Superweapon VII

I’ve never cared for the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy. And no, it’s never been due to Tolkien purism; until this past October, I’ve never tackled the original novel. Though reading through the novel (I own a single-volume paperback edition, and I’ve over halfway through) has made me like the Jackson films even less. What saves the movies are the casting, production values, and score; it certainly isn’t the direction or script, which has little of the subtlety, poetry, and wit of Tolkien’s writing.

For shits & giggles, I used an AI generator to make an image of Mark Hamill as Dorothy Gale.

Still can’t make good hands.

Posts on TFN’s Jedi Council Forums tipped me off to Bataal Bandu, a Sith belonging to a faction in opposition to Vader. Luckily, the Internet Archive has a copy of the magazine he’s mentioned in:

https://archive.org/details/IQ.Gamer.Partial.Collection/inquest.043.(1998-11)/mode/2up?view=theater

Yeah, anticapitalism’s become just another commodity.

If Disney or any of these other film studios were truly leftist, they’d be co-ops with workplace democracy, their IPs would be in the public domain, and they wouldn’t be churning out all these cynical, artless cash-grab sequels, reboots, remakes, etc. in the first place.

timdiggerm said:

JadedSkywalker said:

What did give me a double take was Kirk’s father was first officer on the Kelvin? What that was in the JJverse not Prime, in canon he was supposed to be first officer under April on the first Starship Enterprise and i don’t mean the NX-01.

You have to remember, of course, that the JJVerse timeline was identical to the Prime timeline up to the point of the Romulans arriving. So in both timelines he was on the Kelvin, it’s just that in the Prime they made it back to Earth before Jim was born and George went on to serve elsewhere.

Simon Pegg went on-record discarding that premise:

With the Kelvin timeline, we are not entirely beholden to existing canon, this is an alternate reality and, as such is full of new and alternate possibilities. “BUT WAIT!” I hear you brilliant and beautiful super Trekkies cry, “Canon tells us, Hikaru Sulu was born before the Kelvin incident, so how could his fundamental humanity be altered? Well, the explanation comes down to something very Star Treky; theoretical, quantum physics and the less than simple fact that time is not linear. Sure, we experience time as a contiguous series of cascading events but perception and reality aren’t always the same thing. Spock’s incursion from the Prime Universe created a multidimensional reality shift. The rift in space/time created an entirely new reality in all directions, top to bottom, from the Big Bang to the end of everything. As such this reality was, is and always will be subtly different from the Prime Universe. I don’t believe for one second that Gene Roddenberry wouldn’t have loved the idea of an alternate reality (Mirror, Mirror anyone?). This means, and this is absolutely key, the Kelvin universe can evolve and change in ways that don’t necessarily have to follow the Prime Universe at any point in history, before or after the events of Star Trek ‘09

https://simonpegg.net/2016/07/11/a-word-about-canon/

Imagine thinking a corporation has a leftist agenda. lawl. Just goes to show how obscenely skewed to the right the Overton window in America is.

Raiders or Jurassic Park.

StarkillerAG said:

Woke Palpatine

I can see it now. Pinkwashed stormtroopers carrying rainbow-coloured Imperial banners during Empire Day celebrations … MEGA-hat wearing chuds on the HoloNet ranting that Palpatine is a far-left alien-loving SJW who is undermining good human values.

My personal Trek canon is on the complicated side.

I generally accept the events of TOS as canon – minus such gems as “The Alternative Factor” and “Turnabout Intruder” – but not the visuals, which I think have aged terribly and look cheap/cheesy today. So I imagine the “true” TOS ships, uniforms, aliens, etc. looking closer to the ones in SNW, though I DO NOT consider SNW canon.

Harlan Ellison’s version of “The City on the Edge of Forever” supersedes the final episode.

TMP and TWOK are canon, but I’m on the fence regarding the remaining TOS films. I like them all to varying extent, even TFF, but I often feel Spock’s sacrifice at the end of TWOK was a perfect sendoff for the character and shouldn’t have been overturned.

The Early Voyages comic, along with the novels Vulcan’s Glory and The Wounded Sky, are all canon.

I haven’t read all of the Rihannsu novels, but I’m inclined to accept their depiction of Romulan culture as canon.

“Yesteryear” is the only episode of TAS I feel strongly enough about to consider definitively canon. I can take or leave the rest of the series.

I recognize TNG in broad strokes; there was an Enterprise-D commanded by a Capt. Jean-Luc Picard with a Data, Riker, etc. serving under him. But I have so many issues with the show that I only accept what’s necessary for DS9 to exist. None of the TNG films are canon.

I generally accept DS9 as canon, though not many of the elements I dislike about TNG that carried over, such as the depiction of Klingons. I’m not sure if I accept Jadzia’s death and Ezri Dax’s existence as canon.

Tobar said:

I’ve never taken “DISCO” and its spin-off to be in the Prime timeline to begin with so hopefully that points to SNW and the rest to be Kelvin after all.

I think it’s more likely DISCO-onward is its own third timeline rather than part of Kelvin, but the lunatics currently running the asylum will never fess up to that. Maybe in another decade or so…

“SW-ANH and TESB were good enough to stand by themselves. NO WAY for this
flick.”

Interesting perspective. Wish I could share it, as I no longer enjoy ROTJ and never watch it anymore, but TESB’s loose ends are just too loose for me to pretend it works as a conclusion to the saga.

This reminds me of when my family unwittingly purchased a widescreen VHS copy of the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Eraser in 1999. None of us had watched a video in this format before, and we were all bewildered at the movie being presented to us in this fashion. It wasn’t until 2007 when we finally bought a DVD player that I became accustomed to widescreen as the norm (my father, on the other hand, continued to stretch the picture to fit our 4:3 TV screen regardless of how terrible it made the picture look).

You can’t. You could message one of the mods to lock your account, but that’s about it.

The timeline for TOTJ is interesting. Ten years between Golden Age and Fall of the Sith Empire; six years between The Freedon Nadd Uprising and Dark Lords of the Sith; three years between Dark Lords and The Sith War. Taking the comics at complete face value, a ten-year gap between Golden Age and Fall isn’t at all plausible. But perhaps this is an indicator that these stories were conceived as heavily condensed retellings of historical events rather than accurate reports. Shame the creators who came after Veitch and KJA failed to read between the lines.

Willie Wanka

Spartacus01 said:

Also, the chronological order is the order George Lucas told us to watch the movies, and there is a reason for that.

Yeah, 'cause he’s a revisionist. Star Wars is the Tragedy of Darth Vader. Star Wars has always been the Tragedy of Darth Vader.

If it had been up to me, the SW Saga would’ve consisted of twelve episodes instead of Lucas’ six, with the first five covering the prequel era.

• Episode I: Prelude to the Clone Wars. Roughly similar to TPM, though the baddies would’ve been the Mandalorians, not Neimoidians. Ben/Obi-Wan would’ve been the main character. No Anakin at all.
• Episode II-IV: Clone Wars trilogy. Anakin would’ve been introduced in Episode II, and he would’ve been the main character throughout the trilogy. My trilogy would’ve diverged considerably from Lucas’, though I would’ve keep Qui-Gon/Dooku (merged into a single character) as an antagonist. Anakin would’ve joined the Sith in Episode II, but he wouldn’t have become a bona fide darksider until towards the end of Episode III. He’d probably have lost a limb or two in a showdown with Obi-Wan, but he wouldn’t’ve been put into the suit at this point. The Jedi Purge wouldn’t have occurred yet either.
• Episode V: Interlude. The Jedi Purge would’ve now been underway, probably winding down. Anakin would’ve received a lot of damage over the years since Episode IV, accumulated many scars and bionics, and worn Vader-esque armour into battle, but he’d been more like Saw Gerrera, capable of breathing unassisted. Only at the end of this episode would he’ve become the Darth Vader we know in the OT.

JadedSkywalker said:

Starcrash. I’ve finally watched a sci fi film that is worse than the Star Wars Holiday Special. One of the worst films i have ever seen, worse than At the Earth’s Core even.

This movie has a cult following, and I just don’t get it. Caroline Munro’s hot. Big whoop. T&A alone can’t elevate a bad movie to so-bad-it’s-good.

Palpatine being a young senator post-Clone Wars does conflict a bit with the picture Zahn painted of Palps in the Thrawn trilogy, which establishes him being active in the pre-Clone Wars decades. Though this discrepancy could be rectified if Palps was already using clone bodies at this point, with him possibly posing as his own son as a cover.

Alexa Davalos

[double post]

The Jedi as individuals aren’t bad (mostly). The Jedi as an institution, on the other hand…

MinchD36 said:

Tales of the Jedi is my favorite EU Comics is a shame that this story never had an animated series in the 90s i imagine it being similar to He-Man or Thundercats

Something like this, then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkxE3fKS_Js

*shudder*

NFBisms said:

Vladius said:

Unpopular opinion - I don’t like their depiction, but as depicted in the movies, the prequel Jedi that people call “dogmatic,” “flawed,” “political,” “cold,” etc. were right about a lot of things.

They can be right and still be all of those things.