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The Return of Chewbacca
BrunoC writes "It's official! Peter Mayhew is going to play everyone's favorite wookie once again: Chewbacca is returning in Episode III, currently in pre-production phase. Peter says (quoted from StarWars.com) "I'm delighted to return as Chewbacca, I think his re-appearance in this film is a fitting way to tie the whole saga together, especially for Wookiee fans." Woa! Just for the records: Artoo and C-3PO will be there too! You can read the official annoucement here, at StarWars.com."
WHY can't the editors realize that there are people who don't want these spoilers, even seemingly minor ones like this?
It's extremely inconsiderate. Presumably they don't want people to stop reading their site, right?
Uhhhhh on behalf of the 1.5 million geeks WHO DIDN'T WANT TO KNOW THAT, thanks a bunch!
Time for a padlock on the mousebutton that hits that 'post' button, mayhap?
Octavian
"In the end, we all fall back on fiction." -- Lonely Planet
Let Chewbacca take out Jar-jar! Please? I'd pay money to see that.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
And with this Lucas's conversion to the dark side will be complete. Does he really have to shit all over every character from the original trilogy by associating them with the crap he's been making?
I'd rather see chewbacca appear in a romantic comedy with sandra bullock before the shit that will be Episode III. at least then the plot would most likely make sense to anyone over the age of three.
Isn't transliteration fun?
In other news they won't be rehiring Harrison Ford!! Because they can't make a Harrison Ford suit!! And because he would have told George Lucas to go **** himself and his Burt Reynolds haircut/scarf around neck under denim shirt!!!
Who are y oo ?
Always let the wookie win....
George Lucas must have been really high to think of Chewbacca. I mean that's where most of these famous directors get all of their good stuff...
*puff*
chewbacca
*puff*
he's a wookie
*puff*
arrr arrr
that's the sound he makes, write this down
All you filthy, bearded linux zealots really identify with Chewbacca. This has to be very exciting for you.
At this point I am so disillusioned with the new Star Wars films that I couldn't care less who'll feature in Episode III.
The last two films have been unspeakably bad and I'm extremely skeptical that the next will be any better.
People not wanting plot details, but in light of the fact that this has become a "news item" ... and not just on /. either ... do you people whining about the spoiler really think you can get all the way to the movie without finding this out?
I mean, hello...welcome to the world of computers, posters and trailers...
True, how can people really scream "Spoiler" since they already know how the series ends?
Shock news: Luke is Darth Vader's son!
If Chewbacca is a wookie, you must acquit.
Step 1: Go to your preferences page.
Step 2: Scroll down to the "Star wars Prequels" checkbox.
Step 3: Check it.
Step 4: Done.
Then you won't be bothered with those pesky Star Wars articles that will contain filthy spoilers.
Oh, you want to know about the Star Wars Prequels, but you just don't want any spoilers?
Step 1: Stop reading slashdot.
Step 2: You can't have everything.
Step 2: Done.
My father is a blogger.
They needed to "tie the series together?"
They've got Obi-Wan, Anakin, and eventually Leia and Luke to tie the series together.
They're throwing in Chewie because:
a) Lucas ran out of ideas a long damn time ago.
b) Characters from the original trilogy sell better than characters from this one.
c) Hey. Don't complain. Could have been Ewoks...
How does everyone keep running into eachother? This galaxy of Lucas' is pretty tiny. Is Wedge going to run around in Episode III and introduce himself to everyone?
...the rest of Chewie's family? Here's hoping Maula, Itchy, and Lumpy will also be making return appearances.
Lucas points to casting room:
"I don't care what you smell... get in there"
You're not very smart if you think that you wouldn't see chewbacca in the tv spots 6 months before the movie's release.
Here's another spoiler for you, Anakin will become Darth Vader and use a red light saber.
Sorry to spoil the movie for you though.
It's true
I would know!!
Who are y oo ?
c) Hey. Don't complain. Could have been Ewoks...
:-)
:-)
The Ewoks were supposed to be Wookies originally. But then some genius thought they would sell more dolls if they were all small and cute and annoying. So there you go, they just had to flip the name... ee-wok... wok-ee...
With a little bit of mental exercise you can ignore what your eyes see and imagine it's the planet of the Wookies all right.
Use the force, wook.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
If you didn't like the movies don't take this post as an invitation for you to bash it. It seems like every time someone mentions some key word like "star wars" in a NEWS article, the same old damn topics always come up. I myself hated Jar Jar, but overall 1 and 2 were good movies! Lucas's "vision" was to create a precurser to the original star wars series, and he performed the task well imho. Lets keep the talk to Wookies and not weather the movie was good.
This is not a troll, as trolls are green.
OK, we have a galaxy (far far away) with at least a few thousand planets. Each planet would presumably have on the order of 1-10 billion inhabitants. So what are the chances that:
1. a "remote" planet called Tatooine continually becomes vitally important to the fate of the galaxy, time and time again?
2. The same five to ten characters coincidentally reappear, time and time again? C-3PO was actually made by Anakin and just happened to be on the ship that was attacked near Tatooine and end up on Luke's farm? Now Chewbacca is going to show up, as a "coincidence?"
I suppose you could make arguments about the 'Force' making these coincidences happen. But you have to admit that's retro-explanations. Everything in Episodes 4-6 indicated that these characters were meeting for the first time, with no prior history. Now Lucas (and Star Wars fanboys) want to convince us that "no, really there's a whole previous story with these characters, which was never alluded to in the 'later' episodes."
It just goes to show what a crap storyteller Lucas is these days. How he got that way, I don't know. But Star Wars these days is about as well-written as the Daredevil movie.
I think his re-appearance in this film is a fitting way to tie the whole saga together, especially for Wookiee fans."
:-)
Umm. There's Wookie fans?
Is this a fetish thing?
And I thought this was wierd...
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
In seriousness, though, I'm not wild about this; I love Chewie as much as anyone, but to tie him to the storyline at this early point and then just happen to have him intersect with it again in the classic trilogy just pushes coincidence too far, IMO. Characters like Obi-Wan, Anakin / Vader, Luke, Leia, Artoo and Threepio, Yoda, Owen, Beru, etc. who have some connection to the royal houses of Naboo and / or Alderaan and / or the Skywalker family legacy make sense for inclusion in the prequels, but for characters from other circles (Han, Chewie, Lando, Jabba, Boba, etc.) who weren't already established in the originals as being connected to them to suddenly turn out to have some prior connection after all shrinks the Star Wars universe a little too much, I think (but then, that's hardly the biggest problem with the prequels...).
*sigh* Oh, well. I'll still see it, I'm sure, and I hope it's better than the first two (hey, it's possible, right?), and I similarly hope Chewie's return / "debut" is either handled in a plausible way, or is simply good enough not to object to (or better yet, both). I guess we'll see...
(verb) see: Jump the shark.
Hmm... this seems to me to be the second time they've used Chewbacca to "spice up" the series, so to speak. The first time was in the book Vector Prime, where Chewbacca became the first/only one of the surviving heroes from Episodes 4-6 to be killed off. Now, they're putting him in Episode III... *shrug*
I'd ask why, but I already know the answer. Money. *sigh* More and more I'm inclined to agree that Lucas SHOULD have allowed Spielberg to direct Episode III...
Just my $.02...
Technically, he went over to the Dark Side in Ep. 2 when he slew all those Sandpeople.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Whatever favorable opinion you may have had of the original series, Lucas is completely creatively bankrupt now, not an unusual development for creative types. Does anyone on the planet think Francis Ford Coppela is still as creative as he was in the 70s (Godfather I & II, The Conversation, Apocalyse Now)? Why is it surprising that Lucas has suffered the same fate? Unfortunately, he has total control over SW and thus has dragged the franchise down with him. Too bad a Peter Jackson could not be entrusted with such a project, but, as his right, Lucas is intent on taking his baby to the grave with him.
I'd rather see chewbacca appear in a romantic comedy with sandra bullock
Well, at least there'd be more chemistry than in Episode II.
I agree. It was contrived enough that he had Anakin make 3PO, and it just HAPPENED that Boba Fett, the most popular bounty hunter, was chosen to be a model for the clones. Is he even capable of creating new characters? Oh yeah, Darth Maul. He was cool. Except Lucas fleshed out his character like Kate Moss trapped in a 1-dimensional universe.
And you know, if he wants to maintain some consistency with the first two, he wouldn't use an actor at all for Chewbacca, just some fidgety CGI model.
c-hack.com |
Recall that in Ep 4, Chewbacca is identified as being over 200 years old. 20 years earlier means over 180 years old. I think Meyhew being 30 years older isn't going to make much of a difference. It does not bring him appreciably closer to either age for Chewbacca
-Rusty
You never know...
I thought that went something like "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me twice... You can't get fooled again!"
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
However, I think that the movies of the post original star-wars era that are most liable to still have people talking about them in 20 years time are the LOTR movies by Peter Jackson.
But I draw the line at Star Trek vs. Middle Earth debates ("Hah! Gandalf's an Istari! He took down a Balrog, he could take down a Borg Cube if he wanted to!") No.... I really don't wanna go there.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Don't blame Lucas, he's just following in the grand tradition of many storytellers. For example, Shakespeare wrote a number of plays in which characters separated earlier in life are reunited by coincidence.
I hear the Ferenghi, Q, and the Borg are going to make an appearance, too, completely spoiling the previous continuity.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Remember, Lucas is trying to show the conversion of a very promising young Jedi Knight into the right hand man for the forces of evil. What could be the triggering factor that would make a character such as Anakin no longer value sentient life? If taking revenge for his mother's death wasn't enough to push him over the edge for good, what will be?
It can only be Jar-Jar. That's the death that would really make the audience think. "Wait, is killing Jar-Jar really evil? Perhaps the dark side of the force is more seductive than we imagined!" "Sure, Anakin/Vader is now going to cause the loss of billions of innocent lives and help his vicious master oppress the galaxy for decades... but isn't that a price I would have been just as willing to pay to see Jar-Jar strangled with his own tongue?"
In efforts to save money, I heard that Lucas is going to resurrect some of the wookie footage from the Holiday Special and cut it into Episode III...
The classic exmaple is a star destroyer vs. the enterprise.
And the SD would "win" if they fought at any reasonable range
Actually, this is not true. Star Destroyers use lasers for weaponry (well, turbo-lasers but lasers nonetheless). May I quote some dialog from the TNG episode The Outrageous Okona:
Worf: They're locking lasers.
Riker: Lasers? That won't even penetrate the hull.
Picard: Well, shields up anyway, we wouldn't want them to think we aren't taking them seriously.
So a SD with all of it's thousands of lasers might do enough damage to scratch the NCC-1701-D registry right off. The best hope would be simply ramming, either with all those TIEs or just the SD itself, but unless the Enterprise was incapacitated first it would easily move out of the way being a smaller more manuverable ship.
"Woa! Just for the records: Artoo and C-3PO will be there too!" Didn't someone say that the whole series is told by the droids anyways? I mean, that would explain how C-3PO is able to tell the ewoks the story at the end of Return of The Jedi..
Insert Sig Here
Jar Jar's head. On a silver platter. With Ewok sauce on the side.
No, really, I think George Lucas really needs to learn that he's been getting a pretty bad rap for Episode 1 and Episode 2. His storytelling skills have rusted, and he needs to realize that the magic is gone.
It was fresh when it came out, but now we're used to big aliens, flashy special effects, and bad acting. He needs to provide the people with something that actually lives to the level of innovating the originals had, instead of being all high and mighty and telling us it's an epic.
The thing is people know an epic when they see one. You don't need to tell them that it's an epic, because then there's a chance you could get screwed. Instead, imoho, he should revamp his methods, find what works/what the people want, and do it.
Another sad thing that I think the new ones have really lost was the feeling of the originals. The originals felt like they were made on a small budget and stuff, and the new ones just try to impress you with graphics and Jar Jar.
*[/rant mode]*
is that we'll get another great soundtrack from John Williams. I can ignore the dialogue and still enjoy the movie, and I'll probably get just as much of the "plot", too!
... now, this is the kind of debate that makes Slashdot Slashdot... ;-)
Of course he's beloved; if it weren't for Chewbacca, we never would've heard Ralph say, "I bent my wookie."
Join Team Slashdot at Folding@Home
C3PO either can't understand R2-D2, or for some reason chooses not to communicate what he says, so R2-D2 is running around saying things like "Watch out Luke! Vader is your father!" and "Hey Yoda! How's it hangin?" and Threepio doesn't bother to translate them.
Maybe Threepio is still secretly loyal to Vader and doesn't want to tip Luke off?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Except Lucas will probably hire Britney Spears to replay the role for A New Hope Ultra Special Edittion, because his teenage daughter asked him to.
Also, in the "Greedo shot first" tradition, Chewie will no longer speak with monosylabic screams, but in upper class English.
Now we all know where the anecdote about Wookies' poor sportsmanship originated (ripping arms out of sockets when they lose). In Ep III, Jar Jar will challenge Chewie to a chess match and, stupidly, will embarrass the Wookie. We all know how this ends (and have been looking forward to it since Ep. I).
And you thought you fetish was fucked up.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
In A new Hope, Obi-Wan sets up the Han meeting through Chewbacca. Their having a previous relationship lends merit to that little detail. And, slightly off-topic, but if Lucas keeps bringing back characters, why can't we see the Millenium Falcon in its heyday!? The Falcon is the coolest character in all the movies.
If you were over 12 when the movie came out, then yes, you are the only one.
I was 11 at the time. Ah, those were the days.
However if my son, now 2 years old, ever watches Episodes I & II and actually decides he likes Jar-Jar Binks... well, I'll have to take another look at the will.
...then there really isn't much need for pants.
Unless you get a boner, I suppose. Then it might be embarrasing.
But presumably they wanted to *hide* Darth Vader's offspring from him... so why would they "hide" Luke right where Darth would expect to find him? On his home planet, with his relatives (by marriage)?
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I admit to being somewhat baffled by it all. If I were an editor I would have posted this story without even thinking that someone might consider it a spoiler.