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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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hmm... maybe they'll be smart and incorporate some of the excellent books written by timothy zahn as screenplays.
Kevin would have to be a moron to do it. No matter how good the tv series is it will be slammed as not as good as the original. Expecially if you expect 3-5 seasons worth of good stuff. There is no pleasing the star wars fans.
Bad idea. You want to run a franchise into the ground this is the way to do it.
I'd think Star Trek would have demonstrated that already...
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Is there anything that Kevin Smith has not been named as a possible director for? I'm still waiting for his Green Lantern movie.
Darth: "No Luke, I am your father!"
Luke: "You're my dad? Oh boy, and you know what the worst thing is?"
Darth: "What, my son?"
Luke: "I'm not even supposed to be here today!"
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Does that mean it will have Mark Hamill as Cock-Knocker?
I checked USA Today, Google News, and Yahoo News, and was not able to find the actual story in USA Today. Doesn't USA Today put everything on the web? Shouldn't a rumor like this be substantiated a little bit more?
"Do you see a sign on my lawn that says 'Dead Wookie Storage'??"
Before everyone suggests this is a bad move I just want to say look at SG1. The original movie was at best 'ok' but thanks to the series the brand is highly valued.
Sorry, can't resist, I just have to post it :)
(taken from http://www.whysanity.net/monos/clerks5.html)
Building the Death Star
written by Kevin Smith
Randal: So they build another Death Star, right?
Dante: Yeah.
Randal: Now the first one they built was completed and fully operational before the Rebels destroyed it.
Dante: Luke blew it up. Give credit where it's due.
Randal:And the second one was still being built when they blew it up.
Dante: Compliments of Lando Calrissian.
Randal: Something just never sat right with me the second time they destroyed it. I could never put my finger on it-something just wasn't right.
Dante: And you figured it out?
Randal: Well, the thing is, the first Death Star was manned by the Imperial army-storm troopers, dignitaries- the only people onboard were Imperials.
Dante: Basically.
Randal: So when they blew it up, no prob. Evil is punished.
Dante: And the second time around...?
Randal: The second time around, it wasn't even finished yet. They were still under construction.
Dante: So?
Randal: A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.
Dante: Not just Imperials, is what you're getting at.
Randal: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.
Dante: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?
Randal: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed- casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. (notices Dante's confusion) All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living.
(The Blue-Collar Man (Thomas Burke) joins them.)
Blue-Collar Man: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about?
Randal: The ending of Return of the Jedi.
Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.
Blue-Collar Man: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer... (digs into pocket and produces business card) Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.
Randal: Like when?
Blue-Collar Man: Three months ago I was offered a job up in the hills. A beautiful house with tons of property. It was a simple reshingling job, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose house it was.
Dante: Whose house was it?
Blue-Collar Man: Dominick Bambino's.
Randal: "Babyface" Bambino? The gangster?
Blue-Collar Man: The same. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who he was, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine.
Dante: Based on personal politics.
Blue-Collar Man: Right. And that week, the Foresci family put a hit on Babyface's house. My friend was shot and killed. He wasn't even finished shingling.
Rand
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
I guess that's the good part of the story
I don't read replies by ACs.
...As if the voices of a million Star Wars fans suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced...
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
A .nerd tld might be amusing...Perhaps I'll go email the OSRC.
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.
Who is gonna change channel first? Me or Greedo?
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.
They had it on their front page yesterday but pulled it or something and I can find no reference to the story today. They are tied very closely to Lucasfilm so it makes me wonder...
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
The weekly treadmill is precisely what television is.
For further insight, consider "Star Trek V". It was the only movie (based on the original characters) to lose money. However, when "Star Trek V" was broadcast on television, the movie seemed okay, compared to the junk food on the other channels.
The only conceivable way for Star Wars on the boob tube to not deteriorate to the level of Star Trek is to develop plots requiring at least 3 episodes to tell. In other words, across a 21-week viewing season, Star Wars, the boob tube show, would essentially be aired as 7 movies, each movie being 3 hours in length.
For fate's sake, please try to get good actors and actresses.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
We smoke when we shoot the bird. -- An anonymous mooninite.
For future reference, you may like to know that the little pink mooninite you quoted is called Irr and the larger green one is called Ignignokt.
New. Levels. Of. Yanking. That. Teet.
Oh no, please don't tell me that William Shatner is going to be in it... [runs away screaming]
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.
Luke: Don't you never say an unkind word about the Time. Me and Silent Solo modeled our whole fucking lives around Morris Day and Jerome. I'm a smooth pimp who loves the pussy. And Tubby here is my black man servant. What.
[Silent Solo nods vigorously]
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Wait a minute guys, this is a TV SCI-FI SERIES we are talking about here. There is no problem with them making Star Wars into the next Babylon 5, and here's why:
What do you always get in a TV Sci-Fi series?
Cheesecake.
That's right, Cheesecake. The only compelling reason to watch sci-fi, and directors like to serve up big, heaping slices topped with insincere gravitas and skin tight costumes.
Jerri Ryan, that Vulcan from 'Enterprise', Erin Grey, Lt. Orora, Tasha Yar (I think that was her name), Debbie from Sealab, um... someone from Babylon 5, uh...
I actually don't watch that much TV, so I don't really know the whole list. I am certain there are some other people who can help fill in the details.
But you get the drift, and I, for one, cannot wait until the first time someone has to swing across a vast chasm.
Hoping to see Pam Anderson as a Grand Moff,
M
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
The best comparison is Enterprise. Every Trekkie knows how the universe played out, hence a lot of them hate Enterprise for changing that!
Funny you should mention Berman. From TFA:
Berman: When asked if he had any other advice for George, "He can always hire me if Enterprise doesn't work out".
I think I speak for everyone with a geeky bone in his body when I say . . .
Nooooooooooooo!
Or, perhaps more thematically appropriately:
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!
If its any different than that, it will be pure crap, nobody will watch it and it will be filed away in the history of TV Land failures, right behind Cop Rock.
-- Mace only makes me hornier.
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
There is no pleasing the star wars fans.
You're absolutely right! How could the man who gave us Howard the Duck ever do wrong?
Sarcasm aside, Episodes I and II are dumbed-down versions of Star Wars. They were more about the special effects than about the story. I find it ridiculously simplistic that Senator Palpatine could so easily engineer the takeover of the Empire; are there no other senior politicians who are in this with him? And the acting is wooden; even Ewan McGregor, one of my favorite actors, stumbles through these movies like he's not quite sure how to handle the material. Given how gifted McGregor is, I have to assume that it's Lucas's direction and writing that are the problem.
Thr first trilogy was made in the late 70's/early 80's, before the tech revolution. For most of us, it pushed the boundaries of science fiction. Two decades later, the tech concepts of the prequels are ho-hum. Lucas really needed to hand these off to someone who had a little more of a vision than he did.
Can you imagine if Lucas had contracted the Wachowski Brothers to write and direct the prequels? Even the least favored movie in the Matrix trilogy blows away the Star Wars prequels.
The best of the five Star Wars movies, SW:TESB, was not directed by Lucas. I think that that speaks volumes.
- CSI: Coruscant
- Law & Order: Imperial Sedition Unit
- Extreme Makeover: Padawan Edition
- The Darth Vader Factor
- Survivor: Dagobah
- Who Wants To Marry A Sith Lord?
- The Apprentice
Damn. Actually I think I'd enjoy some of those."It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
You know guys, you could always not watch it.
That pretty much works for me when I don't want to see a TV show.
-sig removed for tax purposes-
Or the classic: "Bocce, motherfucker, do you speak it?"
" 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]
Say MIDICHLORIANS again, I double dare you!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
ADMIRAL JAY AKBAR: All right, plan A. We wait 'till the Death Star's right about in orbit, then WHAM! Smack two fuckin' proton torpedoes right up its trench. We're all on 'em with the snub fighters, which Grand Moff LaFours won't be expectin' - their pitiful-ass defenses are designed for capital ships, baby! Then it's back to the Temple on Yavin for some hot Wookie sex and a fattie blunt. May the force be with us! Snootchie-bootchies!