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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."
You can save yourself the trouble of this one if you just read thi quote:
I know I've been spoiled by movies with bigger and bigger budgets over the years, but it seems like Lucas could have leveled up those costumes.
If you're the kind of person who can't appreciate something as being from an era, because OOH FAST SHINY LOOK A SQUIRREL then OK, rewatching the original films may not be for you. Otherwise, they're still just as good (or not) as they were when they were new.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Back in the day, when Lucas was just a filmmaker, Star Wars was conceived literally as "a cowboy western in space".
It was SUPPOSED to be action-packed and a little cheesy, with hammy 2d archetypes for characters...
The way that this subsequently has ended up hallowed in some peoples' minds (including Lucas, who never has apparently missed a step on his own hagiography) does a disservice to what it was really intended to be.
-Styopa
... and I didn't think it had aged too badly. It's more or less what I remembered. A lean, fast-paced space opera, with a handful of iconic scenes and an uncanny ability to raise a smile. It's not a deep or profound movie, which is in some ways part of its charm.
For me, the Star Wars I loved growing up was never really about the movies. It was about the 1990s games; in particular X-Wing and TIE Fighter, which unlike most other space combat games of the time weren't afraid to allow their starfighters to be complex, tricky beasts, and the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games. It was also about the early novels; the Timothy Zahn ones in particular, before the later degeneration into unreadability. Those games and books showed a very different Star Wars to the one you saw in the films; darker, more complex and more focussed on detailed world-building, compared to the light-touch magical space-opera of the films.
That Star Wars is gone now; it took a body blow when the prequels ignored it and since Disney took over the franchise it's been officially retired. But that's fine, I can live with that. I'll go and see the new movie and I hope I'll like it. I'm fairly confident it won't be a mess on a par with the prequels. But it won't be the Star Wars I grew up with.
This is just lame. For starters, anyone who saw Star Wars once in 1977, and never watched it again until now, is clearly not a big fan of the sci-fi genre in the first place. Even if you managed to avoid it on VHS, DVD, etc, the original trilogy was re-released to theaters multiple times, the last being in 1997. I saw it again on the big screen then, and it held up as well as ever.
As for his specific points, and how things didn't exactly align to what he remembered from four decades ago, Luke was whiny at first - it is a coming of age story. C3PO has always been a "nervous wreck". He's was a vaudeville type comedy relief. Obi-Wan simply put Luke on the right path and their time together was very short. The movie isn't about Obi-Wan. Costumes were fine, and as for the aliens, I'd rather have practical effects that are slightly flawed than 100% perfect CGI aliens (is that really what he wants??). And finally, it is a very fast paced action movie with only a couple breathers in the whole thing. Yet it manages to create such a vast world with so many nuances in short time - you couldn't take it all in in a single viewing (Ah, maybe that's his problem right there! LOL)
That article was just silly.
Better known as 318230.
hilarious the first time.
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...
I was nearly 20 when "Star Wars" first hit the screen and, except for "2001", it was the best science fiction movie to date. Compare it to "War of the Worlds", "The Phantom Planet", Panic In The Year Zero", "Robinson Crusoe On Mars", "Crack In The World", "Farenheit 451", "Planet Of The Apes", etc and you will find nothing comes even close to the epic sweep of adventure that the original "Star Wars" brings to the screen. Hell, I do a rewatch every year and it is still my favorite episode in the series.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Oh, Dad. Stop coming on here and embarrassing me in front of my friends.
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.
Not to mention that at one point while Luke is fiddling with it he actually has it pointed at his head ;)
That said, I think the best thing about the light sabers is how it seems to automatically inspire in nerds the same thought process: "Okay, clearly there's no obvious way in compliance with the laws of physics to make something like that... what's the closest one could actually get?
The best I ever came up with is that it's a combination electric/plasma sword around a telescoping core. So the sound you hear on extension/retraction is a physical object expanding or retracting into the hilt. Inside it would be intense electromagnets creating a magnetic trap to circulate plasma along the exterior of the "saber". The plasma (generated by discharge in the hilt, like a plasma cutter) creates the glow, and a particular colour could be maintained by the injection of various ionizing gases that tend to emit at certain frequencies (this could be done on purpose for aesthetics, or they could just be a side effect of a coolant in the core boiling off). The plasma sheath would obviously be hot and destructive, but not intense enough on its own to, say, cut through thick metal doors or the like (if the plasma were that intense then it would be so bright you'd need welding goggles whenever you turned it on... unless you have it so high energy of its light emitted is in the X-ray spectrum, which would hardly be safer!). When the sword strikes a conductive object, however, it creates a electrical path between the plasma and its core, through the conductive surface. Detecting this, the hilt (which obviously requires an intense power source) pumps a tremendous current into the plasma (low voltage, high amperage, like is used in welding), with the central core acting as the return (either actively cooled or high-temperature superconductive). So ohmic heating is what does the melting of the target, like in welding.
Obviously the saber and the surface being cut would become extremely bright during the cutting (something not seen in the films), but that's pretty unavoidable when you're cutting metals (even normal earth metals, let alone whatever super metals exist "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away") Also, I'm not sure how the magnetic fields would interact when two swords struck each other. If one envisions the interference causing the occasional unstable, temporary conductive path from the sheath to the core then that could explain the electrical cracking while they're in contact (obviously if it was a constant conductive path then they'd just cut right through each others' cores).
That's the best I ever came up with ;)
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.
Technically, the author of the original article is probably right. C3P0 *was* a pretty annoying robot, and I remember having the realization that he grated on my nerves a bit the last time I re-watched the original Star Wars episode 4 too.
And sure, the quality of the costumes of the aliens aren't all that impressive by today's standards.
But I wonder how many other movies, cartoons or TV shows he remembered fondly as a kid but didn't ever re-watch as an adult? Because wow, if you do that with some of them I personally loved as a kid, it's brutal how awful they really are. (I grew up liking shows like "Super Friends" in the 70's -- and that's a GREAT example of a cartoon best left as a childhood memory and not EVER revisited!)
I think with the original Star Wars series though? I've gone into it with expectations adjusted for the era. Before Star Wars, there were hardly ANY movies dealing with aliens or outer space that weren't completely cheesy! Viewed through that filter, I find it stands up pretty well today as some of the best film-making of the 70's dealing with the genre. Those cool blaster sounds? They came up with banging on steel tension wires holding up telephone poles to get those! They didn't have all the computer and CGI tech. we take for granted today to pull any cool sound desired out of a hat. And new technology had to be developed just to film Star Wars, with cameras running along wires and so forth.
Not only that, but the first time I re-watched Star Wars as a young adult, I remember being really shocked/impressed by the complete lack of cursing in the films. That became such a "staple" for any movie with action and explosions in it, it seemed strangely missing from Star Wars. But that's part of the beauty of it. Nobody needed to drop an F bomb to get the point across that someone was scared or tense or angry. It was all kept very clean and kid-friendly without becoming sappy.
Because we were kids once and nostalgia is a thing.
For a person who says he wasn't much of a whiner when he was 9, the author sure got better at it over the years....
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.