Timstuff

double post

Whenever ROTJ:R comes out... If even half of these suggested fixes get put in, the movie will be way more dynamic looking than ever before. It'll almost be like watching a brand new film, lol.

There is a gap, and if there wasn't I wouldn't be a regular at a website that specializes in fan edits. However, the gap is ridiculously overblown by fanboys in comparison to what it actually is. My parents view all 6 movies as being similarly cheesy and the only real thing they complain about in the prequels over the OT is that they can't stand Jar Jar's baby talk. With fanboys though, the movies also had to pass through the additional scrutiny of not having 20+ years of nostalgia to back them up. It's not that I believe that the prequels are better than they actually are, I just accept that the original trilogy is not as grand as my nostalgic feelings for it would incline me to think.

If the prequels were as bad as people make them out to be then they wouldn't be nearly as popular. They segmented the fanbase into those who accept them and those who do not, but to most people outside of our fandom, their attitude towards all six movies is "it's Star Wars."

Also, before you jump in and say "people will buy anything with Star Wars on it," I'll point to the theatrically run Clone Wars pilot which only grossed 68 million dollars. Yeah, that's still no chump change (especially considering it barely cost them anything to release), but compared to the other Star Wars films it's pretty unimpressive that it couldn't break 100 million. People will watch what tickles their fancy, and in the case of the prequel trilogy a great many people liked them enough to push them to the top of the box office and DVD charts. Clearly, general opinion of the movies is not nearly as negative as one might think if just looking at some of the comments of the fans (and even in the fanbase the margins aren't nearly as negetive, because complainers are always the loudest).

Something I've noticed in talking with my non-geeky friends is that they find Star Wars fans to be quite amusing. Some even go so far as equating the malevolance of fans towards George Lucas as being like if Christians were constantly angry at Jesus, which to us might sound absurd, but that's because we're not on the outside looking in. To the non-fan, Star Wars fanboys are an argumentive lot who are impossible to fully please, and when we're not bickering with each other we're biting the hand that feeds us.

skyjedi2005 said:

The best answer is to decanonize the special editions and the prequels, and go back and use the original films as inspiration for new EU material.

The modern stuff comes from the bad prequel mentality.

Hell i even prefer Jaxxon the Bunny over Jar Jar Binks.

 

Jar Jar was bad enough but Hayden Vader/Anakin and dumb Padme were enough to make me want to throw rocks at the theater screen.

Any star wars projects Lucas has had a direct say in or connection to have sucked since post return of the jedi.  I mean it might sound wrong but the dude needs to be fired from his own creation since he is the problem.

To me the Zahn Trilogy was a great era for the EU.  I made me want to see more star wars films.  Instead my childhood memories were trodden upon with garbage looney tune style characters, bad cgi and even worse 1 dimensional characters and nonsense plots, and a almost deliberate break from continuity of the oot. If there was anything i could undue in star wars it would be the special editions and the prequels.  Made star wars into a fucking joke and for what to make money?

If not for the Legacy comics and Kotor series and sometimes a good eu novel here or there i would have parted ways with star wars forever because Lucas is still destroying star wars.  With the Clone Wars cgi toon, the upcoming live actions series and that awful force unleashed and its sequel.  Everything now is a branching off of the bad prequels even the EU. 

Star Wars is forever ruined and tarnished.  Its deserved legacy is compromised, if that is not bad enough the real original films are buried never to see the light of day again, ever.

Other fans probably have developed an imaginary time machine in their minds where they can go back before 1997 and unruin star wars.

Me i will never forget.  Lucas destroyed his own legacy.  Now his legacy is cgi.  lets see if that lasts 30  years or more,lol.

 

This thread should be called erase the Prequel Trilogy from Existence, that would solve the EU problem halfway already.

Have you even watched the Clone Wars cartoon, or are you basing your information of it on second hand information? I have not seen the pilot movie (I am still scared of it because it does not look like it has much redeeming value), but the show itself actually surprised me with how good it is, especially once I got to the third disc of season 1. Even though I can certainly imagine that in the movie theater the animation would have looked like poo, it actually looks darned good for an animated TV show. The last CG cartoon I saw that actually made me go "wow" was Starship Troopers, and Clone Wars was the first one since then that managed to do it. And the stories, while some of them are juvenile, a lot of them actually deal with subject matter a lot deeper than even the original trilogy delved into, which for a "kids' cartoon" is very refreshing.

This thread more and more seems to be backing up a long running theory I have: if Lucas puts his name on something, a certain portion of fans are going to automatically decide that it's irredeemably bad and denounce it as destroying their beloved franchise. Am I honestly the only one who's noticed that it's only the fanboys who ever complain about there being such a large perceived quality gap between the original trilogy and the prequels? What about that girl on TheForce.net's podcast who was a "Star Wars virgin" who after viewing the saga in chronological order actually for the most part liked the prequels better (except for-- oddly-enough-- Return of the Jedi)?

I am not saying that the prequels are without fault-- lord knows I've made up plenty of lists of all the stuff I would cut from them, and I would rather watch the Phantom Edits over the theatrical cuts any day of the week. However, I think that 90% of the fan-rage over the sequels is blown out of proportion and mostly comes from fanboys being unable to remove the nostalgia goggles when viewing the originals, and thefore percieve them as being vastly superior to the prequels to the point where the prequels are unwatchable.

The solace I can rest in is that when the next generation of Star Wars fanboys grows up, and George Lucas's son or whoever decides to make episodes 7 8 and 9 or whatever large-scale multi-media project comes next, a bunch of the kids who grew up with the prequels are going to rant and roar about how inferior the "new" Star Wars is to the six moves they grew up watching. At that point, I'll be able to roll my head back and laugh while saying "I've seen all this happen before."

"Oh I'm a pretty girl..."

Adywan, out of curiousity, what approach are you taking to reintegrating the Sebastian Shaw footage to the end of ROTJ? Are you upscaling the footage from the 2006 laser disc DVD transfer and compositing it with the HD transfer, or do you have a better source that you're using?

Way to go Vaderisnothayden, you successfully derailed my thread. Are you satisfied yet, or are we going to have to involve the mods?

Yeah, but I find your zealous insistance on being correct (despite your views being opinion based rather than factual) more than a tad bit annoying, especially since it's off topic.

Better put a leash on that dogma, it's barking too much.

It's one thing to say "I ignore them because I only care about the original 3 movies," but it's another thing entirely to dogmatically assert that the prequels are not real Star Wars movies and that the characters in them are not part of the Star Wars canon, even though according to the series creator they are. Now if you're finished venting your fan rage I'd prefer you either get back on topic or quit hijacking my thread.

You claim that the Star Wars prequels do not exist. I'd say that's fanboyism.

Well then try to remember that not all of us live in your particular version of reality.

Take a breath and calm down, dude. See that knob that says "fanboyism?" Try turning it down.

The EU passed into "atrocious quality" a long time ago. Over the last 10 years or it seems like it's been one bad storyline after another, and with all the popular characters they've killed off there's really not much left to do. Slowly but surely the EU is imploding from too much baggage and not enough support pillars, and so at this point an EU reboot seems like a pretty sure thing to me.

And I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but I don't really understand how anyone could say that they find the Darth Caedus storyline preferable to the prequels. Or the Second Galactic Civil War. Or any of the stupid, half-assed rehashes of the movies that we've been subjected to for the last 10 years (and the 90's had their share of stinker books, too).

It could be a lot better, actually. I've already touched on some of my biggest grievances with it in its current state. If they don't want the EU to end up in the same rut it's already in though, they're going to have to tie the reboot in with a big multi-media project. The biggest option would be new movies, but that seems pretty unlikely at this point due to most of the actors probably not being interested. Easiest option would be a big video game, but I think that the happy medium in between would be a cartoon series. Basically they need something firm, tangible, and most importantly, mainstream that they can root the new EU in, instead of just saying "all those old books don't count anymore, and these new ones do." They're going to make new books anyway, so they might as well reboot with something bigger to make sure their efforts aren't in vain.

He only loses his right hand in the scene.

Mace had one hand, and that's all he needs because he's a bad ass. ;)

It's either going to be a Star Trek XI/ Crisis of Infinite Earths-scale event that reverses the storyline, or it's going to be a straight retcon with no in-universe explanation or what cause the prior timeline to be undone. Multiple universes and time travel might be tired, but as a means of overhauling continuity there aren't really a lot of other options.

That's actually a cool effect, but it shouldn't be Hayden. :p

And I never noticed that we could actually see all those mechanical parts in Vader's skeleton. Doubly cool!

When I saw Indy 4, my reaction to the Tarzan part was "Was Spielberg high when he put this scene together?" There's so much wrong there that I don't even know where to start in describing it...

I'm sure that in some alternate timeline, when Luke fails it's up to Uncle Badass to come out of retirement and set things straight.

The entire Hasbro Heroes line freaks me out, and it's also terrifying just how many franchises it's managed to taint.

Note my avatar-- do you really think getting his hand cut off, being zapped, and falling out a window would be enough to take Mace out for good? If Anakin can free fall through a freeway and land on a car, so can Mace. ;)

Also, Boba Fett is so tough, that the only way to defeat him in ROTJ was by a freak accident involving a blind man. Everyone knows that he blasted his way out of there a few hours later, though. ;)

LOL, I guess it was a bit late at night when I red that so I missed it. Glad to hear it won't be in there at any rate, because Jar Jar has no place in the OT! Just putting up with him in the prequels is enough of a chore.

The expanded universe reboot thread has inspired me to do a write-up on the possibilities of a post-OT Star Wars multi-media project. There were some rumors recently that George Lucas was considering the possibility of producing a third trilogy of Star Wars films, but I am not entirely convinced of how plausible that would be (the actors from the OT are too old now to reprise their roles, most of them would not be interested, and it would be difficult to imagine a trilogy without any of the classic characters to bridge things). However, something that I do think is a very real possibility is that they could opt to do a CG television series set after the events of Return of the Jedi. Clone Wars has proven to be very successful thus far, but obviously it's not going to be on forever, so it's only going to be a few years before Lucasfilm Animation starts planning another project.

Wahtever Lucas decides to approve of for a post-ROTJ media project, I think that it should take a pick-and-choose approach towards the original EU's continuity. There are plenty of things from the post ROTJ EU that many of us do love, like Mara Jade, Thrawn, (pretty much anything created by Timothy Zahn, lol), etc. However, there's also tons of crap that if I can ever flush out of my brain, it won't be soon enough like all the annoying and unnecessary main character deaths, hundreds of new sith popping up, Jedi constantly switching dark/light alignment, the Palpatine's clones, Darh Caedus, all the catostrophic wars within the first 40 years ABY, and more. This new project, being somewhat of a reboot of the expanded universe would be able to take the good stuff and ignore the crap.

If this was a TV series, I'd like to see a loose adaptation of the Thrawn series to a degree, with Grand Admiral Thrawn being the primary antagonist for much of the series, and characters like Mara Jade being members of the regular cast. Luke would be trying to set up a new Jedi order, while Leia and Han would be involved with transitioning the galaxy from the now broken Empire to the New Republic / Galactic Alliance. All of the main heroes would be struggling to fight off the Imperial Remnant, who are led by Thrawn. A pregnancy for Leia would show up during the series, as would the Luke / Mara romance. Popular EU heroes like Kyle Katarn and Dash Rendar could make appearances, as well as the possibility of some prequel veterans like Mace Windu (maybe with Sam Jackson even providing the voicework). Other fan favorites like Boba Fett would obviously be in, too.

There's a lot of potential to be had with a new post-OT project, and I just hope they don't screw it up, whatever medium they opt to do it through, be it TV, video games, or a new set of films. Not only is it an opportunity to bring a post-ROTJ story to the mainstream, but it'd also be a great excuse to do a massive retcon of the EU and sweep away a lot of the garbage and lame stunts that have built up over the past decade. Maybe for a TV series they could even get Mark Hammil to reprise Luke's voice, seeing as he did so for the radio dramas and does a lot of voicework nowadays anyway.