Writer: Why Watching the Original Star Wars Again Was a Bad Idea (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: CNET's Michael Franco recently sat down and watched Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope again in preparation for the release of The Force Awakens later this week. His advice to anyone who's thinking of doing the same is to save your childhood memories and skip watching it again. Unlike wine, Franco doesn't think the movie gets better with age. He writes: " Since that first viewing, Luke, Vader and company have loomed large in my imagination, and clearly in the imaginations of many other adults introduced to the sci-fi franchise as kids. So have the rest of the characters, as well as the sounds of a lightsaber, a Wookiee and a TIE fighter and the idea that someday I would learn to control people through the power of suggestion and a wave of my hand. But it now seems that maybe all that got a little gilded in my memory."
In TFA he says he fired up his Apple TV and rented the movie. This is not the original Star Wars. This is the Remastered Fifty Times George Lucas is a dick edition that is probably terrible. Go watch the Despecialized Editions and you might appreciate it more.
the whole Star Wars universe. The original was clearly a kid's movie, as were all the follow on stories. It's like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny- there's something wrong with you if you haven't grown out of it by the time you're 8 YO. I mean really, one of the movies had teddy bears ferchrissakes!
I do a lot of 3D printing and I swear if I see one more Yoda head or storm trooper head or light saber being printed by an adult I'm going to scream! If you look at sites like Thingiverse or Youmagine, 70% of it is iPhone cases, 29.9% is star wars figures, and the rest is good/useful/interesting stuff with some artistic or functional merit. I wish they'd spin off separate sites for that stuff so I could avoid searching through all that dreck...
If you take the prequels as canon then Obiwan is a really horrible manipulative liar in Ep 4. "Skywalker... now thats a name I haven't heard in a long time" - you mean since you chopped up his father and threw him into a volcano? "Vader betrayed and murdered your father" - we've always known that was a lie, but the fact that he was nearly Luke's father's killer and was lying about this raises it to a whole new level. The "pretending to never have seen the droids before" stuff, the "reluctant warrior" schtick when we know how he actually felt... there's no other way to interpret Ep 4 in conjunction with the prequels other than that he was feigning ignorance in an attempt to manipulate Luke into joining the rebellion in hopes of amending his earlier mistakes. And given that he'd lie (repeatedly) in order to do this... it makes you wonder whether it even was the empire who killed Owen and Beru, rather than Obiwan hiring someone to do it (not like there's any shortage of thugs for hire on Tattooine that he could have paid). I mean, seriously, "Only imperial storm troopers are so precise"? What sort of transparently false "evidence" was that?
And Luke... what kind of moron was he? He's handed a deadly weapon he's never seen before and immediately points it at his head, then opens it and starts swinging it around... then basically converts religions within minutes of meeting Obiwan. Not just converts, but becomes a zealot, scolding Han about not believing in the force literally like half an hour after he first hears of the concept. His only demonstration of "the force" at that point was having seen Obiwan get an unknown person in a white suit to agree with him, when there's tons of alternative possible explanations for that. Quite simply, if Luke were alive on Earth today, he'd be recruited into a cult in no time flat. Could be quite easy pickings for a group like Daesh as well.
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.
They are in experience in themselves. Watching them was much better than watching any of the remade versions Lucas has put out. The movie has a very genuine and unpretentious feel yet still has all the excitement you remember from when you were younger.
Lucas is that you? There is no one in the universe that thinks C-3PO was at all annoying in the original movies. Please stop. In fact the banter between him an R2D2 when they arrived on Tatooine was creative and funny. Again these are the original theatrical releases and not the prequels nor the modified crap that Lucas put out later.
Lucas? Lucas came up with this tripe, the script writers came up with something mildly plausible and Lucas turned it into toy selling crap. Why would he be ragging on C-3O? As for C-3PO, what about the cheesy British accent? The fact that such an advanced culture as the one in Star Wars cannot create better hydraulics than so that C-3PO looks like he's got two peglegs and a crowbars stuffed up his robot ass when he walks? The endless cheesy " my circuits " whining?? It just gets tiring after a while unless you play that game where you divide the group of spectators into two teams where one has to take a shot of Whiskey whenever somebody says "Millenium Falcon" and the other a shot of Vodka whenever C-3PO moans about something or says 'my circuits'. After about the fourth or fifth shot of vodka the "Great teddy-bear Luau of Endor" actually starts to become mildly watchable once you get to it.
"Skywalker... now thats a name I haven't heard in a long time"
He actually said that about the name Obi-Wan Kenobi, not Skywalker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...