Fang Zei

DuracellEnergizer said:

SilverWook said:

Can't the EU continue on it's merry way while the new films come out?

AFAIK, this isn't even an issue with Trek fans, and that particular EU has been around a lot longer.

Ah, but the Star Trek EU isn't canon, isn't meant to be canon, and makes no pretentions of being canon, unlike the Star Wars EU, which has had The Rod of Continuity rammed straight up its backside by elevated, anal-retentive fanboys who can never see the forest for the trees.

 It's had it rammed there by Lucasfilm. All the while, Lucas himself was saying "there is no Episode VII" and that RotJ is The End of The Story as far as he's concerned, meaning the EU stuff never really happened in his eyes....

....Except now there is an Episode VII, which means RotJ wasn't the end and, well, y'know....

Look, I've barely read anything that takes place post-Jedi. Reading wookieepedia timelines and such has been the farthest extent I've kept up with the story. Since I don't have much invested in it, it wouldn't be the biggest dissapointment if it were to be rebooted.

That said, I think it would be a bit hypocritical of Abrams to ignore Chewie's death after chaining himself to the death of Kirk in Generations as the reason for not including Shatner in the new Trek movies. It would also be kind of a dick move on the part of LFL and Disney to just go "Hey, remember how we killed off Chewie and it was a really big deal? Well, we need to maximize our profits on these new movies, so, guess what? It never happened! Sorry!"

To me, whether or not Chewie is in the movie has absolutely zero bearing on how good the movie will actually be.

As has been stated in this thread by myself and others, hopefully we'll find out soon.

timdiggerm said:

All they have to do is not include Mara Jade, and there goes another chunk of EU.

 Well, that shouldn't be too complicated because (spoiler, I guess) she was killed off in the books.

See, this is a good example (to me, anyway) of how they could take the "constrainments" of the post-RotJ EU and use it to do something interesting. I can't help but think of JJ's Star Trek. Han Solo's relationship with his nephew could be like Christopher Pike and Kirk. Luke could be the shadowy Obi-Wan/Spock character who's out there and Ben eventually bumps into him. All I'm saying is that it makes for an interesting dynamic.

I meant to comment a couple pages back re: continuity.

It's my prediction that we're not gonna see any EU reboot happening, mainly because "the big three" are still alive and well in the books. Also, Luke's son is in his 20's now, pretty much perfect timing for a young actor to step into his shoes. I can understand the potential complaints of Chewie not being around, but I think that would be coming from a place of nostalgia. If anything, it might actually force Abrams and Kasdan to get more creative with writing the story.

An EU reboot would also be a huge slap in the face to all the fans who've made the company millions of dollars by continuing to buy the books. It could result in the exact kind of backlash Lucasfilm is trying to avoid.

As for Chee and Hidalgo's new task force, I think the "canon/ not canon" dichotomy will only extend to future stories, not the existing EU.

All of this continuity speculation is exactly why I hope someone out there gets their hands on the script sometime soon so we can finally know one way or the other. The script is supposed to be done by now, right? At least a first draft from what I heard.

The store I rented the OT movies from was originally a West Coast Video that opened near my neighborhood in the early nineties. It became a Forbes and then a Potomac Video before moving next to a smaller space in an adjacent strip mall and then closing.

Potomac video had several locations around the DC area. By complete coincidence, I now live only a few blocks from the last remaining location.

The last time I saw a Star Wars movie on the big screen (RotS) was at the historic, single-screen Uptown in DC. It was the only theater in the area showing Star Wars on May 25, 1977.

They converted to digital in 2010. For 3D movies they usually alternate 2D and 3D showtimes. I'll probably end up seeing Episode VII there at the midnight opening, unless that particular screening is in 3D.

I remember seeing the clip of Sacheen Littlefeather at the '73 Oscars and thinking how Leia-like she was. George would've just been writing or about to write the first draft of the movie at that time, so I wouldn't be surprised if it had some sort of influence on him.

If there's any merit to the rumors of Abrams doing tests to try and recreate the look of the film grain from the OT, then I would hope and expect that level of fetishization to extend to all other aspects of the cinematography as well.

So, if they're to stay as close as possible to the look of the OT, we should only see a flare whenever there's an explosion. It should look unintentional, as it most likely was in the original films.

Bingowings said:

I just wish someone at Disney would activate the Farscapestarwarcrossovermattron.

Y'know, Chris Pine as Kirk in that first Trek movie always reminded me of Ben Browder as John Crichton. Abrams and Mindel's camerawork even reminded me of that show, the way we'd fly and swerve through the hallways of the Enterprise. Pretty much everything about the "Numb Tongue" scene practically screamed Farscape to me, to the point where I'd be surprised if Abrams had honestly never seen the show.

Also, just making sure:

Unless I missed something, Disney only ever bought The Muppets, not the Jim Henson company as a whole. The creation of a Farscapestarwarscrossovermattron device, as awesome as that sounds, is a pipe dream.

TFN is the darkside of being a Star Wars fan first and a movie fan second. I stopped posting there the moment everyone lept to Lucasfilm's defense after they announced they were putting 1993-quality transfers on frickin' dvd. Only a few months later, and just a few weeks after said transfers-on-dvd streeted, I stopped lurking here and started posting.

Also, they're not really competing with each other since Bond is hitting a whole month before ep7.

The real head-scratcher is the Bad Robot-produced M:I-5 hitting within only a week or so of Star Wars. Some people are theorizing it's because Paramount expects Disney to push it back to May of '16. I've even heard the wild theory that the studio bosses know something the rest of us don't and that a December '15 date for Star Wars is only there to keep the shareholders happy until the time is right to announce a new date.

I've ranted about this before, but the blu-rays of Aliens and Evil Dead are not those films' theatrical versions as far as I'm concerned. The directors just couldn't help themselves and had to digitally erase things that were visible in the original release.

CO said:

I have always said if Lucas would have just changed a few special effects in the OT movies, fans like me would still be on his side. 

I only got mad when he started tampering with scenes:  Greedo shooting first, deleting Sebastian Shaw from the force ghost, and Jedi Rocks.

Even though I still prefer the OOT versions, I wouldn't have complained as much as I do now, and probably would have just lived with the SE if he just updated effects.

 

Didn't realize I posted in this thread in October 2005.  Oh well, atleast I have been consistent:

CO said:

Kinda agree with everyone, if it was just effects, I don't have a problem with it. But when it comes to additional scenes, or change/editing a scene, it is insulting, and makes me want O-OT even more. Lucas could have just really updated the effects in the original Star Wars, and slightly touched ESB & ROTJ and we all would have 'lived' with these SE Editions. But again, Lucas has miscalculated his original fanbase.

 

 

This kinda/sorta is how I feel, although what you described would still - for the most part - be the SE we actually got, simply minus the story changes like Greedo shooting first, etc.

If the '97 release had been nothing more than a true restoration of the films, we wouldn't have complained. Unfortunately, as KilroyMcFadden pointed out, George's SE kinda went hand in hand with his plans for the prequels. I should clarify that it's not the story of the movies that bothers me so much as the fact that George wrote the screenplay all by himself (okay, some help in that department on aotc) and directed the movies instead of hiring three new directors.

I've always thought it would be an interesting expirement to watch the theatrical cuts of all six films and see how well the PT blends with the OOT.

AntcuFaalb said:

Laserschwert said:

bkev said:

They were pretty prevalent in Super8 and didn't detract from how much I love that film

Granted, with "Super 8" he mimicked "Close Encounters" both in style and tone, and CE was FULL of lens flares, so that was pretty spot on (no pun intended). Generally Spielberg used them a LOT in his most iconic movies, and they never bothered me a bit.

Isn't the difference that JJ had to digitally add them in for Super8 whereas CE had them because that's the way that real-film Panavision cameras worked back then?

Hmmm? It was shot in the exact same format (anamorphic panavision). I would think the flares in Super8 are all in-camera.

Anyway, to be fair, there are some subtle (and probably unintentional) lensflares in the OT. The shootout in the detention block of the Death Star comes to mind.

Wasn't JJ's lensflare obsession pretty much limited to his Star Trek movies? I remember a line on the audio commentary about his idea being "the future is so bright you can't contain it." I don't remember there being much lensflare in M:I-3.

The big difference is that today's record-breakers seem almost manufactured to be record-breakers. They're the most expensive movies usually, whereas Star Wars was (relatively) low-budget. The Dark Knight and Avatar, while both risky and innovative, still had the full financial support of Hollywood behind them. If you adjust for inflation, Star Wars would cost around $50 million today. If you adjust to 2005 dollars, it would be just a little more than Serenity's $40 million. Has anything in the last eight years with that low of a budget really burned up the box office to Dark Knight / Avengers / Avatar levels??? That first Hunger Games movie comes to mind, but even that had a built-in fanbase from the books.

While that's a valid concern, I think Super 8 showed Abrams isn't all shaky cam and lens flares. He mimicked 70's Spielberg pretty well in that movie, and these rumors about how he's trying to get the look of the film grain just right for Ep7 say to me that he's trying to make a movie that feels of a piece with the OT.

I see Abrams going back to the original 1977 film just as he went back to CE3K era Spielberg with Super 8. That means exploring the potential of a story set in that galaxy far, far away. We didn't see a lightsaber until a good half hour into ANH, and we only saw them used twice more in that movie. Han Solo's role as surrogate for the skeptics in the audience provided a great dynamic for the other characters to play off of. Plinkett really hit the nail on the head when he pointed out how hard it is to describe the PT characters without simply stating their profession.

There's a great 15-part documentary, made just a couple years ago, that TCM has been showing another installment of every Monday called The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Mark Cousins wrote, directed and narrated this amazing history of - what else - motion pictures, going all the way back to Edison and the Lumiere Brothers.

Empire is randomly referenced about 48 minutes into the very first chapter (the scene between Vader and Ozzel is given as a good example of the 180-degree rule from sixty years after it was first used) and then again, halfway through chapter five, talking about Lea Brackett's contributions to the Noir genre and how Luke finding out Vader's his father was a very noir idea in a very mainstream movie. Both instances could've been using the '04 master but I can't really tell since neither clip had changes (and my memory of the different color timings is spotty).

Chapter eleven, about pop culture exploding around the world in the 70's, covers The Exorcist, Jaws and then Star Wars in the last few minutes. The crawl is the '77 version, and the rest seems to be taken from the GOUT as well, so they must've cropped it to 16:9.

The entire 15-part series is up on Netflix, so if anyone has access they can give their opinion on where the clips are sourced from.

OneCentSky said:

I can live with a special edition that restores the image substantially but keep the original special effects (which means no CGI at all), and please give Boba Fett his original voice back for Empire and Jedi.

What you're describing isn't a "special edition" (which makes it sound like some sort of luxury), but what the vast majority of movies made since the time of Star Wars - and many from the decades preceding it - have recieved. George's "special edition" mistook alteration for improvement.

Well, that was a random spam bump, but this is something I've been wanting to comment on anyway so here goes:

Now that Disney's set a December 2015 release date for Episode 7, anyone else wanna bet they put out a remastered OOT on blu-ray that September?? It makes too much sense for them not to. At the very least, I would bet we're gonna start hearing rumblings and rumors very soon of how Disney plans to handle an OOT release. There is of course the matter of Fox still owning the distribution rights, but that can be worked out. If George signed away everything on his end, that's all that really matters.

How and when Disney chooses to release it is up to them.

My ultimate point is that it's not so much about "if" as it is about "when" and, more importantly, "how." While we all seem to have our own, individual ideas of what we'd want to see included, we can all agree that the OOT should be given the most thorough restoration possible. I've read so many stories, articles and anecdotes over the years that it's become hard for me to separate fact from fiction regarding the OT film materials.

This seemed as good a thread as any to post in, since I think our focus now should be in making sure Disney does right by the films.

I was hoping - perhaps naively - that Ep7 would be made at the same pace as the original film, which started shooting in March of '76 and was in theaters just fourteen months later.

Abrams started shooting Into Darkness just sixteen months before its release, but we keep hearing about a Spring start date for production, so maybe fourteen months was a stretch.

I think if we had it our way, Abrams and Kasdan would continue to work on the script for one more year, principal photography wouldn't start until March of '15, and Disney would release it in theaters May of 2016.

Oh, and they'd let 20th Century Fox release it in theaters purely for nostalgia ;)

Honestly, the December release is probably due more to lack of competition at the Box Office than anything else. Summer of 2015 will be a much different beast than 1999. The World of Warcraft movie is also scheduled for December 18, but Universal will probably push it back to March now that they'd be going up against Star Wars.

It's important to remember that Disney didn't just buy Lucasfilm so they could make money. They did it so they could make a whole shit-ton of money. Putting it out in a December landscape where they could clean up at the box office well into the winter months always made more sense than competing in a summer arena filled with the other studios' prized fighters. That's already gonna be a bloodbath without throwing Ep7 into the fray. 

Considering the budget on this thing will probably be big (200 million just seems to be the expected norm these days for a movie like this), and that Bob Iger has been promising a 2015 release over and over again, a summer 2016 release was probably never gonna happen.

Hey, we're looking at a roughly year-and-a-half schedule from the start of production to release. That's still a signifigantly tighter schedule than on the prequels, which filmed two whole years ahead of release since every shot was gonna have some kind of visual effect. Also, Episode VIII will probably be a summer release since I'm pretty sure the Avatar sequels are squatting December for the next three years after that.

http://badassdigest.com/2013/10/18/look-at-all-my-sith-darth-vader-tv-specials

Adywan started a thread about this already, but I thought it was worth posting here also.

According to this, it appears Disney is still planning a Memorial Day release for Ep7. They're yet to say anything official in terms of an actual date, but I think it's worth noting that none of the other studios have set anything big for that weekend either.

Ah, so the Darth Vader specials would be all the stuff we wanted to see in Ep3? I hadn't considered that. Something about the word "specials" just made me scratch my head and I never would've considered they might've actually meant "made-for-tv movies." I guess we'll find out soon enough.

DuracellEnergizer said:

 

imperialscum said:

Well I don't mind seeing some stuff introduced in the prequels (planets, double-bladed lightsabre etc.)

This is a tangent, but I'd just like to clarify that the double-bladed lightsaber is an EU invention, not a PT one. Lucas just lifted it for his own purposes.

 

One of my friends told me about how pissed he was in the theater when Maul turned out to have a double-bladed lightsaber. Even after I told him that Terry Brooks' novelization makes it clear Maul got the idea from reading about Exar Kun, my friend only took it as Lucas saying to the fans "Oh, yeah, I've got your expanded universe right here" (motions towards crotch). He was also disappointed not to have any mention of spaarti cylinders or Jorus C'Boath in the PT.

That TPM novelization was the beginning of the EU bending over backwards to reconcile the fans' expectations with George's vision. I think it was Cloak of Deception where C'Boath shows up at the Jedi temple. One of the clone wars comics (from '02-'05) explained that it was a crashed Trade Federation ship carrying toxic chemicals that ruined Honoghr. Zahn himself even wrote a clone wars short story around that same time.

Regarding the whole "explanation of the force in the PT and the OT," I don't see how Qui-Gon's midichlorian story to Anakin in TPM contradicts Yoda's talk to Luke in ESB. Qui-Gon simply said "without the midichlorians, life could not exist and we would have no knowledge of the force," meaning they are the conduit through which the force connects with the living world

imperialscum said:

I don't care too much about EU books and some of them should most definitely be ignored (like Dark Empire for example). But on the other hand, I couldn't care less if Chewie is not in the new films.

+1

They can (and should) "ignore" what's happened in the EU over the 40 or so in-universe years since RotJ. By this I mean they don't need to bring any of it up. If they came up with a good story with original characters and make it in the spirit of the original '77 film, it's doable. In that film we were seeing this universe through the eyes of the characters, discovering it as they did (something Abrams took to heart in Trek '09). Have Chewie's kid(s) take over his role. Boom, problem solved. I, for one, wouldn't mind a passing line ala Indy looking at a photo of his dad in Crystal Skull. I really don't see why Chewbacca himself simply must be in the movie.

But what I don't want them to do is suddenly "pretend it never happened" (i.e. a hard reboot of the EU), unless they pull a TCW and sandwich the entire ST somewhere into the years before Vector Prime. I wouldn't want them to do either of these things (reboot or sandwiching), but then again I honestly don't see them doing it anyway.

In response to SilverWook's question, it was TCW (the cgi series) that threw a big huge wrench into the continuity works of the entire existing clone wars canon at the time. This was, I believe, the first time LFL's "different levels of canonicity" excuse was used so blatantly, although I could be wrong.