Servii

I’m really happy to see this.

It’s weird, looking back. I grew up with the Special Editions. I have fond memories of watching them on VHS as a kid. At the time, I wasn’t thinking in the long term or wondering about what would happen to the older versions. The Special Editions were just a neat novelty, and they hadn’t started to look dated yet.

In hindsight, I can still appreciate them in an “experimental tech demo” sort of way, since that’s basically what they were. With those versions from 1997, you can tell that a lot of time, effort, and resources were put into them, especially for ANH. But they should’ve just remained as a neat alternate version put together for the 20th anniversary. The versions that came after are Frankenstein edits, with changes that are a lot more phoned in. But the main issue with those later releases is that they removed the “special edition” label and abandoned any pretense of being alternate versions.

It is weird to think that the Special Editions have now been around longer than the OT was in 1997. The novelty of the mid 90’s CGI has definitely worn off.

That’s something I wondered about recently. In ANH, the fact that officers are so dismissive of Vader and his bygone religion implies that most Imperials had very little regard for the Force or its users. The whole culture of the Empire is very mechanized and anti-spiritual, which isn’t what you’d naturally expect from a faction led by a Force user, even an evil one.

I think the decision to make him a Force-using dark lord came during the writing of Empire. I think it was because they wanted to have a big bad that Vader would kneel to, and the only kind of character where it would make sense for him to do that would be another, more powerful Force user.

Those look pretty good. I was wondering when they’d be doing trilogy box sets for 4K.

“They’re cloners. Damn good ones, too.”

JackNapier said:

I never thought it made sense for Anakin to be mentioning Leia while he’s dying.

I disagree. He’d probably be feeling regret over his treatment of Leia, and over the fact that he’s going to his grave without ever having been a father to her. She’d at least cross his mind as he’s dying.

jedi_bendu said:

Not sure if there’s a better thread for this, but author John David Wolverton, aka David Farland or Dave Wolverton, is currently in the hospital - presumably with a life-threatening illness. I saw this via the Wookieepedia twitter page.

John did a LOT of writing for Star Wars from the mid 90s to early 00s, including The Courtship of Princess Leia and several short stories for the Tales of books, as well as The Rising Force and The Hidden Past in the Jedi Apprentice series.

May the Force be with him.

I’m sorry to hear that. I recently read the Tales books and really enjoyed his writing. I wish him the best, and hope he’s able to beat this and recover.

The Star Wars Purist said:

Pakka said:

“Lapti Nek” and “Yub Nub” rulez, “Jedi Rocks” and “Victory Celebration” droolz.

I second that.

I third that.

Star Wars was never meant to be cute

R2-D2 was definitely meant to be cute.

This is really interesting. It could be like a modern version of the OT radio dramas.

Fang Zei said:

Anyone else remember when Labyrinth of Evil came out right before the final episodes of the Tartakovsky clone wars and we basically got to see the EU contradict itself in real time?

I don’t see the problem.

Restore Han shooting Greedo first, but at the moment he kills him, have Han’s eyes turn yellow like a Sith’s, and have Anakin’s Dark Deeds playing in the background, so that the audience knows that what Han did was very, very bad and mean and pushed him close to the Dark Side. Also, it tells the audience that they should feel bad for poor Greedo, a character we all cared about very much.

Riquendes said:

Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2003 Clone Wars series.

It is mad, fun, highly stylized, and is canon (before Disney said it wasn’t in 2012, which doesn’t mean much to me). It also feels very Star Wars, despite not being anything like it in that universe before. It is not for all tastes, but that is okay too.

I think Tartakovsky did an awesome job with the series, and is a bit of shame we had to wait until the recent Star Wars: Visions anthology series to see anything this different again.

I hadn’t thought of the 03 Clone Wars as underrated, but now that you mention it, I agree. It doesn’t get nearly enough recognition from fans these days. It really is something special.

I can’t wait to watch this. Looks really good.

“The sequels were never really going to get made anyway, unlike 1, 2, and 3, where the stories have existed for 20 years. The idea of 7, 8, and 9 actually came from people asking me about sequels, and I said, “I don’t know. Maybe someday.”

Something I noticed that George has a tendency to do when he contradicts his earlier statements is he makes it seem like those earlier statements or ideas were just made up by fans.

This is less of a headcanon and more just my child mind interpreting the films weirdly, but as a kid, I imagined that in RotJ, Luke was visiting Yoda on his 900th Birthday. Meaning he was 899 during Empire.

This is a really cool way of visualizing each movie. It’s neat how some of the films have more of a “primary” location (like RotS, ANH, and RotJ), while the others have a more even distribution of screentime.

And wow, no wonder TLJ felt claustrophobic.

Also, I’m kind of surprised how little of AotC actually takes place on Kamino. It always felt like it had more screentime than that.

Merry Christmas, everyone. And a happy Life Day, also. I hope everyone is safe and doing well.

screams in the void said:

Yeah , the Legends/canon debate never really bothered me as I remember when the original Marvel comics were kind of dismissed in the 90s and not considered worthy of " Canon " status , and then a decade or so later , they were incorporated into the EU novels and comics etc . Plus , you have the fact that though George didn’t see the EU material as part of his universe , he still often cherry picked from it , from the prequels to the clone wars and even to his sequel trilogy treatments . Which is what the current iteration of Lucasfilm under Disney has been doing a lot of as well .So I see that as relevant to this threads title . I have been making the point ,often ,as well , that the legends material is still in print and yes , a lot of it is even being re issued with newly commissioned cover art .A lot of people act like those stories were wiped from existence when that is clearly not the case .The way I see it ,with everything out there , anyone is free to follow one or the other or even mix and match to suit their tastes where it fits . There’s something for everyone and I will never complain about it . I just read/watch what I like and ignore the rest . I remember the dark times , from about 1986 to 1991 when there was hardly any Star Wars material available .

That’s a good way of approaching it. Star Wars is like a buffet. You enjoy what you like and leave the rest for others. It’s not really worth it to get caught up in which stories are canon or not, since they’re all works of fiction, anyway. The old EU’s “softer” approach to canon, with the different tiers and all that, was more supportive of that “buffet” mindset, since you could take or leave individual stories based on what you preferred. Disney canon is more monolithic by comparison, though that may be starting to change now with stuff like Visions and the KOTOR remake.

Rodney-2187 said:

So it’s fine for George to not consider the EU canon, but Disney saying the same this is a travesty. As for the new books and comics being considered canon, I don’t see anything wrong with trying to have as much continuity going forward as they can, even if it isn’t perfect.

No one is saying that. It’s to be expected that Disney would reset the EU. It made sense to do that. That’s not the problem here. The problem is that they had a chance to learn lessons from the old EU and use those lessons to create a more polished, high quality canon moving forward.

And they didn’t do that. The new canon is a mess that’s repeated many of the old EU’s mistakes in a fraction of the time. And the stubborn insistence on having every new book or comic be hard Canon, regardless of it’s quality, with no way to filter out or compartmentalize subpar stories, has been a huge mistake.

They should have anticipated that contradictions would emerge between stories, and that some new stories would end up being duds. And since the whole concept of soft canon and differing levels of Canon had been useful for dealing with that in the past, they shouldn’t have abandoned that. It was awfully presumptuous of the Story Group to assume that they could keep the new canon straight with everything on an equal level of canonicity. Even if they had tried their best, that was bound to fail. So we end up having mistakes, contradictions, and bad stories being etched into “hard Canon” status forever, with no clear way to remove them.

I’d never seen George’s quote about there never being a war between Jedi and Sith before. That’s really interesting to see. The Sith having ruled the Galaxy makes sense with what Palpatine says in RotS, but this version of events doesn’t explain why the Sith want revenge against the Jedi, or rather what they want revenge for. People would naturally assume from that that the Jedi and Sith must have fought in the past. Also, having the Sith rule “about 2000 years ago” still contradicts Obi-Wan’s talk about “over a thousand generations.”

George said he fleshed out this larger history of the Jedi and Sith, and that he didn’t get the chance to show it, but a prequel trilogy seems like a pretty opportune time to do exposition on that. The whole trilogy is about the Sith plotting revenge against the Jedi to regain control of the Galaxy, so a little bit of history and context would make sense there. We needed that more than we needed an explanation of midi-chlorians.

The old EU’s greatest strength came from the fact that was it was optional and not really canon. It meant that George had a more hands-off approach with the different authors and their stories, and that those authors had the creative freedom to shape the world and storylines in creative, experimental directions. And if an attempted story direction didn’t work out, well then, authors could course correct from that in future stories, and it’s not like the stories were hard Canon, anyway, so they wouldn’t negatively affect George’s mainline Star Wars.

As much as I enjoy much of the old EU, George made the right call to compartmentalize it as an “alternate universe” and let there be different “tiers” of Canon. It was a mistake of Lucasfilm to throw out the tier system and try to make every new material Canon. That was never going to work out.

Every time someone in the movie cracks a joke or says something funny, the film pauses and adds a clip of Robert Downey Jr. explaining the joke to the viewer.

Season 2 of The Mandalorian is one of the best things to ever be shown on a screen.

That’s a pretty intense statement. Season 2’s episodes do often have a “backdoor pilot” vibe to them with their appearing characters, which can take you out of the “here and now” of Mando’s story. While Season 1 felt more self-contained and narratively focused, with much more time spent establishing new characters rather than bringing back old ones from other material. Season 1 felt like its own self-reliant story that could be taking place in some corner of a vast galaxy, while with Season 2, the way Mando keeps meeting established characters so rapidly takes away from that feeling of a wide setting.

I’m kind of shocked that Lucasfilm would want to have anything to do with David Cage after all the bad press about him. It seems like inconsistent standards, on their part.

SilverWook said:

At least there can’t be any shenanigans with Disney/Lucasfilm offering up an SE print in exchange for that old copy the LOC has.

“But National Film Registry, are you sure you don’t want the delightful crooning of Joh Yowza to be archived with you forever?”