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Star Wars TV Show
The lunatick writes "IESB and Theforce.net report a Star Wars TV show. Lucas will not direct it just produce it. Kevin Smith (Silent Bob, the clerks series) is named as a possible director."
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That, folks, is someone milking it for all its worth.
Lucas has always done that, but gaaaaaah...New. Levels. Of. Yanking. That. Teet.
Oh well, I guess I just pity the poor cow...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
I wish you "underground" and "alternative" folks would realize that you are slopping up movies like "Clerks" because that is what the mass *mainstream* media is feeding you. You are being played worse than the "pop" culture you wish you really did despise.
There's already been a pilot for a Star Wars spinoff show that has gotten favorable reactions. They should consider turning it into a series.
Just show more Mos Eisleys, Death Stick Dealers, smugglers in crappy starships, malfunctioning droids, bounty hunters, weird aliens...
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
In my opinion, a Star Wars TV series would work best with the timeline about 5000 years before the Battle of Yavin, which is around the time of action of Knights of the Old Republic. You've got the Sith Wars, the Mandalorian War, and the conflict with Exar Kun going on about that time, and there's a good amount of Jedi and Sith to do battle and tons of interesting worlds as well. With this we could avoid the same old "Empire vs. Rebels/Republic vs. Separatist" nonsense.
I'd have to dissagree with that. As far as I'm concerned Babylon 5 was a giant space soap opera. If you look at it from beginning to end, there is a giant purpose to how JMS wrote it. In fact, there was even hints that how the story turned out was not his true vision. That Sinclair was supposed to be the only "the one". In any case, babylon 5 is a giant soap opera, and it worked in a 1 hour time slot. Star Wars can do the same, it will all come down to the writers, and pray they aren't like the Star Trek writers.
Smith himself has said he wouldn't touch the Star Wars franchise with a ten foot pole. After seeing the uproar over Episode 1 & 2 he refuses to be accused of "raping someone's childhood".
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
You should watch Ken Burns's documentary in the new DVD set. Carrie Fisher says that they used to tell Lucas that you can write lines like the "stench" one and people accept it on the page, but not when actors say it...
I could put up with a couple of years if they use it to somehow cover what could have happened in 7-9.
After all the celebrations at the end of the 6th movie are kind of silly, its not like the Empire evaporated with their Emperor. There would be many years of putting the whole back together.
Now, how to make a movie out of that I don't know. I do not think fans would stand for Luke, Leia, or even Han being transformed into bad guys.
Attempting to fill in gaps between the movies would not make a great story because everyone knows how it came out. The best comparison is Enterprise. Every Trekkie knows how the universe played out, hence a lot of them hate Enterprise for changing that!
We need good science fantasy/fiction on the TV. Who is to say that Star Wars cannot do that? At least give it a shot. Even Lucas is better than Beavis and Butthead over at Star Trek.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Interesting. Hopefully, they'll either be based on:
;) The problem is twofold- 1) It'd be very, very easy to screw it up and make it really bad, and 2) To the people who haven't read the books in between, it'd look really silly- they finish the Clone Wars to have a Galactic Civil War, then after that go straight to the Yuuzhan Vong Invasion. One enemy for another.
A) After Return of the Jedi- in this case, following the X-wing series (liberation of Coruscant and all) and the Thrawn trilogy (yay!) by Zahn. The problem with this is that the actors are way too old to play Luke and Wedge and Han and Leia and Lando.
B) New Jedi Order. Some of the best books in all of Star Wars. The character shields are GONE- Chewbacca dies, along with a number of Expanded Universe characters throughout the year. The especially useful part is that it takes place 25 years after Return of the Jedi, meaning they could use Mark Hamill and he'd fit right in
A) Lucas didn't direct Empire, that was directed by Irvin Kershner.
B) I always thought Mallrats was Smith's low point. But that's just personal opinion.
Might be interesting to see the Old Republic from the perspective of a different Jedi (one of the others from the movies - not one of the main ones) where you can also have some of the main Jedi showing up from time to time.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Can he pull it off? Absolutely. Whine about GL all you want; you can not deny the fact that he and the team he personally assembled single handedly changed movies and fimmaking forever. THX, Pixar, ILM - all creations of the flannelled one. If he surrounds himself with the right talent, and maintains a level of quality control, it could be quite successful, and we can avoid a redux of the Holiday Special.
Star Wars is ubiquitous to every single form of media except television. It only seems to be the next logical step after the prequels are finished. What Lucas needs to keep in mind is when to let it go. The idea is to stop when you see the shark you're about to jump.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
The movie was so-so, so it was easier for the tv show to be better.
While the TV show is better, it did have a lot more time to explore characters and themes than the original feature film. "Stargate" is definitely not a Great Movie, but it's visually innovative, has decent enough writing and no cringey eye-rolling moments (though I'd edit out a few of the scenes with Kurt Russell and the kids, just to keep it well on the safe side of the cheese threshold). I've watched it several times and it's still *fun*.
Freedom: "I won't!"
The best of the five Star Wars movies, SW:TESB, was not directed by Lucas. I think that that speaks volumes.
And he didn't write it either. THAT is the main reason I think it's the best. He had a hand in ROTJ which is probably why we got the Ewoks.
He has shown in the prequels that his writing ability is laughable at best.
I dunno who it is
but it prolly is fhqwhgads.
" The problem with this is that the actors are way too old to play Luke and Wedge and Han and Leia and Lando."
That is not necessarily a problem. Many movies have gone onto TV series using entirely different casts than the original. The most obvious one that springs to mind is M*A*S*H. Ask just about anyone today "who played Hawkeye in MASH" and I doubt a single person would answer you with "Donald Sutherland"
Granted, the bigscreen version M*A*S*H is not quite on par with Star Wars pop-culture-wise (although when it was first released it was highly successful and the main stars were very identifiable at the time). Also, M*A*S*H fans were probably never quite as obsessive as their Star Wars counterparts.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
I think the best way to do a Star Wars TV show would be to do it as a combination of the old serials and short stories.
The writers should be telling several stories. Each episode would cover a segment of one story. They might do one or two episodes of one story in a row, then switch over to another story for the next episode.
Maybe they could follow an agent of the Imperial Scouting Service as they explore a new hyperspace route, or a couple of Corporate Sector Authority investigators checking out an industrial espionage situation. Maybe we could see the Black Sun organization, or do a couple of episodes on a Stormtrooper squad, like Troops.
With this format, the show wouldn't be tied to any particular era. They could mix up genres. It certainly wouldn't get boring. There would be unlimited room for growth.
As the series matures, maybe a couple of the storylines could touch each other. Perhaps the industrial espionage operation being investigated by the CSA is the same operation we see getting set up in the Black Sun story.
I tell you, this idea is brilliant! Brilliant, I say!
Now I just need to know who to send it to...
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
IAAW (I Am A Writer) and I can tell you that the golden rule of dialogue in literature is to make it believable. A different set of rules applies to movies, movie characters talk in a certain way. Close your eyes and listen to the dialogue sometime, then ask yourself who actually talks like that. Who actually says things just for the purpose of explaining or revealing something to a watching audience? Nevertheless, some of the script in the original trilogy was truly dire, and the point I'm making is that people conveniently forget this (because of nostalgia) when slating the new trilogy as being inferior to the original one.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Yes and no. The preexisting characters (Luke, Han, Leia, etc) don't grow all that much over the course of the books. Some, but not a lot.
Zahn's own characters are another matter entirely. Mara Jade, Talon Kardde, Joruus C'Baoth- all of them grow immensely as characters throughout the series.
Re: "Also - in Zahn's books the clone wars were Jedis being cloned and going nuts rather than the pre-cursors to the Stormtroopers."
No, the clones were not Jedi. I think you were a bit confused by the explanation. Zahn's reasoning for the clones' insanity is that genetically identical beings create some kind of resonance in the Force that slowly drives them insane. The clones didn't have to be Jedi or other Force-sensitive types to be affected this way, or else Thrawn wouldn't have needed ysalimiri in the cloning chambers to clone soldiers and pilots. Good fucking Christ, I am such a geek.
These points aside, I do agree that the Thrawn series would not work as a third movie trilogy. The pacing is completely different from what's appropriate for a two-hour film, for starters. Furthermore, the plot is much more complicated, and couldn't be sufficiently simplified without gutting many great subplots and axing a lot of characters. Aves and Niles Ferrier would likely end up sharing an unmarked grave with Tom Bombadil.
You could make a pretty good miniseries out of the Thrawn books, were it not for two things:
1. The original actors are far too old (or too dead) and probably wouldn't want to reprise these roles anyway.
2. Few Star Wars fans would accept any replacements no matter how good they might be. Even if they did a better job than the original actors, they'd be vilified for having the nerve, the sheer audacity not to be the original actors. And how many actors would want to face the liklihood of being labeled "not as good as Mark Hamill"?
IIRC the explanation for the dark place on Dagobah was a cloned Jedi that had gone nuts. Given that the stormtroopers are themselves clones, it seemed kind of odd that Thrawn would need all that force damnpning gear to make his own set of clones - given that he already had lots of clones in his storm trooper legions. Perhaps something happened to the Kaminoans - though given the Empire's rather substantial supply of Stormtroopers up until Endor, there doesn't seem to be any suggestion anywhere in the books that the supply of clones suddenly dried up.
The clones thing is an area where it becomes difficult to reconcile the Zahn books with the prequels.
Although I agree that Mara somewhat developed (at least she dealt with her impulse to kill Luke), I didn't feel that Kaarde was much more than a two dimensional character. I'm also not sure about Joruus - he just kinda seemed nuts the whole time.
I disagree about the mini-series being a good idea. The X-Wing books might work that way - but I really felt that Dark Force Rising and The Last Command weren't nearly as strong as Heir to the Empire. All the cool stuff happens in the first book - the second and third never seem to catch up. The later Hand of Thrawn books are better - but I think that the person who writes the "most Star Warsy" books of that type is Stackpole. Shatterpoint - with Mace Windu - would make a good film as well.
But I'm amused that whenever a Star Wars thread pops up on Slashdot, someone responds "they should make the Zahn books". I think that most people tha tmake this comment really don't remember what was in the Zahn books other than that they enjoyed them when they came out in the early 1990's before the Prequels were announced.