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In the first Star Wars film, the Empire attacks a diplomatic ship and kills everyone on board. They then wipe out a family and burn down their house because the might have bought a droid the Empire wanted. They torture a princess. They blow up a planet, resulting in a body count that makes the Holocaust seem picayune by comparison. And that's just one movie. How much more cartoonishly Nazi do you want them do be? Should they have had Darth Vader kick a puppy?
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Aug 16, 2010 16:47
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Pththya-lyi posted:Cad Bane. He's kind of a cheesy character, I admit it, but I like him for his Western gun-slinger look. His appearance was based on unused concept art from the OT, which only makes him even cooler: Haha holy crap - the Wookiepedia article links to the Clone Wars S3 preview, in which he holds his own against Obi-Wan in a lightsaber fight. I like the character concept, but this is really pushing Mr. Lightsber Knees levels of stupid.
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Aug 17, 2010 06:48
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Bene Elim posted:I must say I like Cad, purely because he's the only character who still seems to have any kind of intelligence. I've only seen a few episodes of the show, and what I've seen of Cad I generally like. He's a much better villain concept that General "Top Hat and Moustache" Grievous or Count Dracula. But this is the Season 3 preview, and god help us he's fighting Obi-Wan with a lightsaber. And let the record show that the Darth Maul clone is named... Savage Oppress.  Edit: I am an idiot and thought I was in the RLM thread, so ignore the first paragraph which I posted like a page ago.
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Aug 17, 2010 15:52
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I really dislike the EU for reasons well enumerated in this thread and the last - basically, that it's usually incredibly stupid. As such I generally avoid it. Still, two books keep popping up here that most posters seem to think are pretty good. I just read one of 'em, Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor. Good points of Shadows of Mindor: 1) Set pretty much right after ROTJ, so very little of the ridiculous baggage of the post-ROTK EU timeline is in effect. The characters are free to be basically the ones in the films. 2) Also because of its position in the timeline, very little of the ridiculous baggage of the PT is evident. 3) No crazy superweapons. 4) It's not yet another iteration of Jedi vs. Sith. 5) The villain, his motivation, and his plan are all interesting. 6) The space battles are well-written, and the action is suspenseful. Less good points of Shadows of Mindor: 1) There is an EU tendency to treat the Force as fantasy-style magic that can be controlled and manipulated via machinery. However, the book is intelligent enough to keep it to a minimum and it turns out that the Force-controlling tech is basically alive anyway, which fits pretty well with the more mystic Force of the OT. 2) The whole thing is pretty tech-heavy by space opera standards, but at the same time the science isn't up to SF quality. 3) The plot is rather grim. This isn't bad, just a little eyebrow-raising in places. But those are minor quibbles. It's a quite a good book. Well worth a read even if you usually hate the EU.
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Aug 20, 2010 02:06
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arioch posted:It'll be hilarious if Luke's still around in Legacy time period. Or Luuuke. They could always introduce a Luke ghola.
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Aug 22, 2010 08:53
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Locutus Of Bored posted:In A New Hope, R2D2 plays a message to Ben Kenobi from Princess Leia that said, in part, "Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars". But after rewatching the Prequel Trilogy, I didn't get the impression that Obi Wan was serving Bail Organa at all. "Served" in this context makes it seem like her dad was a higher ranking officer, implying that they were both in the armed forces at some point. Obviously in the prequels they weren't. But either way, you're right. It's a boneheaded and obvious continuity that's almost as jarring as Leia's memory of her mother who in the prequels said all of one word to her before croaking.
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Aug 23, 2010 02:55
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Torael_7 posted:Figure some approximate numbers here - say 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and one in one million of those has habitable planets. That gives us 100k habitable star systems...which is probably "low" for our estimate of the star wars galaxy, since wookiepedia claims that the Corporate Sector alone has 30k star systems. Star Wars isn't hard SF so I don't imagine anyone official thought this through very hard. If I were writing a book or RPG and had canon-altering authority, the only way I can think of to make it sensible is to assume the population and number of inhabited worlds is much smaller than the current EU. Say, ten thousand or so human-inhabited worlds, most with just a few million to a few hundred million people. Say another thirty thousand planets inhabited mostly by non-humans. Humans and non-humans frequently both live on planets where their biology allows it. I figure a modern Nimitz aircraft carrier is a big deal for a nation of three hundred million, so a Star Destroyer of nearly a cubic mile of high-tech construction requires substantial resource and manpower costs even spread over thousands of planets. Thus it's reasonable that the ROTJ fleet actually was a substantial fraction of the entire Imperial navy.
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Aug 25, 2010 21:24
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Kemper Boyd posted:By the time of ROTJ, Lucas can do whatever the gently caress he likes. The result is that Luke's story by the time poo poo goes down on Endor, nothing he does has any effect on the rest of the plot. The Rebellion would have won anyway. The Emperor's trap failed before Luke even started fighting Vader. Wedge and Lando blow up the Death Star anyway. The net result is that Vader and Palpatine die about fifteen minutes earlier. Really this isn't so bad though. It would be pretty sad if after all these years the Rebellion still can't win a battle without Luke. By that point the Luke/Vader/Emperor subplot is more of a personal journey anyway. It's also possible to interpret Luke's actions as affecting the exterior action even without invoking Battle Meditation(tm) sperging. Military forces do have a pronounced historical tendancy to fall apart when they hear news of a commander's death, and I suppose news of the Emperor's death would have spread pretty quickly. The timing doesn't work well though, since Wedge & co. start their trench run pretty much the second Palpatine bites it. There's not much time for the news to have any effect.
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Aug 31, 2010 17:55
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It gives the source as a one-shot magazine about Vader released at Comic-Con. A few more clicks and I discovered that it also included this gem:
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Sep 2, 2010 02:16
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hellsy posted:After catching up on this thread something came into my mind. During the PT you never hear what the common man/alien/droid has to say about the clones wars, the senate taking away freedoms, Palatine taking full power. Fun fact about Episode 1: not only do you never actually see the Trade Federation actually cause so much as an inconvenience to the non-military citizens of Naboo, you never actually see a single non-military citizen of Naboo at all. It's that whole "show, don't tell" problem the prequels have. In Episode 4 the Empire pretty much right away starts strangling prisoners and torturing princesses and incinerating farmers and genociding planets, and sure enough the audience pretty quickly has a reason to be emotionally involved with the heroes' fight against the Empire. Somehow that got left out of the script revisions for the new films.
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Sep 18, 2010 05:03
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Pththya-lyi posted:Adult Swim shows /= Other Cartoon Network shows Although some daytime Cartoon Network shows are pretty demented. That Flapjack show has more than a couple of horrifying moments by kids show standards.
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Sep 23, 2010 16:38
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Ok, George is a strange guy with a profoundly damaged view of romantic relationships but I think I'm gonna need a citation on that one.
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Oct 1, 2010 19:09
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Pththya-lyi posted:Then I realized that Luke only gave a crap about Vader because he was his ~*DADDY*~. He certainly didn't try to save the Emperor or anyone else on the Death Star. You're a Death Star maintenance tech. The most wanted rebel criminal in the galaxy ambles up to you during the chaos of a rebel attack and suggests you commit treason by abandoning your post and following him... well, we can probably forgive Luke for not giving it much of an effort. Especially when it would have meant abandoning his critically injured father. As for Luke's not trying to convert the Emperor, who's the say he wasn't? It takes a lot of effort for Palpatine to goad Luke into striking, and once Luke finally disables Vader he then promptly throws away his weapon and tries to start a reasonable discussion with the Emperor.
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Oct 13, 2010 20:24
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Bonzo posted:I never got the impression he was trying to discuss anything with the Emperor other than, "I've seen what I could become, I'd rather be a Jedi then go to the dark side". Then Palpatine says "Welp, you gon' die!" Me neither, I'm just saying that "kill the Emperor" didn't seem to be part of his plan. It's simply not reasonable to interpret Luke's actions as "Save daddy, screw everyone else." He did what he could.
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Oct 13, 2010 22:14
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mojo1701a posted:Is it the simplistic black-and-white/good guys vs. bad guys nature of Star Wars that attracts these kind of people? Can't be. Traviss if anything bent the morality lines the hardest in her novels, and I think it's her fans who generally get accused of wacky politics. But really the posted TFN excerpts are pretty tame. It's wildly right-wing by SA standards, but SA needs to get out more.
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Oct 17, 2010 19:37
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Mister Roboto posted:Seems pretty obvious that it does. Complicating things (like politics) with shades of grey and different perspectives is for human being Libera--I mean, cowardly Sith. Not a lot of gray in that opinion either, no?  The great strength of the moral view of the original Star Wars films is not that it's black/white or entirely gray. There's good and evil, but there's also aspects of the story that are more complicated. The strength is that the movie isn't trying to sell us a moral framework at all - it simply tells a story. One of the places where the prequels come off the rails is where it tries to make that kind of a sell in both directions at once: Obi-Wan: "Only Sith believe in absolutes!" Anakin: "Well actually there's shades of gray and my perspective is more complicated..." Obi-Wan: "You're absolutely wrong!"
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Oct 18, 2010 21:30
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George Lucas is 66 years old. He's not actually obese as far as I can tell, but he doesn't look like he's exactly in peak physical condition. I'm not sure he has another trilogy of healthy life expectancy left.
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Oct 24, 2010 00:38
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thrawn527 posted:The worst part is that, if they happen, I will see them in the theater. I don't even have to know what they're about. I know there's no chance I won't see them. And that makes me sad. Once upon a time I saw a film called Mr. & Mrs. Smith in the theater. It was an entertaining and well-executed summer action flick, but what sticks out the most what what I overheard a couple say as they were walking out of the theater. "They should make a sequel - Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Baby. The baby could be a spy too!" That couple is what's wrong with the film industry. I don't want to be that couple. I'm done with subsidizing terrible sequels.
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Oct 25, 2010 16:45
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Who is this Force Cthulhu you guys keep mentioning? Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Abeloth R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
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Oct 28, 2010 15:21
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Oh. A space god with infinite powers who lives in an alternative universe. Very Star warsy. About one link away: Wookieepedia posted:The Lake of Apparitions was a lake that existed in a realm of the Force known as beyond shadows. Any being who walked across the Lake had to step carefully, or they would sink into the Depths of Eternity, from which they couldn't be saved. While walking across it the spirits of deceased Force-sensitives could be seen on the surface of the water, known as the Mirror of Remembrance. Over the Lake hung heavy mists, which were known as the Mists of Forgetfulness.  All right EU authors, repeat after me. High fantasy and space opera are two different genres. High fantasy and space opera are two different genres. High fantasy and space opera are...
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Oct 28, 2010 17:17
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ImpAtom posted:Well, it ends with Darth Vader being arrested and taken to the rebel base on Dantooine. So the rebel base really was on Dantooine? 
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Nov 3, 2010 00:50
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LLJKSiLk posted:I think the most awful part was the using of C3P0 during the climax battle in the Genosian arena as comedic relief during a scene where tons of Jedi are being slaughtered. It completely took away the emotional impact. You're really going to love the deleted scene in the first minute of this. Basically, Anakin and Obi-Wan witness a dear friend murdered before their eyes and immediately perform a Marx Brothers routine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjUAatYo6us
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Nov 8, 2010 19:40
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LLJKSiLk posted:2. We are told through the story about the corruption in the Senate. We are given a few examples, specifically Chancellor Valorum's no confidence vote, the lack of decisive action regarding the Naboo blockade, inability to handle a crisis of the Separatist movement without turning over power to a dictator, etc. None of that's actually corrupt. It's perfectly kosher for a deliberative assembly to replace their leadership, to defer action and form committees, and delegate power. Those things may be bad ideas, but purely in terms of parliamentary procedure they're legitimate things for an assembly to do. Corruption is stuff like blackmail, rigging the ballots, extorting money for votes and whatnot. We didn't see any of that.
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Nov 10, 2010 18:13
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Namarrgon posted:There is nothing inherently wrong with the Trade Federation having senator seats, because we don't know how the political system works. The problem is that we're not told anything about the politics, except that it's corrupt. If you want a gripping story you need to introduce your audience to a simple system and show examples of corruption. It is that whole jazz of being internally consistent. Right. In the US we don't have the the senator from Wyoming sitting next to the senator from Macy's, but it's not inherently preposterous for commerce to have representation in government. The British East India company in a famous example, and the US constitution contains a (mostly disused) provision which allows congress to grant letters of marque, essentially making a private business of naval warfare. For that matter, it's possible that the Trade Federation is simply the Hong Kong to the Republic's PRC. The very fact that the Trade Federation senators speaks in public on galactic C-SPAN makes it less likely to be in-universe corruption, since by definition corruption is something illegal that you do in the shadows. Conversely, Star Wars has done corruption very well on film in the past. Vader simultaneously bribes and extorts the (presumably) legitimate governor of Cloud City to capture Han. Didn't even need long expository parliamentary speeches.
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Nov 10, 2010 21:56
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dialhforhero posted:Well, when you create a race that embodies just about every negative stereotype of southern black people via slapstick, I don't really blame them. I'm sure there will someday be a story in the EU talking about Gungan drug abuse and gangs and rape. I'm pretty sure they were going for a Jamaican/Rastafarian stereotype. Of course most Jamaicans are of African ancestry, but skin tone aside the culture doesn't look a whole like that of the African-American south. Which doesn't make it any less of a caricature.
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Nov 21, 2010 23:17
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Biplane posted:Reformed Black Man Reformed? One might even say downright respectable! 
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Nov 22, 2010 15:44
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RagnarokAngel posted:Despite what people think I do think Lando is portrayed pretty sympathetically. He never stabs them in the back later or even thinks of it. The story does a good job explaining his hands were tied and he never sounds happy about doing it. Right, even as a kid I never though what he did was that bad. The Empire knew Han & Co. were coming, and even beat them there. His choice was 1) play along, let his friends get captured, and save the city, or 2) not play along, friends get captured anyway, and have the city fall to imperial rule while probably getting himself killed. And what he actually did was pretend to choose the first option while actually doing his best to arrange a rescue - which is a whole lot easier to do while not rotting in a cell because you didn't tell Darth Vader you'd cooperate.
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Nov 22, 2010 17:23
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tin can made man posted:And what I'm saying is that maybe George Lucas wasn't as sensitive to that fact and just wanted to have that classic archetype as a villain. Right, it's not as though relatively tame stereotypes are a uniquely horrible sin that Lucas alone is guilty of. How many times a year do we see movies with a plot that amount to "Haha, a black guy and a white guy have different taste in music!"? For that matter if we're talking classic villain archetypes, the main one Lucas uses is the one that's rarely noticed because it's as common as oxygen - the classic bad-guys-with-upper-class-British-accents trope.
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Nov 23, 2010 00:19
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Ferrosol posted:Yeah one thing star wars has is a real problem with scale. The books and games seem all over the place when it comes to how big fleets really are. For example in one book you get the capital of the empire defended by only 4 star destroyers (remember this is an empire of over 3 million planets) in another you get the average garrison of a backwater sector consisting of over 24 star destroyers backed up hundreds of smaller ships and fighters. That's before we get into the whole Karen Traviss inspired 3 million clones thing. Star Wars makes very little sense with respect to scale unless there's only a few hundred to a few thousand human-inhabited worlds, with perhaps a few times that many planets inhabited by other sapient species. Actually setting that as the official scale would require retconning away... well, just about everything, but that's about the only choice if you want resources and military sizes to make any kind of sense.
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Nov 25, 2010 03:04
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Rochallor posted:Kyp went to Endor to visit Vader's final resting place in one of those books that I've blocked from my mind. Was there just a memorial, or was there some armor left over? Well, there was his glove...
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Nov 25, 2010 05:52
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LLJKSiLk posted:Jar Jar should be engraved on Lucas' tombstone. Jar Jar is not what's wrong with the prequel trilogy.
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Nov 29, 2010 20:15
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Would've made more sense just to not have written Padme as so dovish. If she deliberately helped put Palpatine into power and build what she thought would be a defensive army, that would go a long way to fleshing out the "kind, but sad" impression that Leia had of her years later.
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Dec 10, 2010 00:45
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Jerk McJerkface posted:From the RLM forums. I screen-shotted it to keep his emoticons in there. I bet most of us will leave that review thinking ROTS is the worst of the prequel trilogy. More and more I've had the gnawing feeling that as hideously awful as it was, TPM was actually the Star-Warsiest of the prequels.
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Dec 31, 2010 07:09
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Cowslips Warren posted:I suppose one thing we can be thankful for is a lack of sex scene in the prequels. I dunno, my theater audience broke into embarrassed titters at this somewhat... suggestive scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPoxMFzcr-g
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Jan 2, 2011 23:30
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thrawn527 posted:The main reason I prefer the Republic being conquered by the Empire and not becoming it is it gives the war some reason for fighting it. If Palpatine engineer's the war, and the Jedi are fighting on a side that Palpatine wants them too, then if the bad guys win everyone is screwed, and if the "good guys" win, everyone is screwed. It works for some types of films, but I don't think space opera is suited to it. It's a massive galaxy spanning war, and you should be really hoping one side wins. Even if that side loses, you're more interested in the battles if there's something at stake. Palpatine trying to take over through the war makes the battles interesting. Palpatine trying to take over through manipulation behind the scenes makes the battles shiny distractions from the plot. A poster above suggested that when it doubt, rip off Akira Kurosawa. Works for me, but I'd extend it - when in doubt about a grand overarching plot for a war, rip off Thucydides and Edward Gibbon, or classical history in general. Mix and match - Palpatine is a Caesar figure, the clones are the Carthaginians with Grievous (and fix his name) as Hannibal. You have the Clone Wars in Ep 1 & 2. You'd keep Palpatine offscreen to the extent practical, which might be completely offscreen. The war concludes in Ep. 3 with a Republic victory, with Palps seizing power, starting a brief but bloody Civil War, and launching a campaign of systematic extermination of the wandering-samurai Jedi. In each war, the audience gets to unambiguously root for the Republic during the Clone Wars, and against the nascent Empire once that comes about. Obviously in that framework you can do just about anything with the story. You don't have to worry too much about lack of tension, since clearly every character except Anakin and Obi-Wan are at risk.
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Jan 4, 2011 20:09
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Supercar Gautier posted:Kurosawa? Hell yeah, go hogwild! Parallelism between trilogies? Sign me up, could be great for dramatic tension if Anakin and Luke face similar trials and choices. But that's details, when the reality is that the prequels could done well with a pretty similar plot if they'd just followed general guidelines like those. Yep. And you'd want to keep some of the mysteries and surprises of the OT intact as well. Offhand, I'd say: We should never see Yoda. Obi-Wan is a relatively young guy (30s, say) but still a decade out from his training. He'd probably mention Yoda with obvious affection and reverence, and try to pass on some of his wisdom to Anakin, but that's it. We should never see Palpatine use the Force overtly. Maybe we should never see him at all. He's known the way most of us know about national politicians - from a distance. I guess we should learn in the last prequel that he's a master of the dark side, since Anakin has to fall into that orbit somehow, but the RotJ lightning should still be a terrifying and completely unexpected surprise. If seen, he's a normal looking older guy, with his creepy look in the original trilogy left without explanation. The viewer can figure out for himself that the dark side is corrosive to the user. We should never see force ghosts, or have them explained. On the other hand, it might be a wise thing to have all Jedi disappear on death, as a universal (if unexplained) thing. We should never see the lightsaber overused or activated casually. If a lightsaber is onscreen, it's a Big Deal. Each of the original film's lightsaber scenes can be counted on one hand, and that should be true for the prequels. In short, forget "dense" , effects or callbacks or otherwise. Less is more. The original Star Wars was a pretty spare and visually striking film. The director of our hypothetical prequel reboot should be thinking Sergio Leone, not Michael Bay.
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Jan 4, 2011 22:03
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Kemper Boyd posted:I've something like five times tried to read up on Mandalorians on Wookiepedia to get what's the big deal with them and why anyone cares and my eyes just kinda glaze over. Because they're a race of Boba Fetts. Still haven't found out why people like him so much.
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Jan 5, 2011 17:18
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AcridWhistle posted:That and I think that the picture is just fan faction, I don't think it actually exists in the EU. But Mr. Lightsaber Knees does.
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Jan 6, 2011 16:34
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Flipswitch posted:Are there any decent stories on IG-88? I remember him appearing in one of the games on the N64 back in the day as a boss, Shadows of the Empire? I think? but he always seemed like a decent character that could have done with a bit more development. In the EU, the 2nd Death Star was actually IG-88. Go ahead, look it up on Wookiepedia and see if I'm joking. I dare you!
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Jan 10, 2011 03:21
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Teek posted:You might be able to get away with having Yoda off screen during the prequels, and you might be able to play something off where Ben gets Luke and we cut away not seeing the birth of Leia or something. But trying to hide the Anakin thing just wouldn't be worth it I feel. This is pretty much my feeling. Yoda's easy to avoid, since presumably the prequels start off with a 30s or early 40s Obi-Wan who's still young-ish but quite experienced and long finished with his training. Yoda doesn't need to appear at all. Hiding Leia is a little trickier, but doable. A halfway clever writer could easily come up with something workable. One possibility might be having her originally named something other than Leia, and having her adoptive parents give her the "Princess Leia" title between trilogies. But the Anakin = Vader problem simply can't be avoided. The audience surprise will instead be suspense at wondering when Luke's going to find out. But that's just theory, in practice everyone in the audience already knows.
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Jan 10, 2011 23:02
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