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The Secret History of Star Wars
lennier writes "How exactly did George Lucas develop the script for the first Star Wars? Why were the prequels so uneven when the originals were so good? Did he really have a masterplan for six, nine, or even twelve episodes, and why did the official Lucasfilm position keep changing? And just how big an influence were the films of Akira Kurosawa on the whole saga? Michael Kaminski's The Secret History of Star Wars, Third Edition is a free, thoroughly unauthorized, e-book that brings together a huge amount of literary detective work to sort fact from legend and reveal how the story really evolved. Download it or have your nerd credentials revoked."
It's just a movie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress
and you have the two bumbling fools, the noble princess, and the hero trekking across hostile territory, doing various good deeds and engaging in various skirmishes. the scope of the movie and the plot are completely different, but you can immediately understand why this movie was the jumping off point for the picaresque characters of C3PO and R2D2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picaresque_novel
C3PO and R2D2, using their point of view, is really the most risky and rewarding aspect of star wars. now, i don't think lucas would ever admit it, but i think he was trying to conjure up the same sort of picaresque magic twice... with the character jar jar binks
except that character was a terrible failure, while C3PO and R2D2 are universally loved. i don't claim to understand why one worked and the other didn't, but clearly jar jar falls flat as a humours bumbling low life antidote to the otherwise deadly serious proceedings, while the two robots rocked in the same sort of role
which brings me to a final thought: movie magic isn't easy. i think a lot of fanboys need to cut lucas a break. he gave us star wars. did you forget that? ok, he fumbled with the final 3 movies. but holding him in scorn for that, while completely forgetting the first 3, is totally unfair of you. if, in your mind, you can't rise above your own frustrated expectations of the latter 3 movies to still cherish the guy for the first 3, you really are taking star wars way too seriously
oops
did i just suggest someone might take star wars too seriously? yikes, gotta run and hide now, i just awoke the rabid partisan fanboy beasts...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why were the prequels so uneven when the originals were so good?
... shall I go on? you know them.
because those prequels are actually sequels. You know, they were actually made *after* the originals. Like all sequels, they are attempts to milk the cash cow created by the original franchise, i.e. ensure money will be made on the sequels just by vertue of the movie's name. And in many cases, the moviemaker thinks the name alone is enough, and forgets to make the sequel original or exciting because he has cold feets he didn't have when he made the first incarnation.
Examples of good movies with bad sequels:
Matrix
Rambo
Rocky
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I think the author of the "nerd credentials" statement should have his nerd credentials revoked, if he ever had them at all. Star wars is Dorky, not nerdy. Nerds like math, dorks like D&D. Completely different. Nerds get girlfriends due to their thirst for all knowledge and experiences, while dorks grab onto obscure games and facts, because its something that makes them difficult to quickly judge and allows them to feel superior in a field. I am a nerd, perhaps a king or duke of their kind, but I am not a dork.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
why on earth jar-jar was allowed more than 3 seconds of screen time?
Lucas should have taken advantage of the JJ hatred and turned him into an accident-prone character who gets his tongue caught in food processors, gets hit by meteorites or low-flying ships, etc.; sort of like the intergalactic Wiley Coyote. People would cheer everytime he got it.
Table-ized A.I.
"Shaped the course of history"? Gimme a break. It IS just a movie. And yes, it has great cultural significance. But at the end of the day, has it influenced foreign policy? Have real life people been killed because of it? Are people willing to give their life, or alter their concept of what life is about in the most sacred way, because of it? Have nations altered their behavior because of it?
Star Wars is just a movie and a successful business franchise. Influential, yes, and I'm sure some souls out there fit under some category I've mentioned above, but to say that it has "shaped the course of human history" is a bit over the top.
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Unlike those plastic action figures that emerged to commercialize the world forever, 'Star Wars' was an organically fallible piece much more in common with 'American Graffiti' than the blockbuster c--- that has dominated the last 30 years. I was a kid in the seats in 1977 and what captured my heart at the time was the gritty broken chaotic mess of the first film. Droids break, spaceships fragment, bizzare languages permeate every scene, plans go spectacularly awry. Even a kid could see that this was life. Spielberg used to capture this spirit in those wonderful scenes where everybody is talking at once; dialog that doesn't translate to the international export market. We all know, the true sequel of Star Wars is 'Firefly.' ---537
I think it would have been much funnier if he was just generally portrayed as clumsy (like he already was), and then got killed instantly in a single accident, by doing something patently stupid, like walking onto a pod racing track, or walking up to a ship afterburner immediately before it took off. It would elicit a single, epic cheer from every fan.
Alternate definition: Someone who argues about the definition of nerd credentials on /. and is modded up for it, generally has nerd credentials. Welcome, o' nerdy brother!
I think Star Wars is only dorky if you dress up for it. But perhaps that is my unfair prejudice against cosplay. To the "don't knock it until you've tried it crowd" -- no thanks!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I don't know, I find that when people say they "hate Star Wars", its really just to be different. I could see not being interested in the movies, but hating them seems a little much.
Oh god, the Nerd/Dork/Geek argument. We always went with nerds being unwashed, antisocial geniuses who small vaguely like cheese, and somehow manage to reference Yoda, and differential equations in every utterance. Dorks are just like nerds, but dumber. And geeks are the swashbuckling generalists who get all the chicks (er...) because they have some modicum of social skills, while still knowing their swallows apart.
By your jargon though, there still is a deep relation between nerds and dorks, since both of them are "systems" people. D&D is just another complex system to play with, just like math, code, and circuits. As is, oddly, the various nerd friendly mythologies. Both groups, by your classification, are equally likely to get the chicks... Not very. Neither math nor D&D impress many of the chicks I know.
So where does arguing over the semantics of nerdery put one?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Oh come on, anyone who tries these little classifications... come on, face it, we're all nerds, we're all geeks, I don't really know anyone who uses the term dork any more, so perhaps that speaks volumes as to your status?
You can be a geek or a nerd or anything you like AND still have social skills...
I prefer the term geek for myself, but hey, don't get too bogged down with terms for god's sake, we all pursue things of a cerebral nature, be they maths, be they D&D, you getting so uppity with possibly being called not a nerd because you don't like Star Wars... that just shows you're just as big of a dick as the jocks who look down on all nerds and geeks and dorks, you're just refining down your scorning of people into finer subgroups.
That doesn't make you any better than the jocks, and in fact probably just a hypocrite.
Learn to be comfortable in yourself and don't mind what bucket you get thrown in this week, it doesn't matter... if you're happy with who you are and with your friends and family who gives two rat's fused arses what people call you?
It was because he never had a moment of dignity. He was the comic relief in every one of his scenes. Even in battle he was just a clutz, even as he was being promoted and rewarded.
If you are going to make a cutesy character work, you have to give them a kick-arse moment at some point.
I thought this was covered in Geroge Lucas in Love.
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
Lucas was like Roddenberry, great ideas, but they need to let other more talented writers and such do the polishing of the raw stones into gems. When Gene was heavily involved in the early years of TNG, it was /terrible/, and I say this as a die hard trekkie. When his role was reduced, the show began to shine. all the facets of what Trek could be were able to be explored. And when untalented people got ahold of the franchise (most of Voyager, the first three seasons of Enterprise) it went into the toilet (Season 4 of ENT was genius, Manny Coto is one smart cookie). Same with Star Wars. I'm not a huge SW guy, but I liked the first three, and saw huge problems with the prequel set that a good editor and writer could have fixed very quickly.
Story wise, Episode 1 needed cut down to about 15 minutes of intro for Episode 2, which is now Episode 1. This is a common problem with movies and TV shows, in that too many writers think we need to be introed to our characters at the dawn of time. It's much better when we join the story already at a decent pace and get the background filled in along the way. This lets the viewer/reader get interested in what's happening without having to spend time in school learning about the history of our characters first. If we wanted school, we'd read a textbook. Also, kill the midichlorian crap, excise JarJar Binks. Midichlorians stole the wonder from The force and JarJar wasn't taht great a merchandising tool anyway, as I STILL see Ep1 crap at the local Big Lots.
Episode 3 is now Episode 2, except for the last 15 minutes or so. This should end when Kenobi leaves Whinykin, er, Anakin, truncated on the volcano. Ep3 picks up there and we spend the next 2 hours seeing the creation of Darth Vader and how he builds the Empire and WHY. Only knowing that can we truly appreciate him turning on the emperor in Ep6, and what it means for him to look on his son with is own eyes.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I have a theory I call the Marx Brothers Syndrome and it works like this:
The Marx Brothers are old and boring today. A person having never seen them before will sit down in front of one of their classics and know all the jokes and nuances and just walk away.
If they were so great, why is this so?
It is because the were great, one of the greatest! Everyone in the business learned their tricks, copied their jokes, and expanded and improved on their dialog and themes. Now the Marx Brothers look diminished in comparison to what has developed after.
The same is true for Star Wars. It was great when it came out. It covered new ground. It did things that people had never seen before. In a lot of ways Star Wars was "dreadful." Today, I watch it and think Luke is such a whiner and C3PO shouldn't be an uptight english comic book character.
I think the episodes 1,2, and 3 suffered from the Marx Brothers Syndrome because the story, dialog, and "film making" of "Star Wars" has always been fairly flawed and needs to show us something new to allow us to overlook the weaknesses. Unfortunately, the cutting edge for special effects is irrelevant. Once you crossed over the "miniatures and props methodology" to CGI, improvements are now only incremental.
Star Wars fails because we already know it. We've seen it before in a thousand different ways since 1977. We already know the special effects. We have seen enough space opera, complete with bad dialog and acting, that there is almost nothing that would surprise us.
IMHO, Star Wars was ground breaking, but the space opera is as depleted a genre as the american western.
And so balance was brought to the Force.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The thing is, nearly the entire audience for Star Wars and Indiana Jones were too young to remember the "Saturday Serials" movie genre that Lucas was paying homage. They were cheap, they were pulpy, they had heros larger than life and more cheese than Wisconsin. The dialogue was not the selling point: the wow factor of swords and pistols and chases and mummies and exotic foreigners were the hook. Pay a dime to get in, pay a nickel for your root beer float afterwards.
Lucas recreated that bad-dialogue-silly-heroism on purpose. That's why he ignored all the flack about bad dialogue through the first trilogy and why he ignores it about the second trilogy too. It worked for us old-timers in 1977 because we weren't old-timers. Now with all the HBO and Blockbuster you can shake a stick at, even a kid born in 1990 has enough world-view inside him to spot how cheesy Episode One was, but has no cultural context with which to judge them. What has changed? We have.
[
It was a simple tale told well.
The opening credits were a novel and gripping way of getting people into the story. Still uncommon nowadays in movies, though voice-overs are used a bit now.
The scene with the ship being attacked and then the apparently ETERNAL rollover of the Star Destroyer had a massive impact because it gave you a huge immediate impact on what the movie was about.
And being played simply helped a lot. There wasn't much to dig through to get the story. Why do you think one-liners are still so popular as jokes?
1. George Lucas is a terrible writer.
2. He wrote tons of different drafts for Star Wars, all universally awful, even the better parts he stole from better stories.
3. George Lucas had enough success to get $10 million to make a movie but he was nowhere close to being the Beard. He says "Fuck you, I'm George Lucas," they say "George who?" So he couldn't do everything his way, he had to listen to the input of others.
4. The genius of the whole Star Wars project is that Lucas served as a catalyst to bring hundreds of talented people together to make good movies. As Harrison Ford told him, "George, you can write lines like this but you sure as hell can't say them!" He hated, absolutely hated the way Empire turned out. But because he didn't have enough money to reshoot the material, he had to accept what he was given. And it was arguably the strongest of the original trilogy.
5. Because he had to listen to others, his best ideas were polished up to be brilliant, his worst ideas discarded, and good ideas from others were welded into the structure that is Star Wars. And it was good.
6. After all that success, the Beard is seen as having made it happen. And for the new trilogy, he felt he could do it on his own. And like the egotistical singer from a rock band who thinks the rest of the act is holding him back, he finds out in his solo career that he really doesn't have the chops to stand on his own. But in this case, the fanbase is so uncritical, so slavish, that he still has massive success even as he's shoveling steaming feces down their throats; they just smack their lips and beg for more.
That's Star Wars in a nutshell.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Ignore the Prequels for a moment... let's take the universe deployed in the original piece. Also ignore the Nazi/Fascist imagery as well...
Why does random citizen on Planet X care if the Empire is there of the Republic is there? Under the Republic, he was governed by a nobleman, probably a King or Queen (though we don't know if lesser planets, or less connected families had lesser titles like in Dune, which was AN inspiration for Star Wars). If you wanted to rise up and not be ruled by a Monarch, the Jedi Knights were there to "keep the peace" as they have for 1000 generations. While Tatooine is an impoverished fringe world run by the Hutt Mafia, we don't know that being ruled by a random monarch is better.
The inefficient Republic couldn't really do much, and it clearly lacked a massive military so that the Jedi were keepers of the peace and generally given free range. They seemed to only answer to some Jedi Counsel, and while the Republic certainly appears to be mostly human (judging by the makeup of the Empire -- 100% AND the Rebellion, 50%), the Jedi Counsel seems to be heavily influenced by this little Green Guy we meet.
That world is somewhat ambiguous. We're told to root for the "White Army" there to restore the noblemen to power (where they are "elected officials," who wants to bet that Princess Leia's election to the Senate, as daughter of the King, was about as competitive of Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin's elections) and their Republic government where some form of vote takes place to send their children or other connected allies to the Senate (we don't know if the Senators are elected by the people or some Parliament, and we don't know if that Parliament is elected, appointed, or inherited).
One presumes that there were wealthy urban planets (or planets with wealth urban cores) with wealthy individuals served by the various courts... they probably lost out as their connections to the monarchs lost value as the imperial governors took power. OTOH, goods appear to be readily available to the wealthy because the smugglers seemed to grow in numbers (including the spice smugglers on Tatooine, but the importance of spice is unclear, or if it's a throw away line to pay homage to Dune), and the decline of the government while the Empire, Imperial Senate, Regional Governors, and Planet Monarchs are no longer aligned to screw the people (admittedly referencing the Trade Federation from Ep. 1, where we see a sanctioned monopoly that can strangle a planet with blockades).
So, one COULD have kept that moral ambiguity by leaving things in the background, but they didn't. A throw away line or two from Palpatine about the inefficiency of the Republic would have kept the idea that he might have been fed up with the pace of the Republic and the Jedi Knights. In the Prequels, he is made raw evil, in the originals, there is plenty of young rebel nonsense in there.
As a kid watching the originals, I saw NONE of that, but as an adult watching them, I appreciated some underlying ambiguities. OTOH, Jar Jar isn't substantially more annoying than C3PO's whining other than the fact that "Android/Robot = cool, retarded alien = lame," and I met C3PO as a child, and Jar Jar as an adult. My wife, who never saw Star Wars as a kid, so has no fond memories, thinks that the Droids are just as annoying.
BTW: I really liked how in Episode I, they delved into some political references. A trade dispute and a deadlocked Senate leads to a No Confidence vote in favor of the Senator from the isolated planet, clearly the rest of the chamber felt that their planet could be next. However, I did NOT like how the rest took events that were described as Epic and made them ordinary. The Clone Wars appeared to be a long war that bordered on a Civil War, instead it appeared to be a short series of events between Jedi and Clones/Storm Troopers/Battle Droids. I guess we don't directly here of a non-Jedi fighting in the Clone Wars, but the Clone Wars definitely seemed more substantial than Episode II made it seem.
You're right that there are obviously many other causes that are just as good as religion (and other religions that are just as good as Christianity) for driving groups of people to commit atrocities, but you don't need to distort history to prove it.
Considering AC has a user ID of 666, you should be careful who you call whipper snapper.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on