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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."
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 original has been completely ruined by Lucas with all his remakes and extra scenes.
Cutesy extra creatures _everywhere_, Han shooting second, that barf-worthy fake scene with Jabba The Hut... it completely changes the feel. And it's awful.
Take all those out and it's still quite good.
No sig today...
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.
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.
... 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
Soooo. Typical teenager, eh?
Star Wars kind of suffers from the same problem that Tolkien suffers from when one goes back and reads LotR (well, apart from his long-winded writing style): it all feels so cliche now, done to death a million times over. But that's not Tolkein's fault because, while he hardly invented the tropes in LotR, he's the one that really popularized them and inspired a million other works to pick up those tropes and run with them.
Star Wars certainly had its cheesy elements (a *lot* of them, and they don't start at the ewoks), but it did innovate too. My favorite example is the use of "crappy spaceships". It'd always generally been a sci-fi rule that, unless a ship has been recently damaged in combat, it's a shiny awesome wonder of technology. But the first space ship (after the initial chase scene) we're introduced to in Star Wars is a run-down piece of junk that's always breaking at the most inopportune times. Most of the rebel ships look like they're practically being held together by duct tape and poorly improvised spot welds.
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.
"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?...