EddieDean

Interesting!

And I like that idea a lot, Eyepainter.

While we’re on Maul, I wonder if it’s worth replacing his one line of dialogue? The Sith only reveal themselves to the Jedi insofar as it’s a secondary thing that happens in his pursuit of the Queen, and no revenge is had. The Clone Wars has a dearth of possible Maul lines we could work with, and it’s arguably his more canon voice since he’s got hundreds of lines in that as opposed to the single one here.

That structure feels really compelling to me. We’re focused on Padme rather than having the Jedi stumble into the plot while expecting to negotiate.

I’d maybe shift the invasion even earlier, perhaps even the first shots (after a pan down to the planet?) A landing army, troops and tanks deployed and moving into the city, [ideally extra shots of damage/oppression], a Queen sadly and silently watching, until we hear she’s been captured.

If Amidala is the Death Star plans, that opening is the Tantive 4 being captured by the Star Destroyer.

Edit: One thing you might want to do to smooth out a couple of your changes would be to have TC-14 say something like “We’ll be dropping you off soon in the swamps not far from the city.” And if you’re going with the Jar Jar as native guide/ambassador, you could reference that there too. Even “We’ve just received a distress call from our contact” if you wanted to help explain the transition into the action.

This could be a big one, should we spin this out into a new thread? I’m more than happy to have the conversation here or in another thread, but I don’t want my threads to arrogantly dominate the front page!

Go for it! Let’s get this party started.

That’s a great idea. I’ll maintain a list of suggestions in the OP. £200 a month is steep so we should really try to nail it- we should get tonally perfect sample voices first, then aim to get them run through the program in the first week, giving us the remaining three weeks for review and quick tweaking.

Oh for sure! There’s definitely a lot of merit to your idea, and it’s impressive how quickly you pulled it together!

One other thing that has me tending away from the Maul’s saber idea (and not to criticise the idea or your work, PeterPan), is that there’s a risk that we take away from the power of a couple of other ‘good guy uses red saber during an emotional time’ moments. Off the top of my head, we have:

• In ROTS, when Anakin wields a blue and red saber to decapitate Dooku, illustrative of him making the transition to the dark.
• In Tartakovsky’s 2003 Clone Wars miniseries, when Anakin uses Ventress’ saber in anger against her, in a moment that’s shot a lot like Luke hammering Vader at the end of ROTJ, showing an early tending toward the dark.
• In the Clone Wars CG series’ episode Revenge, where Obi-Wan uses Ventress’ saber in anger against a resurrected Maul, in a moment where Maul’s really goading him about the fact he killed his master, illustrative of Obi-Wan really feeling the pain of that loss.

(I compare the last one, about Obi-Wan, to his behaviour in TPM, where really he wins because he’s just had that slow, meditative moment in the pit, rather than acted in anger at the loss of Qui-Gon. In TPM, when he acts, it’s more peaceful and Jedi-like.)

The red Maul saber is a nice addition, and well done, but I feel like there’s important symbolism in Obi-Wan taking up Qui-Gon’s saber (and metaphorically his quest) at that point. They’ve had their disagreement and made up about training Anakin. Obi-Wan the padawan falls, and Obi-Wan the knight rises, inheritor of Qui-Gon’s ideals.

evansj1983 said:

Alright. About to take one for the team and work my way through all the Clone Wars episodes with Jar Jar to transcribe his lines. Wish me good luck.

edit: So far I’ve got up to (and including) S04E04 Shadow Warrior. Hopefully there’s some useful lines/sounds that can be used. I’m using Disney+ to make my notes so I can’t actually rip the BR and isolate dialogue etc. but at least this should provide a resource for those that can.

Here is the spreadsheet I’ve created.

Just have the season 6 two-parter to go. But I’m calling it quits for the night. I’m Jar Jar’d out!

This is a heroic effort! Thanks so much! I’ll add it to the spreadsheet, and cut those lines into the video too so they’re all in the same place and on hand.

sade1212 said:

Sorry, this is not relevant to TPM lol.

No no, I think you both raise perspectives which are valuable to shaping a focus for TPM! I don’t think we need to take it further, perhaps, as we’ve covered what’s explicit and what’s open to personal interpretation, but I think this discussion is still valuable to a potential editor. Here we should be thinking about themes we’d like to emphasise or downplay. I think your analysis of selfish versus selfless love, and forbidding personal connection versus permitting healthy connection, is spot on.

Ooh, I’ve spotted a nice unplanned bit of continuity. When we last saw Anakin, in my s02e06, he was in a crash that left him and Ahsoka stranded on the Lurmen planet. After the Maul/Obi-Wan centric s02e07, we’ll return to Anakin in s02e08, which opens with him visiting Padmé. In their opening dialogue, she asks him what’s going on, and he references having had to return to Coruscant via a civilian transport, because his military transport “blew up”. Nice!

I liked this quote from Dave:
“And at the end of the day, one of the questions that I guess I pose is, is that really a good thing? Is Anakin’s way of being so compassionate wrong? Because on a certain level, you have to accept that the Jedi lose the Clone War. So there is something that they’re doing that’s wrong. There’s something they’re doing that doesn’t work and that the dark side is exploiting. If anything, it’s Luke’s overwhelming compassion and love for his father that in the end overthrows the Emperor because it’s something that he doesn’t understand. So as far back as Anakin, there is a seed of an idea of love and compassion, which admittedly in Attack of the Clones, the Jedi say they’re lacking because they’ve become arrogant and very sure of themselves.”

I think that demonstrates a good middle ground viewpoint. Either way, I think there’s a valid interpretation in either direction, and as you say, it hasn’t been particularly emphasised in the movies, so I don’t think we need to wrestle over the details.

This is a good article that goes into some of it, including the video attached. And other Lucas and Filoni quotes here, here and here. But you’re right, there’s still a lot of room for interpretation in there, and certainly the genuine positives of Buddhist or transcendent beliefs are also a major factor in the design of the Jedi.

That’s really slick.

I haven’t watched over the original sources for those in a long time, and I thought that one felt natural enough.

Yeah. And thinking about your whole idea, even if the viewer is watching TPM first, and doesn’t have the context that parents can’t come with Jedi when they go away to get trained, Shmi explains “my life is here”, which implies enough to make that element of it work.

Here’s a quick little mockup of the deal just being a straightforward ‘the boy and his mother’.

There’re a couple of alternate ways you could cut that, but that’s a simple one. Music transition at the cut seems fine too.

One other idea I had, if you still want a little Qui-Gon manipulation, would be to add in the shot of Qui-Gon waving his hand (originally to manipulate the dice) as he’s saying ‘the boy and his mother’, or just after it. There you’d be implying that he’s using a mind trick to get Watto to accept.* There’s maybe a conflict there with him failing to mind trick Watto earlier. However, you could read that as Watto rejecting the first attempt because he STRONGLY wants spendable money, whereas the second attempt succeeds because Watto’s mentally WEAK to gambling, something that Qui-Gon’s now realised he can exploit. That’d also give Qui-Gon a little arc (fail > succeed) but also be a little manipulative for a Jedi - perhaps emphasising his less dogmatic side as he does something a little wrong to achieve a greater right.

*You could also split the scene of Jar Jar looking left and right around that shot, to emphasise it. He looks from Watto to Qui-Gon, we see Qui-Gon’s hand wave, he looks back from Qui-Gon to Watto as we see Watto accept. Might help tie it together.

Whoops! Fixed.

You’re most welcome! He also appears in my s03e02 The Death of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

RELEASED - S02E07 - Monsters (V2.0)

• RELEASE VERSION, now brought up to my more polished 2.0 standard.
• Our seventh episode of season two.
• Comprising the original episodes Brothers and Revenge
• Running 35 minutes.
• DOWNLOAD LINK is in the tracker spreadsheet, PM me for access.
• Note: It’s recommended that you download this before watching, rather than streaming it directly from Google Drive.

A brilliant episode, this, bringing Maul finally back into the Galaxy. We get a good deep dive into Maul’s psyche since Naboo, more of the surviving Dathomir characters, and some meaningful character work for Obi-Wan. It’s got great action, complex alliances, and builds more anticipation for what’s to come. It’s one of the big turning points in the original show, leaving the threat of Maul hanging over it, and hopefully one that’ll serve the same purpose in my edit, which is why I wanted to kick off the hints at Maul’s return as early as reasonably possible.

Noteworthy changes:

• The episode is titled ‘Monsters’ as a light reference to the prior episode ‘Monster’ (where Savage was the titular Monster’), but pluralised here because both Savage and Maul have been referred to as monsters, and they’re the focus of this episode.
• I’ve truncated everything before Lotho Minor. Dooku and Grievous’ discussion, and Savage hunting through the diner, is now in an earlier episode, to help create anticipation for this one. We don’t need Anakin and Ahsoka having dinner here either (especially because this has Ahsoka’s older-looking character upgrade).
• I’ve heavily trimmed Lotho Minor (including some further smoothing compared to v1), removing lots of wandering, snake banter, the pendant going faulty, the ‘fire breathers’ (even though they look cool) and Savage slaughtering Lotho’s scrappers. None of it’s vital. He just meets the snake, who leads him to the right place then tricks him into the trap. It makes sense for both characters.
• I’ve shifted the scene of Yoda sensing Maul to immediately after he’s healed on Dathomir, runs outside, and screams. I used an iris wipe and preserved some of the Maul/Savage audio to help emphasise that this was a powerful moment in the force.
• I’ve cut the scenes of Ventress on Tattooine seeing Savage’s bounty. The main reason for this is because she’s not yet a bounty hunter in my version of events. (This change is the most major canon impact of my restructuring.) Instead, she shows up unexpectedly (though Yoda’s implied there’ll be a suprise visitor), and it’s not a huge stretch to assume she’s felt something in the force (or seen the same transmission the Jedi did). I actually think this works a bit better, and it also makes her now-later journey to Tattooine and decision to become a bounty hunter more of a reaction to her failiure here and fear of Savage and Maul, and has given her longer to keep her resentments before she starts to soften.

Onward to s02e08/09/10, the Geonosis trilogy (formerly the Geonosis pentalogy), where we finally see why there’ve been no major Republic/Separatist conflicts this season. After that I’ll revise the workprints for Monsters and Attachments, to complete the season.

Respectfully, Vladius, that definitely was intentional. Both George Lucas and Dave Filoni have said in interviews that the Jedi dogma seen in the Prequels was deliberately intended to be taken as a negative, and a factor in Anakin’s, the Galaxy’s, and the Jedi’s fall. (Whether or not that idea successfully landed for audiences is up for debate.) Dave’s explicitly said something along the lines of “that’s why they live in a literal ivory tower”. And the elements of TLJ where Luke criticises the dogmatic past of the Jedi order were apparently a feature of George’s original ideas for the sequel trilogy which he sold to Disney.

That said, whether or not we choose to emphasise or retain those intentions in a fan edit is of course entirely up to the editors.

I’m not posting that for conflict, just for information.

Speculating now, I think he intended that Qui-Gon was supposed to represent the first challenge to that dogma (hence his lower standing in the order), Yoda to represent entrenched dogma fading as he realises its flaws near the end of the Clone Wars, Obi-Wan’s and Yoda’s meditations (in life and as force spirits) to represent their coming to understand an alternative existence within the light side of the force, and Luke as the intended inheritor of the new order.

Anakin would have been the first inheritor of the new Jedi if Qui-Gon hadn’t been killed, causing the tragic cascade that led to Vader, delaying the light’s revival. Luke was the new hope, delayed in his path by the presence of Vader. After Return of the Jedi, Luke sought to rebuild the order - already a better one based on the limited information he had, and under the guidance of the force spirits - but in his attempt to rebuild what was lost he still incorporated some of the old dogma, as we’ve seen recently. The tragedy he caused his own family with Kylo Ren and the failiure of his new/rebuilt order sent him, like Yoda and Obi-Wan, into doubt and exile, before the discovery of Rey (and his reconnection with Yoda) helped her forge what will follow.

The only force spirits we’ve seen have been those Jedi that challenged or questioned the order’s dogma, which seems deliberate. (And, for me, makes the final moments of Rise of Skywalker Ascendent all the more powerful, continuing that thread into Rey.)

It also serves to take one layer out of what is originally a complex three-layer gamble.

Could you maybe skip that bit?
Qui-Gon: “I’ll wager my new racing pod against, say, the boy and his mother.”
Watto: “Hmm. Well, uh-”
[Cut to Jar Jar watching them to cover Watto being closer in the next shot]
Watto: “Deal*. But you won’t win-a the race, so it makes little difference.”

*(Could source this from their original deal. For a moment in that line above he’s got his back to the camera.)

Ooh, that is a good one! She’s freed by the time of AOTC so that works, you’d just skip the scene with Watto and assume Anakin knew she was living with the Lars family. You’d also have to make the deal scene work with Watto in TPM. I wonder if Anakin can reference it in AOTC, perhaps using a line like “Attachment is forbidden. If Master Obi-Wan caught me doing this he’d be very grumpy” as they approach Tattooine. Worth investigating!

Thanks! Generally, all of the VFX/SFX is isolated from the music in TCW (with a few exceptions in earlier episodes) so it’s likely to produce a decent volume of workable stuff.