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Star Wars TV Show Tainted By Memories of Jar Jar
bowman9991 writes "Can George Lucas' new Star Wars TV series, the first Star Wars spin off with real actors, atone for the flawed follow-ups to his original classics? Producer Rick McCallum calls the new series 'much darker,' a 'much more character-based series' and 'more adult,' while George Lucas himself calls it more like the first Star Wars film. The new TV show takes place in the 'dark times' between the last prequel Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, when most of the Jedi and anti-emperor politicians were hunted down and killed. The characters of Boba Fett, C-3PO, and the Emperor Palpatine will return, and casting has now begun. Mark Hamill, the actor who played Luke Skywalker from the original movies, believes George Lucas lost his way, 'making it bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until you're just exploding with special effects all over the screen like some fireworks display,' but thinks the new show is a 'positive' step forward. Hopefully George Lucas can wipe the memory of Jar Jar Binks, Anakin and Padme's romance, his shameless merchandising, and some lame attempts at humor from everyone's minds once and for all."
Hopefully George Lucas can wipe the memory of Jar Jar Binks, Anakin and Padme's romance, his shameless merchandising, and some lame attempts at humor from everyone's minds once and for all.
Don't bet on it.
"Hopefully George Lucas can wipe the memory of Jar Jar Binks, Anakin and Padme's romance, his shameless merchandising, and some lame attempts at humor from everyone's minds once and for all."
I had managed to block all that crap from my consciousness. That is, until you brought it up again just now. Thanks a lot - you can expect to see my therapist's bill.
I find your excess of faith disturbing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We want sequels to Return of the Jedi. Wasn't he originally going to do 3 sets of trilogies: with the 3rd set later on, and the only common characters would be the 2 droids?
I recall watching the original Ep.4 as a 12 year old. The bar scene was particularly intense because it showed humans as a bit player in a big, bad universe. Fast forward to the updated remake with the CGI singer - just another funny looking alien to laugh at. The two headed announcer in the pod race scene is another example - funny aliens who exist primarily for the amusement of a human dominated universe. I don't think Lucas ever grasped this difference.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Memories of Jar Jar sounds like a fragrance that George Lucas would put on the market.
Who??
And there are no prequels, and there is no way to ever make any. Any possible existence of Star Wars prequels have been curiously eliminated in the space time continuum. Interestingly the same applies to the much later stand-alone sci-fi movie Matrix (in case anyone wondered why no sequels were ever made). No one knows why this stands as such immutable facts though.
"There is no fixed release date for the show, but it's expected sometime in 2011 or 2012..."
Lets see, the Mayans called it in 2012.
Nostradamus called it around 2012.
People are all end times for 2012.
Then we had Jar Jar... DEAR GOD NO!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Your computer runs on smoke. Once you let the smoke out, you can't put it back in thus your computer has stopped working.
Or in the old days: "Once you let the cat out of the bag..."
The fact was Lucas proved you can in fact destroy a successful cannon of work. Most of the hard core Star Wars fans I knew growing up washed their hands of the whole thing (some even went to the dark side... Trek...)
The whole "Joss Whedon is my master now" was a slap in the face to Lucas I'm sure but I think it is too late for damage control. The MMO crew I play with were chomping at the bit to beta test damn near everything out there with one exception.... the new Star Wars MMO coming out. With the first 3 films plus that train wreck of an MMO and it's subsequent "fixes" the franchise is dead. The inital 3 month subscription figures will be telling on how bad the damage has been.
Warhammer and most AAA MMOs should clear around 500,000 copies in the first 90 days and should clear at least 200,000 in pre-orders. Watching this new MMO release may gauge how much damage the franchise has taken over the years.
Comic runs, novels, etc are all factored into the success. Prior to the first 3 films in the series at the local book store there was an entire section (4 shelves high, arm span length) of Star Wars books. Now it is a single shelf post-prequels. That strikes me as significant damage. That puts the book count equal to Terry Brooks Shannara series and they haven't even gotten a film yet (which is suprising, the first three books strike me as very film\mini-series friendly. In fact now that I think of it the first book The Sword of Shannara would make a pretty good 3 season series or 4 part mini-series. The special effect requirement for his works is actually rather low until Scions...)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
There's a 3-way my mind could have done without.
if by depth you mean CG animation in the background, yes, it will.
if by depth you mean actual storytelling, i'm afraid this won't. if episodes 1-3 proved anything, it's that lucas just doesn't know how to tell a good story unless he's ripping off kurasawa.
George, there's an easy way to go back to the "good old days" before the prequels (if you haven't seen the 7-part, 1+-hour-long review of the Phantom Menace on youtube, go now and find it). Let somebody else direct them, and you just be a producer. It's clear that nobody on your staff is willing to contradict your "artistic vision," and thus we end up with crap results. Let somebody else direct, and then you throw in some criticism for a back-and-forth, and maybe these won't suck.
But smart money would be on them being terrible.
Why do so many screenwriters equate "something that adults will enjoy" with "darker"?
Most of Raiders of the Lost Ark was not "dark", but I loved it when it came out, and I still really like it. There was action, adventure, wonder, and surprise. There was no soul searching over life's moral ambiguities, or "deep" plot elements where Indy tortured bad guys with car batteries. Similar with the first Star Wars movie (episode 4).
If this is Lucas' attempt to atone for past mistakes, it seems like he's still off the mark.
The opening sentence of the article states "In the history of cinema it's hard to top the utter disappointment felt when watching George Lucas' follow ups to the original Star Wars movies."
I don't know about that. I saw Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
I wonder if Lucas is going to do what's been happening to most other movie series (James Bond, Batman, Spider Man, Star Trek, etc) and do a ground up restart on the series. Take it back to a darker, rougher and more realistic level...
I'm not saying that's what it needs, but just seems to be the theme of late in Hollywood...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
These days "Much darker than its predecessor" has become Hollywood doublespeak. It means nothing. "This Harry Potter movie will be much darker than the last one" is just the studio's way of trying to get more adults to come see it (at the end of the day, it still ends up being the same PG-13 rated CGI-fest).
Here's a good rule of thumb, if they have to *say* it's much darker, it probably isn't. If you want to see if it's just doublespeak, ask the simple follow-up question "But it's still suitable for kids, right?" If they fall over themselves saying yes, then you know the "much darker" thing is just a con.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
We want sequels to Return of the Jedi. Wasn't he originally going to do 3 sets of trilogies: with the 3rd set later on, and the only common characters would be the 2 droids?
Yes, those were the initial plans. Although there was a very important if in their plans. From what I've heard through rumors, Lucas had two trilogies he could tell and he picked the stronger of the two (prequels) to do first. If that was financially successful and well received then he would continue with the sequels. I think this strategy changed with the release of the first or second episode and the latter sequel was canceled altogether.
Keep in mind that Harrison Ford turned down a Han Solo spinoff and opted instead for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (with a fifth shaping up).
I don't want later sequels. If anything is done in the Star Wars universe, I want the Timothy Zahn Trilogy done as three movies. Thrawn is badass. I want a TV series that takes stories like the "Tales" series of SW books and brings them to life.
Personally I think the characters in Episodes I, II and III were so weak that we need new characters that aren't supposed to fulfill some other plot line's obligations.
My work here is dung.
star wars horse has been beaten to death, skinned, gutted, bones and hooves boiled to glue. Then Lucas squatted over the offal and took a shit lasting for years. Time to forget the whole damn thing.
Hopefully, this show will get it right, and have a little bit of depth to it.
Well, for starters, it is set in the best possible time frame. Rather than the time of the wooden Jedi Council and the useless Senate holding endless meetings, it's set in the time of the rise of the Rebel Alliance. There's so much potential for a good show in that era.
Also, George plans to hand the reins over to someone else after writing and producing the first season. So, it might have a slow start, but the possibility of a decent series growing out of it is actually fairly high — depending, of course, on who takes over in season two.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Hopefully George Lucas can wipe the memory of Jar Jar Binks, Anakin and Padme's romance
I must have missed this perverse threesome when I watched the film.
As I understand it (and most of this is, of course, rumour and speculation), the original trilogy was supposed to go on much longer than it did, with ROTJ not being the last episode. Darth Vader (intended to be a somewhat minor villain) was to be killed, while the hunt for the real villain, the Emperor, would continue in the subsequent episodes. Han Solo was supposed to be killed off, paving the way for the love affair between Luke and Leia (the brother/sister idea was only thrown in at the last minute).
Unfortunately, with Lucas' failed marriage weighing on him, he got sick of making these movies and decided to just wrap everything up quickly and not-so-cleanly in ROTJ.
If he had plans later on to attempt to create a sequel trilogy (of this I have no doubt), it was more of a "milk the cash cow" idea than even the prequels were, because there really is no story left to tell after the destruction of the second Death Star and the death of the Emperor. At least, not a particularly relevant story. I really hope he doesn't ever head down that road.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Darn, and I was hoping for something along the lines of Peewee Herman's BigTop adventures, with Jarjar the main character, constantly breaking the third wall to talk to a juvenile audience about toy endorsements, "Can yousa kids say to Mommy, "Meesaw want Jarjar action figures!" "
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I think I must be about the only person in the world that detested most of the early Extended Universe (Zahn included) stuff as much as he detested the prequels that followed some years later. No idea what the later stuff was like as I never bothered with it, Han Solo calling someone a "panty waste" and lame story after story was just too much for me.
"We found him in the Academy sewers and the burns on the decapitated corpse indicate lightsaber cuts, which means the killer is probably... *beat* It's not a Jedi that I'm looking for. Please move along. Move along!"
Hey Lucas,
Instead of rehashing the train wreck you made of the Skywalker Saga, why don't you tell the story of the splitting of the Jedi and the Sith. In The Phantom Menace, Darth Maul says "At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi. At last we will have revenge." Tell THAT story: why they are in hiding; what are they getting revenge for.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Actually Star Wars very definitely has potential to do 'dark and nasty' and do it well. I mean, think about the key themes in there. It's about a rebellion - freedom fighters, or perhaps 'terrorists'? It's about an oppressive regime, spreading out and being racist (ok, species-ist) across the galaxy.
You'd have plenty of framework to make a political commentary on the war on terror. Mix in a little bit of fundamental differences in culture - the Empire plugs one ideology to people who just don't think that way - and maybe mix in a bit of crooked shenanigans, spaceships and just a shade of jedi mythos/persecution. (Not convinced it needs it though - way better to have a couple of 'dark jedi' bad guys, and have the good guys running scared).
Could be pretty good. Fairly sure it'll never happen mind - George Lucas will want creative control, and he'll go all fluffy and cute.
Mark Hamill is probably just bitter because he never did get those power converters.
I was a huge fan of Star Wars until the abomination that was episode 1. I watched episode 2 at the theater we affectionately call "The Welfare Flicks", a second run theater. For the third, I just rented the DVD and that was just for closure. Now, I have no more interest in Star Wars. He f*cked up the originals, and I just don't even care anymore if he ever releases a decent DVD of the originals.
As for my kids, their only interest in Star Wars is a video game with little characters made out of Legos. They couldn't care less about the movies. If they run any of the movies on cable, their attention span is about 15 minutes.
George Lucas killed Star Wars.
Star Wars is tainted by more than the memory of Jarjar. There's three loud, busy, but ultimately empty prequels, terrible acting by people who should know better, idiotic plot developments, a painfully pedestrian, bizarrely animated series, and years and years of disrespect towards the fans from whom he got his wealth.
Never again. I don't care if the new series ignored everything made after Empire Strikes Back and was produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Martin Scorsese. (Which it won't be; it'll be ham-fisted ol' George at the helm, as expected, and he'll make a mess of it, as expected.) Let's all face it -- George Lucas is never going to repeat the success of 1977. It's time to move on. And even if by some bizarre set of circumstances he did, who cares? I'm so through with Star Wars that I was reluctant to spend two minutes to write this. Never again. That ship has sailed. Life is too short for bad TV.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What? Doesn't "Bobby, milkman to the Emperor's pet cat OF DUNE" count?
Assuming it survives to season two. One season is plenty of time for Lucas to drive it into the side of a mountain.
Read my blog.
coming from 40-somethings whose prepubescent selves likely giggled with glee when a bunch of teddy bears with spears and slingshots defeated an Imperial garrison.
We want some drama and action. It's a simple formula really. We don't need "comic relief" and especially not in a TV series.
But there is another thing wrong with the prequels and this series as well. Unless nearly all characters are completely new, we know who will live and who will die -- it's worse than the guys named "smith and jones" wearing red shirts on Star Trek. We KNOW the characters will live and in what state they will be in by the time Episode 4 comes around. (I think the family guy star wars spoof said it plainly and accurately when it was said "we have most of the major characters in this story on this ship. I'm pretty sure we'll all make it through just fine" or something like that.) Not knowing what will happen next is an important factor in a good story.
Will Darth Vader die? Nope! Will he turn away from the dark side? Nope! (Might be tempted here and there I presume.) Will he remember that he built C3PO?
Now here's a question -- will characters from "The Force Unleashed" be in this series??? Will there be aspects of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter and related games in this series? I seriously hope so -- those were great games with great stories.
This guy had some good ideas in this essay. You could expand on some of this and have a great story line.
Star Wars veered away from 'dark and nasty' when they shied from the Midiclorian stuff. If Jedi were 'superior' because of an innate biological feature, the struggle became one where both sides were feeding the common people a mass of propaganda, and moral issues would be a mix of gray tones at best. It would still be possible to show one side as having better reasons to justify the propaganda than the other, and even to create audience empathy for the Jedi - after all, even if both sides were manipulating the general populace, only one side ended up blowing up whole planets. Still, the idea of Jedi who don't like to admit it's all about the Midiclorians even to themselves, and who take the 'controlling your emotions' philosophy to dangerous extremes as a result, would be a great basis for dense, nuanced scripts that would give good actors a chance to shine and, it's hoped, be remembered come Emmy time.
Not gonna happen, of course.
Who is John Cabal?
For some reason, I have a bad feeling about that.
Copying anyone other than Kurosawa is ripping off that person.
Copying Kurosawa is making something more awesome than it has any business being.
No fan will ever forget Jar-Jar, or indeed any mistake Lucas has ever made. Hating Star Wars is now an integral part of liking Star Wars. Fans will never let it go, regardless of the quality of future product. They'll continue to enthusiastically shove C-3PO cereal into their mouths, yowling "this cereal tastes so awful it raped my childhood!" until the goddamn sun goes dark.
Dear George,
Look, I was a huge Star Wars nerd back in the day. I saw the original 'Star Wars', like, 1000 times in the theatre, and about a hojillion times on VHS. I had all the toys - it was easier to count the things I didn't have in the little Star Wars catalog/pamphlet that came with the toys, than count the things I did have. Loved 'Empire', and tried my best to love 'Jedi' even though it had dancing Ewoks in it. Honestly, though, you lost me with Episode 1, and totally killed that Star Wars geek in me with Episodes 2-3.
You won me back (somewhat) with 'The Clone Wars' animated series. I think it's that I don't really mind cheesy dialog when spoken by CGI-animated puppets in a CGI-animated show. (Note the difference between that and Jar Jar.) I really dig this show, and I watch it every week.
But I'm really worried about your plans to do a show about the "Dark Times" between Episodes 3-4. We know how that ends; you end up with Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Ben, Darth, and the gang. I don't want to see Luke Skywalker grow up, I don't want to know what it was like when he got his first pimple or kissed his first girl (or Jawa, whatever they do on Tatooine for entertainment.) I don't want to see how they built the first Imperial Star Destroyer, or installed the freaking air conditioning system in the Death Star.
If you must do something in the Star Wars universe, please please please give us a new story. What happens after the Empire crumbles, who takes charge then, how does the new Jedi order come about? There's a whole Expanded Universe Storyline you can play with there. And we don't know how any of it ends.
Sincerely,
a worried fan (reformed)
But Kurosawa himself admittedly ripped off John Ford. Nothing's really made in a vacuum. Ok, apparently, Star Wars: Episode 1 was... so I'll restate: nothing good is made in a vacuum.
And since I didn't see it here, if you didn't like "Phantom Menace", you need to see this truly epic review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&feature=player_embedded.
If you did like it, you still need to watch, do that you can fully realize, to quote the review, "what an idiot you are".
-Dave Haynie
Well, for starters, it is set in the best possible time frame...
Are you kidding me? The prequels had so much potential, a great subtext for plots and whatnot. Think about it. The reason Lucas made the films in the first place is because everyone was curious about how Darth Vader became Darth Vader. If that's not a good setup to a story, I don't know what is. The corruption of Anakin Skywalker is an amazing setup for a good story. Instead, it was Lucas that bogged down the prequels with useless CG, pointless Senate meetings and a Jedi Council that really wasn't anything more than a showcase for Yoda. Lucas was the one that felt the need to recycle every character from the first films.
Put a talented writer like Joss Whedon on a project with such clear boundaries and he would have made an amazing film. We could have seen the slow moral corruption of an innocent Jedi. The seduction to the dark side by the emperor. A realistic romance between Anakin and Padme. Several brand new characters that would have depth to them and interesting plot twists could have been made all around. Instead we got a train wreck full of discombobulated stories about characters that no one finds interesting. In short, the story was set up well by episodes 4-6. Lucas just blew every advantage he had in Episode 1. He had three fat pitches down the middle and he swung and missed every one.
Compare that to the setup for this series. You have an already evil Darth Vader hunting down Jedi. Somehow, the emperor is going to show his evilness to the world such that rebels will start rising up. You think senate hearings are boring? How else are you going to show any protest by rebelling planets? Remember that the emperor doesn't dissolve the senate until ep. 4. What about action? The Jedi are mostly already dead. Yoda and Obiwan are supposed to be hiding. What can you anchor the story around? Some Jedi that's running away? A planet that keeps getting oppressed (how exactly? through trade embargos)? It's not obvious and not easy to tell a good story in such a setting. This is like a slider away that you have to hit. A single is possible. A strike is more likely.
You know Lucas won't be able to keep himself from fucking with establish events. In this version, Luke goes to Tashi Station first.
episode IV
It had good actors (Alec Guinness and Christopher Lee)
Sir. Your geek card. Hand it over. Now.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Perhaps 15 years ago I would have followed this story more closely. Lucas didn't have any quality control for the animated series (of which I only watched 3 before losing interest) and you'd have to pay me to get me to waste 30 minutes watching this. This is probably the last Star Wars tv series headline I ever click on.
However, I'd love to see a Star Wars "reboot" [b]without any Lucas input[/b]. Get the writing crews from BSG and the Batman reboots plus the BSG production crew together and now we're cooking with gas.
moox. for a new generation.
Ok, so a movie about space operates in a vacuum, that's not really a fair complaint, is it?
If he's bitter, it is more likely because Carrie Fisher ended up being his sister.
Only if you have the Batman writers and BSG production crew beat the BSG writers to death with baseball bats.
I don't care how the stuff that I like was made, I just like the stuff that I like.