CP3S

Mithrandir said:

I wander if this sort of reveal will have any input in ady's version of PT...

 

Reveal? There was nothing revealed. Fans have known all of that stuff for as long as I can remember, and those things are part of what made the PT so very disappointing to us. It seemed like a really cool story, and we waiting so many years to see it, then it was nothing like we expected. Not being like we expected would have been totally fine, maybe even a really good thing, but it was done really poorly, and established continuity from the first films was ignored and forgotten.

The only part of it that was new to me was Lucas saying that Yoda doesn't fight. Between being a wise sage and making statements like "War does not make one great", I think most of us just assumed that he doesn't fight and that he'd just use the force to protect himself if it came down to it. It is nice to hear young George agree on this, though.

Mostly off topic, but an interesting somewhat related mention: There was an old animated chess game called Star Wars Chess, Yoda played the role of the white Rooks. Anytime one of the white Rooks/Yodas captured a piece, he'd use the force against them. For example, white bishop taking black pawn would be a Stormtrooper pointing his gun at Yoda, and Yoda waving his hand and saying, "Backwards is your gun" which caused the Stormtrooper to flip his gun around shoot himself instead of Yoda. To take out the black rooks, which were AT-ST's, Yoda would levitate it into the air and use the force to squeeze it into a ball, if I remember right. Hardly canonical, being a silly chess game for Star Wars fans, but I played it when I was fairly young and I think it went a ways into shaping my perception of how Yoda might go about a fight. I mean, when you have the ability to lift space ships out of swamps with just your mind, why use a stupid laser sword?

Come, Mister Yodaman, tally me banana!

Lucky bastard, looking down on us from up north, surrounded by all those sexy Detroitian nerds...

Let us know how it goes/went.

DuracellEnergizer said:

I should clarify - I've seen only two ST films focusing on the TNG characters (Generations and First Contact). Outside of those two, I've seen the first six films with the original series' characters.

Yeah, you made it pretty clear you were talking about the TNG movies the first time.

Why haven't you seen Generations or First Contact. They're both fun movies, hell of a lot better than that film in theaters right now. Having Kirk make an appearance in Generations was a little silly, but overall I really liked the Nexsus concept, even though the writers failed to strictly define the rules of how it works and kept making it do things you felt it shouldn't be able to do. And I can't complain about freakin' Malcolm McDowell as an ST villain.

And First Contact will always be one of my favorite Star Trek films. I hated the introduction of the Borg Queen and wish that had never become a thing, but overall I really like this movie.

I thought Insurrection was entertaining, but it didn't do a whole lot. And Nemesis felt like pretty much the bottom of the barrel, until J. J. Abrams came along and showed that the barrel, was indeed, much deeper than we thought.

Is it just me, or did a breath of very fresh air just gush through this thread?

Wooo! Well said, Gaff. I miss your regularness in these here parts.

Disney's marketing people have enough knowledge and skill that they know the importance of making a product look fresh.

Disney cancelled The Clone Wars for a reason, obviously they didn't feel it was beneficial to keep it going. They aren't just going to have essentially the same looking show restart just 15 years later on the timeline.

I anticipate an entirely new look and feel.

Okay, maybe we should move on to a different point of interest that hasn't been mentioned yet.

Lucas stated that the Emperor wasn't a Jedi (presumably, this included Dark Jedi, or what we now all know as a Sith). When did that change? It is revealed explicitly for the first time in ROTJ when he uses the force to undo Luke's binders.

I always kind of liked the idea of Palpatine just being a selfish politician who made himself a dictator, saw the Jedi as a threat, and manipulated one of their number into destroying them for him.

imperialscum said:

Bingowings said:

Leia doesn't though does she?

The assumption is made by both Ben and Vader that any offspring of Anakin's would be a threat to the Emperor (who knows this) because of their mutual Force strength.

For the last time now... Anakin's offspring were a threat to the Emperor BUT in sense of triggering Anakin's return. The fact is that this is what actually killed Emperor.

Exactly. That has always been my take on it. If it was a fear of their ability to use the force, then surely there were a lot of other Jedi offspring out there who would have inherited their parents' genetic Force strength that the Emperor should be equally concerned about. 

On the other hand, if Force use is a learned ability, killing all the teachers and destroying the literature should be all that is needed kept the threat at bay.

The threat of Anakin's offspring on the loose I have always taken to be the Emperor's fear that they might bring him back to the light side. Or fear that Vader may try to betray him, much like he does in Empire when he tries to get Luke to join him.

An Xbox One exclusive Halo TV series was just announced with Steven Spielberg involved.

Feels like too little too late. A few years ago, I think I would have eaten this up, but now I feel like there has been so much Halo, it is hard to get excited about any of it. Halo 4 went a long ways in quenching my thirst for another good Halo game. When Reach came out I was cautiously looking forward to it, and when I finally got to play it, it just didn't come through for me, leaving me longing for some more real Halo. I loved every second of playing Halo 4, it went a long ways in fulfilling that longing left by Reach, perhaps too far. Maybe in a way for me it was that one last fun joyride with an old fling before saying 'goodbye' and moving on.

I don't think I am at all alone when I say that Halo has lost its magic for me. If I am ever to get excited about another Halo branded thing again, it is going to have to be pretty groundbreaking, which was what made us love Halo to begin with.

So far, it is really starting to sound like all the things some of us worried about the most with the next Xbox have been confirmed to be true concerns.

My interest in getting the new Xbox is now completely gone, as used games and lending/borrowing play major roles in my justification of keeping up the video game habit. For PC games, there are ridiculously cheap Steam sales, and for the consoles there are second hand game purchases. Unless Microsoft decides to start doing something similar to Stream sales to cater to us budget gamers, then this console just doesn't sound like it will mesh at all with my gaming needs. 

This topic made me decide to watch a few Clone Wars episodes for curiosity sake. I watched the last three episodes of season four. Seems like a decent kids show. But wow, what a mess for continuity! Anakin seems like a really likeable and heroic character here. How'd he go from being as he was in AOTC, to mature and likeable in The Clone Wars, to entirely immature and unlikeable again in ROTS? None of it makes any sense.

At least with the finale they found a nifty way to get Ahsoka out of the picture to explain her absence in ROTS.

doubleofive said:

You don't have to be online constantly. You DO have to have the Kinect on constantly.

Xbox One is watching you!

Did a little searching online and found this quote from the ROTJ novel,

" We fought ... your father fell into a molten pit. When your father clawed his way out of that fiery pool, the change had been burned into him forever — he was Darth Vader, without a trace of Anakin Skywalker. Irredeemably dark. Scarred. Kept alive only by machinery and his own black will ... "

I also found that in a pre-Empire Strikes Back interview with Mark Hamill, he mentions that he was told his character's father and Obi-Wan fought Darth Vader over a volcano, and both Luke's father and Vader fall in, with Vader managing to survive. 

Ryan McAvoy said:

Although it's interesting to note that the "Seduction of power" plot element...

"(Papatine) was a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name. He subverted the senate and finally took over and became an imperial guy and he was really evil. But he pretended to be a really nice guy. He sucked Luke’s father into the dark side."

...was fully filmed during principle photograhy on ROTS. But Lucas went back in during post-production and rewrote much of the dialogue and called his main cast back for pickups, to change Anakin's fall to be about losing Padme. All of this material is sitting on a tape somewhere in the Lucas archive but I doubt it will ever see the light of day.

Ugh, I haven't seen that movie in so many years, I was starting to forget about it. No I am remembering how ridiculous the turn was.

Somewhere in the depth of this forum we have a thread discussing good characters turning bad, and whether or not it is possible for it to be done convincingly. That was a fun thread, I thought of it sometime back while watching Breaking Bad.

You start off with Walt, an easy to sympathize with character and you grow attached to him. They put him in a dire situation and make him do bad things for a noble reason. So you still sympathize. As the show progresses, his dire situation turns around, and his bad actions slowly cause him to lose the noble reason for doing them. Eventually, when you take the time to think about it, you realize Walt is just a bad guy. But you still can't shake that sympathy for him that was built at the beginning. He continues to do these bad things, but is now driven by greed and pride, rather than the intended selfless sacrifice for his family that started him off on that path. It is the best story of a fall into evil that I have ever encountered. 

I don't think it is impossible, or even necessarily that hard, to make a beloved character sink into becoming the villain. We all loved Darth Vader before, but imagine how we'd feel about him now if George had managed to make Anakin a character we loved and sympathized with as much as Luke. Instead he was just a bitch from the beginning that you couldn't wait to see Obi-Wan smack around a bit before he finally grew a pair and donned his leather suit.

It should have been the story of a good man led astray, instead it was a character who was marketed heavily as being a hero for a very young audience (who ran around with his action figures and dressed up like him) ultimately doing some very stupid, sick, and sadistic things, all the while seemingly having never made up his mind about what kind of a person he really was or wanted to be. Anakin as portrayed to us had no character to be put to question, he had no ethics or moral code. He was an immature kid in one film, an annoying jerk of a teenager in the next (where he is already committing mass murder), and a creepy conflicted psycho in the last one (who isn't sure if his mentor admitting to being evil is a big deal or not, and is easily convinced that slaughtering a classroom full of small children is necessary). Gah, that movie isn't only awful, but it is actually kind of disgusting when you think about it.

I agree with imperialscum, saying, "The Force runs strong in my family" doesn't have to mean it is hereditary. It is like saying, "Faith runs strong in my family" indicating that the family holds to religious values and are strong believers.

Anakin having been a Jedi, and now Luke becoming a Jedi, are enough to warrant the comment about the Force being strong in Luke's family without inferring that it must mean that the ability to use the Force, or how well you can use it, is somehow genetic.

In fact, that seems like a really bizarre inference to make based only on that one line.

Were there other sources for force ability being genetic, or only found in some? It must have been out there somewhere, because the EU used this. Some characters were said to be force sensitive, while others were not. Luke's Jedi Academy would look for and take in Force sensitive students, it is suggested throughout the EU that not everyone has it in them to be able to manipulate the force. Was all of that simply based on Luke's comment about the force being strong in his family? It seems like quite a stretch.

We've known a lot of that stuff long before the prequels came out. But what was the source for it? For years I had my Return of the Jedi Luke Skywalker action figure playing the role of Anakin fighting my Obi-Wan figure on sofa cushions that served as the cliff of a volcano. I've known this was Anakin's fate and what made him Darth Vader for as long as I can remember, since before I had any exposure to the EU, but why did I know this? Wasn't it in the Return of the Jedi novelization or something?

ZariusTwo said:

I know it's fashionable right now to deride Moffat and co, but I have greatly enjoyed this half-season and was bowled over by the sheer audacity and ambition of the finale....new idea and a great hook for the anniversary

Fashionable? I couldn't care much less about what is fashionable, but I do care when I find something enjoyable and entertaining or not. These new episodes have all felt dull and flat to me, not just in comparison to the last couple of seasons, but in comparison to all the new Who since 2005 (which is all I've seen). Sure, it is all "utterly naff", I realized that after watching my very first episode, but I found it enjoyable to watch, which is far more than I can say about the second half of this latest season.

I watched The Name of the Doctor and didn't feel it was ambitious at all. Compare it to season finales like The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang, which I thought was an exceptionally fun set of episodes, and it just didn't have much going on in it. It was more of a setup for the 50th anniversary episode than anything else.

I have never liked River Song that much, but found her appearance my absolutely favorite aspect of the episode, simply because her presence reminded me of when I did find the show enjoyable.

DuracellEnergizer said:

 

AntcuFaalb said:

I finally finished all of TNG last night, including all four movies.

Now I'm depressed. :-(

I haven't seen a single episode since the early 90s and only two of the movies, so I'm in the dark here. Why are they depressing?

 

Whoa! You watch like 9 movies a week, and you've never bothered to check out all the Star Trek movies?

Imrahil said:

I hope she isn't a centerpiece, but they could bring her in for a finale or a big ratings boost.

LOL, big ratings boost. It isn't a live action TV show, it wouldn't be like a real celebrity guest appearance from an actor who got big and moved on from the show to do bigger things. I doubt having Ashoka make an appearance on the new show would bring any sort of boost. 

For some reason I've been kind of excited about this new animated series announcement. I think the main reason is I feel like Disney is actually doing something right and looking at the market. George kind of did his own thing, regardless of whether or not it was the most marketable. I for one have never had any interest in the Clone Wars series, but if it had been a Star Wars cartoon featuring things I've had nostalgia for since being a kid, like X-Wings, Tie Fighters, and other familiar things from the OT, I would have been all over it. I think there is a large currently untapped base out there that feels much like I do.

Sure, kids relate to the silly Clone Wars stuff and have a lot of fun with it, but I think they relate to the OT era just as well, and the OT era stuff has a much larger base of interest. While you have plenty of fans who can't stand the prequel stuff, I've never heard of too many fans who only like the prequel stuff and can't get behind anything from the Rebel v. Empire stories. There is a lot more goodwill associated with it, and it has a long enduring fanbase. George has forced the market to stay in the PT era by only providing new PT material. I think Disney recognizes the goldmine that is classic Star Wars.

Bingowings said:

Forget lens flares after seeing STID I'm anticipating a Star Wars film filed with Dutch angles.

Hehehee! Sexually Transmitted Infectious Disease. STID.

How does Farscape hold up today? I randomly caught an episode or two of it back in the 90's and always thought it looked interesting. Wondering if it is worth checking out today if you don't have any nostalgia for it?

Bingowings said:

Warb shouldn't feel bad.

I believe there were some people who didn't figure out the end of The Sixth Sense before the film started too.

I lived with such a person for eight years and he managed to surprise me now and then.

LOL

Warbler said:

Johnny Ringo said:

RE: Khan's magic blood and the sick girl / dead Kirk - that's why they had that awkward scene with the dead Tribble.

yes, but the tribble didn't come back to life until it after Kirk was dead for awhile.

The whole injecting the tribble thing didn't make sense, why would you do that?

Hmm, I have a vial of superhuman blood here, where should I start? Do I use some of this high tech medical analysis equipmeee- NOOOooooo! Squeegee! What's happened to you? Dear god man! I'm so sorry I failed you my little tribble friend!- ~sniff~ Hmm, now where was I? Oh yes, superhuman blood... Do I use some of this high quality medical analysis equipment, or do I... ~raises eyebrow and grins mischievously as he looks upon Squeegee's limp lifeless body~

I'm not an anime fan, and have never gotten into any anime at all, but for some weird reason I can't explain, I've always wished they'd make a Star Wars anime series or adaption of the films.

I kind of wish this new series was at least drawn instead of CG as well, but as long as they ditch the Clone Wars style CG, I think it still have the potential to be pretty cool looking.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! I am actually feeling kind of excited about something with the name "Star Wars" on it again, that was unexpected...

I do hope they ditch the Thunderbirds look of the Clone Wars.