuality I just happen to have. I'm trying to avoid confrontations of that flavour by not posting there though I confess to be not entirely successful. That one post happened after the one shown here.

It sort of illustrates the potential of what I'm proposing here, essentially a partition of the General Chat section allowing for the current un-moderated and previously existent moderated form of Off Topic discussion.

What I was suggesting was that should I see a thread heading post that seems to belong in another thread I could link to the thread in my head while reporting it.

For example

If someone were to make a new thread about what they hate about the EU I could notify a moderator that there is already a thread covering that topic and point them in the right direction by providing a link to where I think it should go.

The end decision being the moderator's,

natch.

Not meaning to be rude but you are using the word franchise incorrectly.

I think the word 'series' or 'projects' make more sense.

To paraphrase Leonard McCoy MD : you can't be franchised to do a legally dubious thing!

Your edits do sound interesting though.

I'm glad of this thread existing and would extend it to include other craft like the Star Destroyer and the view from various other windows (like the Emperor's tower).

We now live in an age were cameras a sufficiently small enough to fit inside reasonably small scale models to answer these sorts of questions.

We can also model these situations in computers.

TV's Frink said:

The worst thread here continues to get worster...

Our cruisers can't repel blusher of that magnitude!