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gethedgical

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26-Dec-2005
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8-Sep-2006
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34

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Post
#318573
Topic
EU books: Thats it..
Time
I firmly believe that, after trying to look up some basic Star Wars stuff on wookieepedia, these books have lent far more utter garbage to the Star Wars universe beyond the original three films than the prequels. I can't even read the Zahn books, even though I liked them when I was younger. I mean, the first one starts out with Luke Skywalker drinking hot chocolate for crying out loud!
Post
#318563
Topic
70mm screening
Time
I've been wondering lately why someone doesn't just track down one of these prints and do a bootleg digital version of better quality than the GOUT dvds. I didn't realize they were that rare or in poor condition, but now that I'm thinking about it that makes sense - I'm sure few people thought to keep a copy in proper storage like that.

Someone told me that a collector offered a good copy of it on film to Lucas and he turned the guy down.
Post
#300137
Topic
How did you envision the prequels?
Time
Some friends and I are contemplating doing a graphic novel/comic or flash animation rewrite of the prequels to fit more along the lines of what we as fans would have liked to see in the prequels. One of the biggest beginning questions is whether or not to acknowledge any elements from the prequels (other than things that were obviously referenced in the original trilogy). Darth Maul, I thought, had a good deal of potential as a character, and the whole Palpatine playing both sides was a fantastic way to develop him towards the Emperor, so those are things that might be worth saving?

A few things I thought would have been there and or could have been (or I guess will hopefully be ) improved upon are:

- Anakin's age in the films should parallel those of Luke in the OT. We do not need to know about his childhood in order to understand his struggle. I never even imagined that the prequels would deal with him as a child. His journey should also parallel Luke's, but the key moment being his choice to follow the dark path. I think it might even be interesting to have another parallel where Anakin leaves his training to help his friends and ends up causing their deaths or being helpless to stop those deaths, and that moment (rather than some awful shit about his mother) being key to his doubting the light side of the force/the jedi way.

- Darth Maul, or another primary villian other than Palpatine/the Emperor/etc, should have been left to exist for AT LEAST two of the films, if not all three. Maul had 2 speaking lines, no background, no real character AT ALL. I'm imagining something running parallel to Vader in the original trilogy, someone that Anakin could ultimately destroy and open the space at Palpatine's side for him. The only thing about this is that I also like the idea of several "sith" believing themselves to be the apprentice and vying for Palpatine's favor. That, however, could get a bit too complicated and difficult to follow, as it was in the actual prequels. Anakin has no true foil in the prequels, although I guess we are supposed to believe that Obi Wan should represent that. There should be a character that Anakin is aware of, that he fights against becoming similar to, and that he ultimately finds appealing via Palpatine's persuasion. In other words - combine the characters of Dooku and Maul, and perhaps even Grevious. There were obviously things that worked in the OT and those should be the reference points for the prequels, though it wouldn't hurt to throw new elements into the mix if they are well-executed (the prequels WERE NOT).

- GOOD MINOR EVIL CHARACTERS! Boba Fett's lineage be damned... that was such a weak way to include some minor characters and connect unnecessary dots between the PT/OT. What about the Tarkins, Jabba the Hutt, etc? Wattoo? The Trade Federation? Jango Fett? There is nothing about any of those characters that was interesting, much because the dillydallying that occurred throughout the three films... they were obvious filler, and I can't think of one example of those characters improving the story.

- Palpatine as rising political star/sith lord. While I think this idea was good, there needed to be more subtlety. How could the Trade Federation not have known that Palpatine was the guy on the hologram, or nobody else would realize this? I think it could have been written better to emphasize that he was both but making a point of the importance of the disconnect between the two characters... perhaps an execution of a key character who discovers the secret?

- This one is probably going to be controversial, but either little or no Yoda. The entirety of Luke's training in the OT shows a lightsaber once - when Yoda tells him that he does not need his weapon. Why then would you show a 'badass' Yoda in the prequels with a pen light duking it out with Dooku and Palpatine? Yoda's presence in the OT, that of the 'mysterious stranger', whose origins and going-ons remain a mystery but whose wisdom changes the course of events, is something that I think is incredibly compelling and strong. I always imagined Yoda as living on Dagobah and promising Jedi going there to learn with him. Or maybe he shouldn't even have that background - just remain a mystery that is relegated to the OT, or perhaps only referenced by Obi Wan, or shown only interacting with Obi Wan. His whole presence in those action sequences, in the Jedi Council, and as a major speaking character diminished his presence in the 6 films a great deal. It was almost laughable, especially with the completely different look across 3 movies.

- Beyond Yoda, there was no real reason to include C3P0 or R2D2, and it just contributed to fucking up the continuity between the trilogies.

- I'll never buy the justifications for the technology in the prequels looking newer than the OT. They should either look similar or predate the OT.

- Humor. The prequels were a humor vacuum of poor dialogue and slapstick b.s. Is there anything from the prequels that was actually humorous and not a cheap gag or poorly written one-liner?

- Believable love story. IT ISN'T THAT HARD TO DO! Han and Leia was almost accidental in its simplicity and believability, so why would it be so difficult to write something that would show a conflict for Anakin? Keeping the whole thing hidden from the other Jedi seems key, and perhaps even Anakin's love interest keeping her pregnancy secret from Anakin as he begins to go down a dark path should be key.

- More development of other Jedi... not necessarily a Qui Gon, but we don't learn ANYTHING about the other Jedi Council members, and yet we're expected to care when they are brutally murdered. I thought that sequence could have been very powerful had it involved characters whose names I could even recall.

- The Clone Wars. I'm not really sure how this could have been approached... I thought it was really haphazardly integrated into the already shoddy plot that Lucas had built up, so this needs to be treated differently. I like the idea of not making it the main conflict and arch, but what better way to show a republic turning into an empire than war. I don't like what the clones ended up being and their origins AT ALL, so some serious rethinking on this topic would be good. I always kind of liked Zahn's crazy fucking jedi clone from that otherwise blah book trilogy, so perhaps something along those lines?

- Obi Wan. Obi Wan. Obi Wan. In my mind, I almost feel like Obi Wan should have been THE main character of the prequels... with his course as a senior Jedi paralleling Anakin but ultimately choosing good over evil (with plenty of tension and conflict, of course). We should feel his anguish when he realizes that Anakin has turned.

- The Turn. The turn should not have happened in a 2 minute scene. Yeah yeah, Lucas tried to plant the seeds of that in the other films and in the beginning of the third episode... It wasn't believable AT ALL. There was no resistance on Anakin's part, no real tension or conflict...

I'm skipping a lot of details on the last couple (I should probably do my actual work), but you probably get most of the points...
Post
#300133
Topic
Helping someone with a childhood Star Wars memory
Time
This is reposted from another board:

"VanEck posted this on Oct 29th, 2007 at 09:26:11 am
I fancy myself a hardcore Star Wars nerd... but I know there are a few who surpass my knowledge of the Force on this board.

Do any of you know what video/clip from 80's features Darth Vader chasing a boy on a Subway? It is a very short clip, and there is a very groovy tune in background. I do not recall any vocals, but I was like 5 years old when I saw it, so I could be wrong. Whatever this video is, it had a big impact on me as a kid, and I always associate Subways with Darth Vader to this day.

I have never seen it again since, and I have started to think I was crazy... until today i stumbled upon this lonely thread: http://ask.metafilter.com/31435/What-80s-music-video-featured-Darth-Vader

Apparently I'm not the only one who has seen it... this guy described exactly what I remember seeing once. He seems to think it was a music video of some sort. Personally, I thought it was something I saw on HBO once, in between movies or something... just some weird random stand alone short. No one seems to be able to provide him with an answer though =/"

Does anyone know what this was/is?
Post
#261363
Topic
BSG
Time
I still think this is one of the most fun shows on television (although I don't watch a whole lot) and probably one of the best science fiction shows ever created.

There are some points that I wish they would improve upon... spending a season and a half to create a particular situation (that being two battlestars, people colonizing a planet, and the occupation by the cylons), then spending the next season undoing all of the developments that occurred in that past season and a half (destroying the Pegasus, rescuing people from New Caprica, the relationships that happened on NC falling apart, etc) for what amounts to killing off the Colonel's wife just feels tough to swallow. Why didn't they just keep the Pegasus and its crew around? The conflicts with the Admiral could have gone on for at least half of the season, instead of 2 or 3 episodes. Then they kill off the next two captains of Pegasus in one episode each just to put Lee in command for 5 more, after which he's back to KAG again. It makes you go WTF sometimes.

Its also hard to recover from giving people the best moment of a season within the first two episodes ("the maneuver" being this season's definite mind-blowing moment).
Post
#261248
Topic
BSG
Time
Really? The first mis-step? I'm pretty sure that already happened in the middle of season 2.5 with the Apollo/prostitute, the pro-life/pro-choice, and the mysterious cylon blood cure episodes! Oh and the one with the hostages where Billy gets killed.

The last two weeks were kind of weak, but at this point I'm expecting the mid-season slumps. The biggest problem I see with it is that they're introducing conflicts and resolving them within 1-3 episodes, instead of letting things simmer and build tension. Seasons 1 and 2 were all about that, and its a little disappointing to see the writers running out of ideas and struggling with stuff to happen that doesn't involve cylons attacking them. That said, these last handful of episodes are WAY WAY WAY better than any of that b.s. I mentioned above from 2.5.

And its still one of the best shows out there!

The new time change is EXCELLENT. Friday nights are so f-ing hard to watch for me and my friend who actually has sci-fi. Hopefully there won't be a conflict with Sopranos and we can watch them back-to-back.
Post
#261243
Topic
What did the Prequel Trilogy need?
Time
Was Boba Fett really the 'bad guy' in Empire? He had two or three scenes. This goes back to the overblown importance placed on Fett by some fans and, as a result (and I think far more unfortunately), Lucas. Jango Fett was a terrible 'bad guy'. There were about zero reasons to include him or Boba Fett's backstory in the prequels, and certainly little reason to make it a major plot point for an entire film.

Back to Darth Maul, I think what the films lacked was a consistency in the villian department. Three separate villians who 'look cool' (maybe not so much Count Dooku) all of whom get no character development, no sustained tension surrounding any of them, etc. I realize that ultimately the revelation of Palpatine as Sith Lord is something akin to Vader's presence in the original films, but there was something very real about Vader... Maul had a lot of potential, but it wasn't written in there at all. He was introduced, had a single line of dialogue, fought two lightsaber battles, and died. Thats IT. That is terribly weak character writing! Why not leave him this mysterious figure (with perhaps a bit more screentime to build that tension) and have more revealed into the second movie? Why not have him last all three movies, as a near-equal to Anakin who is finally destroyed by him? I mean, there are a million ways that story could've been told better. All I do is sigh anymore when I think about any of these movies and how wasted their potential was.
Post
#260646
Topic
What did the Prequel Trilogy need?
Time
With Kashyyk, I mean that it would have been a much better plot device for the Trade Federation than the Naboo garbage.

With the other comment, I don't mean telling a completely different story than what is hinted about in the OOT, but rather telling it a different way. The Trade Federation/Seperatists/clone storylines are so poorly-developed. One of the few intriguing aspects of the PT for me is the arch of Palpatine's rise to power, and playing the various sides against one another in this master plot. I think that part and the political stuff is decent, but the specifics of Anakin's becoming a jedi and falling to the dark side, the origins of the twins, and relating it all to the revised original trilogy totally blows. There is a list of a million problems with it, which people have covered again and again here, so it doesn't make sense for me to repeat them. What I would love to see are ideas for the prequels that don't have any reference to ideas and characters that came from anywhere other than the Lucas conception of the prequels. The re-writes and ideas I've seen always refer to bettering what is there, and other than the Palpatine stuff, I don't really know what is worth salvaging from that. I don't mind Qui-Gon or Darth Maul, but given that they were tied up in the rest of the garbage and they both die for basically no reason in the first film, theres a bigger and better role that both could have played.
Post
#242264
Topic
An idea I was thinking about for improving the prequels...
Time
I was just thinking today about what they did with the english version of Robotech, where they created a coherent storyline (well, sort of) out of three different Japanese television programs.... and how it would be cool to maybe take the prequels one step further than simple fan edits and actually create an entirely new movie out of them using bits and pieces of the films with perhaps re-worked space battles (using models, or computer generated bits that actually look good... perhaps more like Battlestar Gallactica does).

The more I thought about the idea, though, the problems that would arise make it basically impossible to do... Dialogue/voiceacting is kind of difficult, unless one were able to redo the voice acting in a different language (perhaps a made up one) with subtitles... and I'm sure not many people have the time/energy to do all this stuff (I certainly don't).

I really like the idea of fanedits, but of the ones I have seen, none have really been able to save the films enough to make them watchable at all for me.

Perhaps something more like the Clone Wars cartoons is more realistic, although animation is equally time-consuming and requires a lot of people with a lot of talent.

Sigh.
Post
#166385
Topic
Someone please explain why there is a 50's diner in the Star Wars universe...
Time
Your analogy is poorly drawn at best.

Yes, you have a point that there are basic tenets of the Star Wars films that assume connections with 'reality': objects are called similar things in that universe as they are in ours; characters with names like Luke whose origins are biblical; human beings existing as one of the primary 'races', so on and so forth. But there is a huge difference between representing a common language among multiple cultures in a film universe (contrasted, of course, with a healthy helping of other languages) with the one of the assumed audience and placing anachronistic and otherwise completely ridiculous references to very specific aspects of reality into the film. What does that accomplish? It takes you completely out of being immersed in the film's universe. It is the stuff of sci-fi parodies See: Space Balls truck stop scene, almost anything in the Space Quest adventure series (particularly Monolith burgers), etc...

I realize that Lucas is not known for his attention to 'suspension of disbelief', so why not throw in a scene with Anakin and Palpatine discussing Darth Plagueus at the nearest McCoruscant burger joint? Or perhaps Obi Wan having an iced latte at Mustafarbucks to 'cool down' after that climactic final battle? Seriously, are you joking?
Post
#166360
Topic
Someone please explain why there is a 50's diner in the Star Wars universe...
Time
I've honestly only seen episode 1 once and episode 2 twice in their sanctioned versions. I've watched the edits by Magnoliafan once each as well. I don't rewatch them again and again, and as a result, most of my criticism is of small things I remember from the first two and mostly from the third film, which I have watched at least 5 times (I actually enjoy 99% of it).

I honestly cringed a lot more when I watched magnoliafan's edit of Phantom Menace a lot more than when I saw it originally. I actually didn't hate it the first time I saw it, and sort of left it at that by never seeing it again (then again, a GREAT film would've had me coming back for more time and time again).
Post
#166158
Topic
I wish Anakin and Padme had been played by......
Time
Please!! Hayden(Anakin) represents who will be the baddest and most feared dude in the Galactic Empire(Vader). He cannot possibly portray that and he didn't. Hayden Christiansen is way to winey and feminane to represent what will become Vader.


...which is precisely the point of the prequels showing the 'tragedy' of Darth Vader, is it not? Your rather sexist appraisal of Hayden aside, the whole point is that we never see who Vader 'really' is in the original trilogy...he is ruthless but eventually turns back to the light side before he dies. I think that is one aspect of the prequels that Lucas got right in theory and, like almost everything else in the prequels, failed miserably at in practice. That Vader did not come from this ruthless origin, but rather suffered a conflicted descent into the darkside, one in which he ended up destroying all that he loved and that loved him and was left with nothing but the Emperor and the darkside is an AMAZING idea. I think that having some macho d00d (like I'm sure we would all imagine yourself) playing Anakin would have been inappropriate. It is unfortunate that Lucas could not give his really great overarching storyline to someone with a bit more tact at writing/directing and watch it turn into more Star Wars magic. I'd imagine such greatness would have been lost on you anyways.