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Star Wars Phantom Menace 1.1 Editor Speaks
guinnessy writes "Studio 360 interviews the person who carried out Phantom Edit 1.1. You can listen to the interview here if you have Real Audio. It's quite interesting and explains why he hated Jar Jar Binks so much and what he did."
Yeah I could if i Had real audio. Anyone will to write down the conversation and post it some were so those of us who don't have real audio can read it?
MP3 or OGG COULD be used to do the same thing? Um, have you ever been to mp3.com? They have all kinds of streaming MP3. It plays in Winamp, and I assume it should work in XMMS or whatever Linux distributions are using now. I'd venture that as many people have Winamp as have RealPlayer, especially as RealPlayer gets crappier and crappier.
grep -ri 'should work'
The trade federation is, I think, meant to be Chinese, not Japanese (I'm part-Japanese myself). As well, Anakin's flitting slave-owner is supposed to be vaguely eastern European / Jewish, near as I can tell (accented, haggles over money, big nose -- I mean, Jesus Christ!).
To be honest, it annoyed me first time I saw the film, and it only got worse with repeat viewings. If Lucas meant to make the film to satisfy himself only, as has been claimed by others at Slashdot (sorry, can't be arsed to find the reference), you have to wonder just what the fuck he was thinking when he wrote the screenplay.
To address your last comment, though, Tolkien wrote LOTR many years ago. Lucas doesn't really have that excuse, and in my view, doesn't deserve an out. Just my opinion.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
The "Lord Of The Rings [imdb.com]" movie trilogy isn't your average Hollywood "gee-what-kind-of-ending-did-the-test-audiences-li ke-the-most?" film series. It's a pretty faithful (so far) movie adaptation of what's commonly regarded [guardian.co.uk] as the best book of the twentieth century.
I'll have to dispute with you on that one. LOTR was a damn good book. Undoubtedly the best book of the Fantasy genre ever. However, there are books such as Ulysess, 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, The Old Man and the Sea, and of course Brave New World that I think edge out ahead of LOTR.
I think the poll in your article is skewed to favor LOTR because it is just a poll of regular people. Many of whom have heard about or seen LOTR at a theater near them. Many of these people have not heard of books like The Old Man and the Sea, or Ulysses.
Basically stated, what I'm trying to say is the recent publicity of LOTR has skewed the poll in the article you linked to. Most critics consider Ulysses to be the best book of the century, with Brave New World in second.
Besides, Foghorn Leghorn's entire manner of speech was meant to parody that of a prominent politician in the days when the character originated. The character was meant to satirize the politician.
This sort of proves the point, though. We want to make fun of someone, but that isn't politic. So we make a cartoon character that talks like the person we want to make fun of. Then we mock the cartoon character. Or, if we want to show that Jews are evil, Africans are ignorant, and Chinese are evil and ignorant, we make aliens that talk like Jews, Africans, and Chinese and then mock the aliens.
I tend to believe George Lucas when he says that wasn't his intent, but it's pretty amazing that the man could be so insensitive...I guess we were all supposed to grin with our big white teeth and say "Yassuh, that's how it is, sho nuf!"
wtf? why is having an accent racist?
An accent is not racist. Using an accent to identify a character with a race of people, and making said character a buffon who exhibits many negative sterotypes about that race of people is racist.
maybe the people were jamaican and japanese that did the accents?
I guess someone who would assume that voice actors who are Jamaican or Japanese would not be able to acheive accents that did not sound like cartoon versions of their own native accents should not be expected to understand this issue.
this is like saying "some of the aliens sounded like white americans! im outraged!"
What if all the aliens stole everything they had from other races and had tiny penises? What if 99% of movie or television appearances by white people were characterized as such. Might be funny for a while, but how about after 5 or 6 decades?
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
My nephews (ages 10 and 12 at the time of Episode I release) loved Jar Jar Binks. I know the character made the movie unpalatable for many adults, but for what it's worth, lots of kids were happy with it.
Personally, I really don't feel one way or the other about Jar Jar.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
The whole idea of making Anakin "badass" defeats the purpose of the story. It is often times that the highly intelligent, sensitive, and loving (parting with his mother, etc) succumb to the weaknesses of evil, usual provoked by a sense of fear, then arrogance, anger, and hatred (and, if you remember Yoda, the last in the list is suffering - possibly driven by an internal conflict). It is seldom that a young bully becomes anything more than a sloppy reject in the end, not to mention that it defeats the purpose of character development. His ultimate reign of terror (possibly something we'll see in EP3, and something that most certainly occurs between EP3 and ANH) imposed by Anakin's is his shield of defence from imagined fear. Badass == lame.
I'm an Eastern European Jew and I have a number of mixed Asian (Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Cambodian) friends, and none of us percieved or interpreted any of the characters as racist statements made by Lucas. In fact, it didn't even occur to us until we read a post much like this one on some stupid message board a year ago.
:/. And yes, Ahmed Best is African American (he consented, didn't he? What about Samuel Jackson?). This racist garbage must be a result of political correctness where being human raises eyebrows.
Racist? Give me a break.
PS: strange how Watto is a racist statement against Jews and Natalie Portman is a glorification of them.
Blah.
when everyone gives everything, then everyone everything will get
This whole racist obsession people have is kinda ridiculous. Colors aren't hidden racist subtext.
White is fascinating and black is scary. This makes sense. Think about it. The dark is "black". If you go into the dark, you can't see things and this is bad. Things can eat you in the dark. There are Grue's in the dark. Everyone naturally is warrier in the dark, even someone with "black" skin.
On the other hand, bright light is white, and it reveals everything that was hidden. Light also conquers darkness.
So if you're portraying a character who's evil and nasty you could (if you're wanting to make it blatantly obvious) dress them in black and have them hide in shadows. Dangerous things lurk in shadows, so the connection is obvious.
For an example. I, as a kid, was scared of the dark long before I'd ever seen a black person. I liked flashlights because they got rid of the darkness. This was long before I knew that I was "white" by comparison to anything else.
This is seperate from the skin color of the characters. It's just to explain that Gandalf the White and Sauron the Dark aren't necessarily racial comments in any way. Feel free to read anything you want into the skin colors of the orcs and the "good guys".
I am glad though, that they didn't throw in a token black character. They were dealing with small isolated populations. You likely wouldn't get someone with a really different skin color so it'd be a blatant "Don't hate us, here's your token minority" gesture. Now on the other hand, if they'd made (for instance) the wood elves dark (or the Rivendell ones) that would have made some sense because they were a seperate population. But it's unthinking knee-jerk PC gestures that stick out like a sore thumb. And in my opinion these do more harm than good because they bring the issue of skin color to mind, instead of ignoring it as the non-issue it is.
" to be fair, i also thought lotr has some racist undertones as well...i mean, the book is especially bad on this score, equating darkness of skin with evil, and fairness of skin w/ good."
:)
You mean Saruman The White was good? Damn, I totally misinterpretted the books and the movie.
An Anonymous Coward wrote: "I made a better competing 'edit' of the movie which (sic) highlights JarJar's zany antics and removes the parts that advance the story."
Actually, I would prefer an edit of The Phantom Menace that left Jar Jar alone (all the SW movies had some kind of comic relief) and took out the embarassingly bad stuff about "chlamydians" (OK, midi-clorians, but I can't help but wonder if a simple dose of penicillin might have prevented the whole Darth Vader situation) and the virgin birth of Anakin. This little bit of Star Trek-like technobabble, in just a few minutes, completely ruined all the magic of the other three movies. The Force, before Episode I, was basically magic. How it worked was not explained and DID NOT NEED TO BE EXPLAINED, like the magic used by Merlin or Gandalf. Post-Episode I, it's a blood condition. Bleah!
So Coward, I welcome your edit. But did you cut out that seemingly never-ending scene with the big fish getting eaten by even bigger fish?
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Uh, I wouldn't consider myself a biblical scholar (even though I translate ancient Greek and have taken classes on the Tanach in a previous life), but I do believe that you are WRONG in saying the Old Testament says "Do unto others as they would have done unto you". You are in fact, misquoting the New Testament, when Jesus was replying to question of what was the greatest commandment. His response, according to King James: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." -- Matt 7:12
Let me point out that I am not what any Christian would consider a Christian... At any rate, your view of history is severely skewed. Did you even realize there was a history to the Middle East before the 1880's or European colonial rule?
No people are not justified in being offended. This thin skinned bleeding heart crap has gone too far. If I were to make a movie, I sure as hell would ignore ANYONE who told me my bad guys couldn't have dark skin, or light skin, or speak with this accent or that. You read too much into it. And the people who generally whine about this sort of thing are the people who look for it everywhere.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Although a great idea, it'll never happen so long as certain people in positions of power are allowed to trampse on the rights of the consumer. They don't understand that the entertainment experience doesn't end where the original does... it never ends as long as it is allowed to be manipulated, twisted and mangled to the mind's delight.
I doubt that Kevin Smith minds when someone quotes his movie in an appropriate situation(comical). I also doubt that Lucas would mind if I made a tape of some kids playing with sticks and acting out jedi fight scenes, submit it to a film festival, and made money from it... would he?