It’s not letting me put the images in the post so here are links to the Howard monster panels
https://ibb.co/R2VDwNj
https://ibb.co/94xGJrM
https://ibb.co/FBTFQt3
This is regarding another Lucasfilm Marvel Adaptation that has different or incorrect art from the film.
The Howard the Duck 1986 Movie Adaptation has amazing art from Kyle Baker (one of his first Marvel jobs and he drew it with huge style). The final monster in the film was the huge scorpion looking creature beautifully designed by Phil Tippet. In the comic adaptation, this creature is missing and is replaced by a giant Duck that looks just like Howard but huge and monster sized.
It’s really strange and obviously a place holder of some kind. It makes me wonder how late in the design process they settled on that Scorpion and what Kyle Baker was told to put there. Also from my own memory that adaptation came out a few weeks after the film came out which means they never even went back to correct it knowing it was wrong and let it publish with the incorrect monster at the end.
You’re memory is mixing up two different trailers. The initial teaser and the 2nd full length trailer. The 2nd trailer has the opening shot of the droid troop ships coming over the hill.
Unless there was a tv spot that mixed those images your remembering the 2nd full trailer.
What a fantastic series of videos! This is why I love this site 😃
The whole Q&A is a must watch. There is some really interesting bits about THX 1138 at the end.
Gary Kurtz pronounces it as Thex and not saying the letters T-H-X. I think in the movie they say Thex as well.
Warner Brothers pulled the film shortly after release due to issues with Coppola’s Zoetrope and Kurtz says THX was making money at the box office. I never knew this.
35mm prints of THX were almost non-existent in 76 and you could only get 16 mm prints for screening.
Great stuff!
Anchorhead said:
I’m not posting the pic directly because it contains a spoiler we haven’t really discussed here. I know this is a spoiler thread but this is a big one.So…anyone wanna talk about this?
I think the big shocking twist will be that Luke has always been bad even throughout the OT. Does it make sense? nope but I’m thinking they will do abit of retconning.
Did any of the educational stuff Lucas once talked about utilizing with Young Indy ever come to pass?
It didn’t. I remember Lucas talking up in interviews about using the show in schools and creating collected versions with more historical information but it never happened. A google search doesn’t even come up with a mention of it but it was definitely one of Lucas’ big talking points about the show.
He also talked about either the six DVD set of the the Star Wars saga or the Blu Ray set as being this film school in a box experience. As nice as some of Blu Ray or dvd extras are, they fall short of that of course.
I wonder if Lucas created the PT primarily to keep LucasFilm alive? Its artistic outcome would not have been important as long as it generates money. Back in the 80s he also saw ESB & ROTJ as mere vehicles to fund his elaborate Skywalker Ranch. Somewhere between ANH & ESB the filmmaker disappeared and the businessman took over. Didn’t he say during infamous “White Slavers” interview with Charlie Rose that he wanted to do the ST himself and that he had to care about his employees? Maybe it was easier to sell LucasFilm than to stem another trilogy himself…
Late reply to this one but this is actually true. Young Indiana Jones in the early 90s was a huge money loss for Lucasfilm. He had to come up with something that was going to generate income. This was partially why he went forward with the prequels.
I think Lucas has a love/hate relationship with Star Wars. With Empire he really did want to farm out the star wars movies to other people and he would build his dream Skywalker Ranch studio. However he had a very hard time letting go of wanting to control Empire and the quality of that film. When he did Jedi he was onset every day I believe as opposed to the hands off approach he had with Empire. After Jedi he was finished with the whole thing until he decided to finish the saga with the prequels which would make him a ton of money and he would have absolute control over the output of the film.
After viewing the film here are my initial thoughts:
It’s better than all three of the prequels (and I liked parts of those movies!).
It’s better then TFA. That was a film I think that was trying to do what this film succeeded in doing. TFA was a new star wars that was desperately trying to be like the OT but the writing and characters were just not there.
This film feels like a real Star Wars film and a return to the universe that we saw in the OT. The scenes on Jedha had that grungy used universe feeling that Lucas got from the European comic artists of the 70s and its been translated so well here. This is also the first Star Wars film since Empire to not have any childish or cute characters. As much as I love ROTJ, the ewoks were the beginning of a trend of pandering to kids that lasted only until a few years ago. This was a straight forward sci fi fantasy film and a really good one at that.
And then there’s the Vader’s castle sequence which is just so beautifully done. I think there’s definitely fan service parts to the film but they are very quick and definitely nothing as offensive as any of the Phantom Menace gags or tentacle monsters in a cargo hold that we put up with in previous films. It was a film that finally said “Someone who isn’t Lucas can make a great Star Wars film”. The filmmakers of TFA were so sure of themselves that they forgot to make a good movie. But everything with Rogue One was just spot on from the characters to the pacing to the amazing visuals. Great film.
I have my own false memory from seeing ESB in a 1981 re-release. When Luke is in the Wampa cave, I have a distinct memory of Obi Wan telling him to use the force telepathically to lift the lightsaber.
When the VHS of ESB came out, I was shocked that Obi Wan’s voice was absent from that scene. I think when I first joined this forum it was one of the first things I asked about. At this point I don’t think that voice over existed but I don’t know how I came up with that as a kid. Unless those re-release prints had some weird meddling by Ben Burtt that is now forgotten in time.
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Definitely can’t rule out that it’s from the future.
On a side note I wonder if the place in which Luke places his hand on R2 is the same island. I don’t think that’s the case though.
Thats a good point about the hand. Pablo’s tweet is confusing isn’t it? It’s a clan leader but it looks like it’s the same place Luke is with R2. And that low angle shot is probably from Rey when she was a little girl looking at Luke.
I do like parts of the prequels and have enjoyed them. But I noticed the fun aspect of TFA makes it a less morose and more fun experience to watch.
I’m sure all the visions will be explained in the next films. My post was mostly about Rey’s family and how they’re trying to do everything to keep it as OT as possible and avoiding whatever the prequels really did stylistically and story wise. What’s interesting is that we’re now seeing kids posting on imdb (and I’m sure TFN which I avoid) that are anti TFA and pro prequels. I like all the films but it’s an interesting turn of events.
ratpack1961 said:
One is of the Luke’s acadamy being wiped out,
Nope.
and another we don’t see of an island which is again maybe the future.
But Rey dreams about it though.
Just because she dreams about it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily from the past. The Jedi also see into the future of course. She may have been having visions of the island for a long time.
After viewing the film for the nth time I’m wondering if Rey is pretty much related to nobody in the original cast.
I think it’s safe to say that this film is an anti-prequel. Meaning anything having to do with the prequels is removed in every way (overly complex story, art design, huge cg crowds, childish anything). I think the fact that the only even remotely prequel moment (the republic capital) is wiped out is a funny aside at their real feelings about Lucas prequels.
That said, what about Rey? If one of the big parts of the prequels is that everyone is related, then it can be assumed that this new cast is related to nobody. And that includes Rey.
So who is she? We know she had a family. We don’t know if she even remembers who they are. The family (or someone who knew them) dropped her off on Jakku. That’s pretty much all the facts we get.
She has a few visions in the film. One is of the Luke’s acadamy being wiped out, Kylo Ren coming for her in the forest which is the future and another we don’t see of an island which is again maybe the future. I think her family were the Jedi who were wiped out, not necessarily Luke.
But none of that means she’s related to any of the original cast. It’s easy to say she’s Luke’s daughter but wouldn’t be more interesting if she’s just some random jedi sensitive girl caught up in a huge adventure? Her real family dropped her off with Luke to be trained and she was the lone survivor of his students for whatever reason. It sounds like Kylo had mercy on her or that Luke wouldn’t let Kylo destroy the child.
Also, since episode 7 is a riff on A New Hope and Return of the Jedi then its safe to say the next episode will riff on Empire Strikes Back. Luke will be Yoda here with the island as Dagobah. But related to Luke? We’ll see but I’m going to guess no.
The only thing that connects her to Luke is her lightsaber strike and kick at the end of the fight with Kylo. But that could mean anything.
I think the fact that Kylo is wearing the mask in Rey’s vision is because the scene was probably originally shot with the mask on. If you look at the first trailer with Kylo in the woods, he has the hood on which means the mask also.
They probably reshot the scene with Kylo without the mask to make it more dramatic or to change something. The shot of Kylo in the forest with his mask is just a leftover from the unused sequence. Also it could be they hadn’t revealed Kylo’s face yet in the movie and so just used the mask in the forest to hide his face until the reveal.
I have met David Prowse and Jeremy Bulloch. Both were amazingly kind hearted people and so generous with fans.
Kenny Baker, who I didn’t get to meet personally, is a riot. At a convention I was at, he was onstage and would hold his nose and jump off stage like hes jumping into the ocean. He’s so small he disappeared completely! The crowd loved it! He still has some of that comedy act performer in him that you got to see in Time Bandits. A great talent!
What puzzled me about selling to Disney was that Lucas has always been against Hollywood and anything coming out of the Los Angeles Studio area. He had done business deals with Disney such as getting Star Wars rides into the Parks but when it came to filmmaking he was totally independent.
All of the prequels were financed by Lucasfilm and the toy merchandising deals. Lucas kept a tight reign on those budgets as well as McCallum which may account for those digital sets. He was paying for everything and the OT was the same way.
The white slavers remark, even though it was a snide joke, was from a viewpoint he shared for 30 years. He views all of the studios in hollywood as slavers of some kind. Not true artists like himself (or how he sees himself as still that 70s film radical).
Lucas’ actual hands on involvement with Howard is debatable. He took on the Executive Producer mantle mostly as a favor to director Willard Hyuck and Gloria Katz, his old American Graffiti script writers. It was their baby as much as Labyrinth was Jim Henson’s baby. And I never hear anyone praise or scorn George for that film, even though he’s the executive producer on it. Willow on the other hand…
And I did see Strange Magic. I like it more than Frozen. 😉 Was pretty cruel of Disney to dump it the way they did. Pity there isn’t a Blu Ray release.
As a fan of Howard the Duck, I’ve always been interested in how much Lucas was involved in it. I think he actually had alot of creative input into the film. At this time in the mid 80s, Lucas was very interested in music and music videos. He had worked on Captain Eo and was dating Linda Rondstadt. The decision to make Beverly a rock singer was probably Lucas. Also the pacing of the film which is breakneck is completely Lucas. I’m almost certain he did some second unit shots and was absolutely on set. Lucas would later say he wanted Howard to be more of a film noir detective movie but this is absolute revisionism on his part which we’ve seen before from him.
It’s true that at the time Lucas was a producer on a few projects. He was even onset everyday on Return to Oz to help Walter Murch. But knowing Lucas, when it has his name on it specifically as a “Film by George Lucas” like Howard does, he was probably involved in many aspects of the production down to the editing.
Back on topic, I think the Charlie Rose interview is probably most truthful interview Lucas has ever given on Star Wars. He admits he should have directed Empire and Jedi which lends more evidence that he doesn’t like Empire that much. He also admits that he liked 30% of ANH which is much lower then his usual 70%, so he’s truthful the whole move makes him cringe. And of course that he thinks the ideas behind TFA are rubbish. I think this interview explains the prequels whether you like or hate them. It shows he was trying to improve on the OT and remove any aspect of the OT that he hated. On viewing TFA for the third time, it struck me that Lucas probably hated all the fun joking moments of the OT since they are utterly absent from the prequels or kept to a bare minimum. The Phantom Menace was I think the film Lucas had always wanted to make. I just wish he saw ANH as the masterpiece and best of the series (my opinion) that it is.
After watching the film at first I was pretty angry about it. However as I think more about it, the film had alot of great moments. I think any OT fan loved it when Rey ran to the falcon. I don’t think it’s as visually dynamic directing wise as the OT but overall it was fun. I think what they did with Luke I’m still not sure about.
I picked up the Art of book today from Amazon. I would recommend everyone check it out as there are tons and tons of unused concepts in it. Storywise this was going to be a much different film. Also it looks like the Art team had a huge influence on the story. Under Lucas that kind of freedom with story concepts just didn’t happen.
Alderaan said:
timdiggerm said:
Alderaan said:
I'm warning you guys, don't get your expectations up. The trailer is a window into the filmmaker's mind and what kind of story they are hoping to tell. All indications are that the story in this film will be poorly fleshed out. The characters will be kind of just there. The movie will be a sleekly produced but vapid Revenge of the Sith meets The Godfather Part 3 meets standard Hollywood blockbuster fare.
What kind of character fleshing-out can you expect from a trailer for a film with a big cast?
Who is the main character? Are they a Jedi? A wizard? A Paladin? What thing has caused them distress in their normal ordinary life such that they will be forced to journey into the world of the story?
The only thing this trailer does is put vague Star Wars like stuff on screen and tell you to come watch it because it's Star Wars.
To be fair, the OT trailers gave away zero plot aspects except for "Space, action, fun!"
Alderaan said:
The trailer looked terrible. Doesn't even look like a Star Wars movie. Looks like some random blockbuster film with explosions and lens flare, with STAR WARS plastered all over it to sell to audiences.
This was may impression, that it didn't have a certain "look" that a Star Wars film should have. It looked like it was shot with very nice HiDef cameras and a super clean look that you would see in a Fast and Furious film.
The work by ILM of the action sequences looked about right but I just can't get excited about this film. The costume design work is really uninspired and the characters just seem bland. JJ Abrams is using the same approach he used with Star Trek. I loved his Trek reboots but Star Wars requires an entirely different more atmospheric approach and that just didn't happen with TFA. He's also reusing a ton of OT ships and design work. It's fan service but the fun of a new Star Wars film is all the cool new designs like the speeder bikes in ROTJ. JJ is recycling the OT too much and it will win over the causal fans but after awhile it will just end up in a forgettable movie.
DuracellEnergizer said:
Eh, killing Palpatine wouldn't have automatically won the war for the Rebels, anyway.
It would be incredibly lame if they never won at all, though.
Yeah that was sort of my point with a bit of snarkiness thrown in. That the end of Jedi was only a small victory in the long run in the new canon. :)
I guess I'm clinging onto Lucas' notion that ep. 6 was supposed to be the real final with all the celebrations. I know its not GOUT but oh well.
FIXED
A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away . . . .
Completely forgetting the end of Return of the Jedi it is a time of uncertainty. Unrest grips the galaxy as the influence of the First Order, whoever they are, spreads, but a glimmer of hope remains in the heroic forces of the Resistance, even though they destroyed the Emperor and technically shouldn't be resisting anything. As they struggle against the dark might of the enemy even though the Sith are supposed to be wiped out, these brave heroes may yet awaken the skill and strength needed to forge a new future . . . .
It's only a $1 on amazon, it's fantastic. You get to hear the 3 actors defending ANH from overly harsh reviews and they're not in their press mode. It's them as they really were.
I wanted to post a link to George buying new Star Wars comics because I had no idea until I read this thread and found that very cool http://www.newsarama.com/23747-george-lucas-visits-nyc-comic-shop-for-star-wars-comics.html
Didn't Lucas have final say over the novels? He must have been given a synopsis of each one and vetoed what he didn't like. Maybe the same thing with the comics?
Even though Lucas wants to experience the new Star Wars films like the rest of us, I have a feeling it must really bother him at some level that his baby is in other people's hands. He had tight control over the property since 1977. I think it's kind of sad to be honest.
I bet he likes Captain Phasma, the best thing in ep. 7 we've seen.
I'm not sure about the costume either. It's so light especially the hood. Very elderly monk like but it really needs some darker shading to give it a real Jedi feel that we remember.
I will say one thing. It looks like JJ is not costuming him like a Tattooine native. If you remember from the prequels, all the Jedis were wearing Tattooine tunics like Ben. It looked good but didn't make alot of sense. This outfit sort of corrects that.
