If I were to watch it a few more times, I might start scrutinizing it to the point that I will see the things you are nit-picking about... Although I would lay good odds that Lucas will have touched up the most glaring examples before the DVD hits the shelves, and I ain't gonna see it in the theater more than maybe twice.
Because by then he had helped destroy a Death Star and fight alongside the rebellion through all the events in "Empire."
Also, Jabba once employed Solo a lot. It goes without saying that he would know of Chewie. No need for him to have a tacked-on backstory of saving Wookie World with Master Yoda.
Now that you mention it, I really should have gone to the midnight showing of Star Wars dressed as Frank from Rocky Horror.
It would be even funnier if I acted really surprised that the movie showing was Star Wars... Or if I got a really hot-looking chick to go along with me dressed as Janet. Maybe even bring along all the usual Rocky Horror props (newspaper, toast, squirt guns, rice, etc.)
Hmm... note to self in case Lucas ever changes his mind and makes films 7-9...
Why is Boba Fett from the original trilogy the best bounty hunter in the galaxy? His dad was once the greatest; he happened to be chosen to be a source for clones.
Except now we have the Special Edition version of Star Wars, in which Boba Fett is not "the best bounty hunter in the galaxy", but rather a full-time flunky in the personal entourage of a mob boss on a jerkwater desert planet in the middle of nowhere.
Why is Obi-Wan depicted in the original trilogy to be one of the best Jedi
He wasn't. He just happened to be one of the only ones left.
Why is Chewie a famous wookie?
He wasn't. Chewie was the co-pilot of a derelict smuggler who dumps his cargo at the first sign of trouble.
Well, do the best you can for the situation you are in. If you need to choose between compromising on visual quality and compromising on sound, go with the better sound.
The music John Williams composed for this series of films is maybe half the reason why they are so popular. Even as much as I hated "Attack of the Clones", and as skeptical as I was about liking the new one... when the opening fanfare boomed through the theater speakers, it still sent a tingle down my spine.
The Emphasis on military base operating systems in Star Wars was obviously on droid-friendliness over security.
After all, the only way to access them is to be physically present at a terminal, all of which are inside a heavily-armed facility. For an unauthorized person to even be there is understood to be utter suicide, even if you don't require magnetic pass-keys on any of the doors.
In 1977, the Western was considered by many to be a dead genre which was once embedded into the culture.
Kids my age at that time were still playing "cowboys and indians" in their backyards, just as their older siblings and parents had, but stories set in the Old West just didn't seem to connect to people anymore (that, or else Hollywood just forgot how to make them connect.)
Lucas wanted to make a genre picture which became part of our culture's "shared mythology" the way Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger once did. There was nothing like that at all in the late 60s and early 70s.
It worked really well. Most kids these days would much rather have a "Mace Windu Lightsaber" than a "pearl handled silver" cap gun.
I would not be surprised if Lucas considers the fact that kids now "play Star Wars" in their back yards (as we did, post-1977) to be his greatest triumph.
Version doesn't matter much. The SE DVD versions have some added cruft, such as Han repeating his conversation with Greedo word-for-word five minutes later with Jabba, but not enough to take away much from the film. Also, some of the extremely cool and historically-signifigant space shots (done entirely with pyrotechnics, robot-guided cameras, and creative hand-cel animation) has been replaced with cartoony CGI. I can't really tell you which parts were ruined without "spoilers" (although I wonder if I'm being trolled, because it's hard to imagine how somebody got through life in Western Civilization over the past 20 years without knowing about the events in these movies.)
Also, the film was in pretty rough shape by the time the LD's were made. They will look a lot better on modern wide-screen TV sets if you watch with the cleanest prints possible, and that would be the touched-up ones in the SE box set. Sad, but true.
A lot of people were (and are) reluctant to see it because the previous one was such a God-forsaken disgrace.
Effects rating
Episode I looked fairly realistic most of the time. While Jar-jar was an unpopular character, he was rendered fairly well most of the time. The biggest weakness was that the CGI was perhaps a little to sparse and too uniform. The battle-droid "pez dispenser" scene in particular didn't look quite right.
Episode II was a complete mess. Shot composition and cinematography were simply discarded and ignored in favor of making things look "high tech." The cartoon shots of Tokyo in "Ghost in the Shell" looked more realistic, and certainly less distracting from the main action. There were a lot of shots which simply could not have been done with stop-animation or puppets or other techniques, but it seems like they were done that way for no other reason.
Episode III... From the opening battle scene in the very beginning, I think you will agree that this time Lucas finally got it right. He begins with a nice close-up of a couple fighters skimming the surface of a larger ship, so when the "camera" pans back you have a much better sense of scale. (He also included one of those robot controller satellites in the shot, which not only helped the eye grasp the scale of the shot, but also reminded the viewer who they were fighting against.) Later scenes in other landscapes were also fantastic. At no point while watching the movie for the first time was I suddenly reminded that I was watching CGI characters or backgrounds.
Story review
God, what a fuck-up.
One of the things that made Star Wars so cool was that Lucas decided to make it feel like a 1930's 15-minute serial, in which most of the audience was not likely to have seen the beginning of the story. He wanted it to "come in at the middle", so he wrote an elaborate back-story which he never seriously thought he would get to film.
Having that untold back-story made the entire world seem bigger and more well thought-out.
When making Episodes 1-3, he did not have benefit of all that extra story, and it really shows.
Also, all the precious little inbred tie-ins to the the original series (C3PO was built by Anakin, "Red Five" was Obi-Wan's call sign, Chewbaca fought along with Yoda, etc. etc. etc.) were really tiresome, and had the impact of making what should have been a large-scale saga about a galactic struggle of mighty armies turn into a story where the fate of all civilizations for two entire generations were married to the actions of the same small small handful of people, many of whom were directly related.
Would it have hurt the story to have had Mace Windu (or some other Jedi) be the one who discovers the clone factory in Ep 2, instead of Obi-Wan being the only Jedi who ever does anything that matters? Did it really need to be Boba Fett's dad who was the genetic source of the clones? Did Chewie really need to be in the Wookie battle scene at all?
Why did Lucas think that all of these little "wink wink" connections would make the films more entertaing? If anything, they guarantee that children down the road who watch these films in 1-6 order will not enjoy 4-6 half as much as we did.
Watching them in 1-6 order the first time out would call a lot more attention to the little continuity errors, such as Liea telling Luke about her memories of their mother. Or that it took about 18 years to build the Death Star, but only about 3 to build a replacement.
Then he says "WHAT HAVE I DONE?!" and collapses in a chair. What the fuck?
It shows that he wasn't entirely manipulated or transformed. Anakin chose to become Darth Vader with his eyes more or less wide open. He knew for certain that what he was doing was wrong, but didn't care (enough.) I thought it worked really well.
My favorite moment of accidental humor in the movie was the line:
How true. And how unfortunate since World of Warcraft, while good, introduces nothing new.
It does introduce one thing new, and it's the reason why nearly all of my friends are playing it:
Cross-platform support for both PC's and Macs.
No, there are not many Mac gamers out there. No, Blizzard probably does not sell the game to a lot of Mac users. However, there is one modern MMORPG in which my PC-owning friends and Mac-owning friends can all play together on the same server, and that's World of Warcraft.
I loved City of Heroes, and I think City of Villians will be a great sequel, but I'm not renewing my account and I'm not buying the new one, because Cryptic doesn't support Macs and doesn't plan to do so anytime soon. End of story.
How is it that such an ordinarily enlightened group of people that gather here, can become JUST LIKE the fundamentalists they hate when presented with a hot-button issue.
Infidel! How dare you question The March of Science and Reason! Have you no faith in mankind's infallibility?
In short, what is wrong with looking before we leap? I think we all agree that a lot of disturbing science fiction revolves around scientists who should have stepped back and wondered: "Should I really be doing this?"
Oooh... You're just asking for a stoning now! Where's my lucky rock?
Every three or four years, somebody else tries to get us all to panic because there are not enough CS majors enrolled at college.
The dirty little secret is: You don't need a degree in CS or anything like it to be able to do 99% of the jobs in the IT industry, and most large companies are brimming over with techies who hold degrees in completely different fields.
My degree is in Music Education. Sure, I have a certification in C and C++, but zero college credits in the computer sciences, other than a single FORTRAN class I took as an incoming freshman.
I work as a support programmer alongside somebody who sweated through the CS degree while I was having fun at college.
It's not like this stuff is brain surgery. There's a perception that computer science is hard to learn because so few people are interested in learning it, but the truth is that most IT jobs are so pathetically simple that even a humanities graduate like me can learn them.
One could argue that "Business Administration degree + computer skills" often results in a much brighter future in the corporate IT world than "Computer Science degree + business sense."
I play World of Warcraft and I like it well enough, but it isn't the end all and be all of MMOs.
You know the part of my post where I said that it was?
Yeah, that part wasn't actually there.
Go ahead, read it again. Not there.
All I was saying is, almost nobody seems to care about any other MMOG at the moment. The tiny number of posts in this thread so far kind of backs me up on that.
There's a reason why the final generation of floppies had that little metal door, and it was a good idea. Something like it would be a good idea for these new DVD formats.
Oh, and those "little trays" you are talking about, they were called "caddies," but that's hardly the same thing, because 1. They were kind of expensive, not like the cheaper way of doing it I'm suggestiong, and 2. You had to remove the CD from one plastic case and put it into another, which was a fantastically stupid way to go. Current cases only cost a few cents each... Just make a similar case which doesn't open but does allow a player to spin and read the disk, and you're done.
Crickets were heard chirping in response to announcements from several massively-multiplayer online games which were not World of Warcraft.
Audience members, who nearly outnumbered the company spokesmen, called it the biggest non-Blizzard MMOG announcement since the last Shadowbane expansion.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were to watch it a few more times, I might start scrutinizing it to the point that I will see the things you are nit-picking about... Although I would lay good odds that Lucas will have touched up the most glaring examples before the DVD hits the shelves, and I ain't gonna see it in the theater more than maybe twice.
Jabba refers to him as "the mighty chewbacca".
Because by then he had helped destroy a Death Star and fight alongside the rebellion through all the events in "Empire."
Also, Jabba once employed Solo a lot. It goes without saying that he would know of Chewie. No need for him to have a tacked-on backstory of saving Wookie World with Master Yoda.
Now that you mention it, I really should have gone to the midnight showing of Star Wars dressed as Frank from Rocky Horror.
It would be even funnier if I acted really surprised that the movie showing was Star Wars... Or if I got a really hot-looking chick to go along with me dressed as Janet. Maybe even bring along all the usual Rocky Horror props (newspaper, toast, squirt guns, rice, etc.)
Hmm... note to self in case Lucas ever changes his mind and makes films 7-9...
Why is Boba Fett from the original trilogy the best bounty hunter in the galaxy? His dad was once the greatest; he happened to be chosen to be a source for clones.
Except now we have the Special Edition version of Star Wars, in which Boba Fett is not "the best bounty hunter in the galaxy", but rather a full-time flunky in the personal entourage of a mob boss on a jerkwater desert planet in the middle of nowhere.
Why is Obi-Wan depicted in the original trilogy to be one of the best Jedi
He wasn't. He just happened to be one of the only ones left.
Why is Chewie a famous wookie?
He wasn't. Chewie was the co-pilot of a derelict smuggler who dumps his cargo at the first sign of trouble.
Well, do the best you can for the situation you are in. If you need to choose between compromising on visual quality and compromising on sound, go with the better sound.
The music John Williams composed for this series of films is maybe half the reason why they are so popular. Even as much as I hated "Attack of the Clones", and as skeptical as I was about liking the new one... when the opening fanfare boomed through the theater speakers, it still sent a tingle down my spine.
It's the old "ease of use" compromise.
The Emphasis on military base operating systems in Star Wars was obviously on droid-friendliness over security.
After all, the only way to access them is to be physically present at a terminal, all of which are inside a heavily-armed facility. For an unauthorized person to even be there is understood to be utter suicide, even if you don't require magnetic pass-keys on any of the doors.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
;)
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
In 1977, the Western was considered by many to be a dead genre which was once embedded into the culture.
Kids my age at that time were still playing "cowboys and indians" in their backyards, just as their older siblings and parents had, but stories set in the Old West just didn't seem to connect to people anymore (that, or else Hollywood just forgot how to make them connect.)
Lucas wanted to make a genre picture which became part of our culture's "shared mythology" the way Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger once did. There was nothing like that at all in the late 60s and early 70s.
It worked really well. Most kids these days would much rather have a "Mace Windu Lightsaber" than a "pearl handled silver" cap gun.
I would not be surprised if Lucas considers the fact that kids now "play Star Wars" in their back yards (as we did, post-1977) to be his greatest triumph.
Watch 4-6 first. No question about it.
Version doesn't matter much. The SE DVD versions have some added cruft, such as Han repeating his conversation with Greedo word-for-word five minutes later with Jabba, but not enough to take away much from the film. Also, some of the extremely cool and historically-signifigant space shots (done entirely with pyrotechnics, robot-guided cameras, and creative hand-cel animation) has been replaced with cartoony CGI. I can't really tell you which parts were ruined without "spoilers" (although I wonder if I'm being trolled, because it's hard to imagine how somebody got through life in Western Civilization over the past 20 years without knowing about the events in these movies.)
Also, the film was in pretty rough shape by the time the LD's were made. They will look a lot better on modern wide-screen TV sets if you watch with the cleanest prints possible, and that would be the touched-up ones in the SE box set. Sad, but true.
A lot of people were (and are) reluctant to see it because the previous one was such a God-forsaken disgrace.
Effects rating
Episode I looked fairly realistic most of the time. While Jar-jar was an unpopular character, he was rendered fairly well most of the time. The biggest weakness was that the CGI was perhaps a little to sparse and too uniform. The battle-droid "pez dispenser" scene in particular didn't look quite right.
Episode II was a complete mess. Shot composition and cinematography were simply discarded and ignored in favor of making things look "high tech." The cartoon shots of Tokyo in "Ghost in the Shell" looked more realistic, and certainly less distracting from the main action. There were a lot of shots which simply could not have been done with stop-animation or puppets or other techniques, but it seems like they were done that way for no other reason.
Episode III... From the opening battle scene in the very beginning, I think you will agree that this time Lucas finally got it right. He begins with a nice close-up of a couple fighters skimming the surface of a larger ship, so when the "camera" pans back you have a much better sense of scale. (He also included one of those robot controller satellites in the shot, which not only helped the eye grasp the scale of the shot, but also reminded the viewer who they were fighting against.) Later scenes in other landscapes were also fantastic. At no point while watching the movie for the first time was I suddenly reminded that I was watching CGI characters or backgrounds.
Story review
God, what a fuck-up.
One of the things that made Star Wars so cool was that Lucas decided to make it feel like a 1930's 15-minute serial, in which most of the audience was not likely to have seen the beginning of the story. He wanted it to "come in at the middle", so he wrote an elaborate back-story which he never seriously thought he would get to film.
Having that untold back-story made the entire world seem bigger and more well thought-out.
When making Episodes 1-3, he did not have benefit of all that extra story, and it really shows.
Also, all the precious little inbred tie-ins to the the original series (C3PO was built by Anakin, "Red Five" was Obi-Wan's call sign, Chewbaca fought along with Yoda, etc. etc. etc.) were really tiresome, and had the impact of making what should have been a large-scale saga about a galactic struggle of mighty armies turn into a story where the fate of all civilizations for two entire generations were married to the actions of the same small small handful of people, many of whom were directly related.
Would it have hurt the story to have had Mace Windu (or some other Jedi) be the one who discovers the clone factory in Ep 2, instead of Obi-Wan being the only Jedi who ever does anything that matters? Did it really need to be Boba Fett's dad who was the genetic source of the clones? Did Chewie really need to be in the Wookie battle scene at all?
Why did Lucas think that all of these little "wink wink" connections would make the films more entertaing? If anything, they guarantee that children down the road who watch these films in 1-6 order will not enjoy 4-6 half as much as we did.
Fantastic news, yes.
Now, will this new DVD series be funny? I think the original run of Futurama would have been a lot better if they made it funny.
True, but nothing you just said contradicts my point.
Third person chewer
Sounds like the title of an "H" game, or maybe a new chapter of "Leisure Suit Larry."
Sometimes "staying aside" supports one side or the other. Like the old saying goes, evil prevails when good men do nothing.
Vader:You're either with me, or my enemy/Bush:You're either with or against us/Obi-Wan:Only the Sith deal in absolutes
You missed one:
"He who is not with me is against me"
- Jesus Christ.
(Luke 23:11)
OMG! Jesus is t3h 5ith!!!1!
You know, some people don't like to hear it, but sometimes you do gotta chose sides.
Watching them in 1-6 order the first time out would call a lot more attention to the little continuity errors, such as Liea telling Luke about her memories of their mother. Or that it took about 18 years to build the Death Star, but only about 3 to build a replacement.
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes."
- Obi-Wan
Also very funny.
Then he says "WHAT HAVE I DONE?!" and collapses in a chair. What the fuck?
It shows that he wasn't entirely manipulated or transformed. Anakin chose to become Darth Vader with his eyes more or less wide open. He knew for certain that what he was doing was wrong, but didn't care (enough.) I thought it worked really well.
My favorite moment of accidental humor in the movie was the line:
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes."
No exceptions! LOL!
How true. And how unfortunate since World of Warcraft, while good, introduces nothing new.
It does introduce one thing new, and it's the reason why nearly all of my friends are playing it:
Cross-platform support for both PC's and Macs.
No, there are not many Mac gamers out there. No, Blizzard probably does not sell the game to a lot of Mac users. However, there is one modern MMORPG in which my PC-owning friends and Mac-owning friends can all play together on the same server, and that's World of Warcraft.
I loved City of Heroes, and I think City of Villians will be a great sequel, but I'm not renewing my account and I'm not buying the new one, because Cryptic doesn't support Macs and doesn't plan to do so anytime soon. End of story.
How is it that such an ordinarily enlightened group of people that gather here, can become JUST LIKE the fundamentalists they hate when presented with a hot-button issue.
Infidel! How dare you question The March of Science and Reason! Have you no faith in mankind's infallibility?
In short, what is wrong with looking before we leap? I think we all agree that a lot of disturbing science fiction revolves around scientists who should have stepped back and wondered: "Should I really be doing this?"
Oooh... You're just asking for a stoning now! Where's my lucky rock?
Every three or four years, somebody else tries to get us all to panic because there are not enough CS majors enrolled at college.
The dirty little secret is: You don't need a degree in CS or anything like it to be able to do 99% of the jobs in the IT industry, and most large companies are brimming over with techies who hold degrees in completely different fields.
My degree is in Music Education. Sure, I have a certification in C and C++, but zero college credits in the computer sciences, other than a single FORTRAN class I took as an incoming freshman.
I work as a support programmer alongside somebody who sweated through the CS degree while I was having fun at college.
It's not like this stuff is brain surgery. There's a perception that computer science is hard to learn because so few people are interested in learning it, but the truth is that most IT jobs are so pathetically simple that even a humanities graduate like me can learn them.
One could argue that "Business Administration degree + computer skills" often results in a much brighter future in the corporate IT world than "Computer Science degree + business sense."
wondering where the hell you're going to be in 20 years, other than stuck under the same a**hole boss whose salary is probably 4-5 times yours.
"It would be nice to have that kind of job security."
- Samir from Office Space
I play World of Warcraft and I like it well enough, but it isn't the end all and be all of MMOs.
You know the part of my post where I said that it was?
Yeah, that part wasn't actually there.
Go ahead, read it again. Not there.
All I was saying is, almost nobody seems to care about any other MMOG at the moment. The tiny number of posts in this thread so far kind of backs me up on that.
I didn't say it was new, I said it was simple.
There's a reason why the final generation of floppies had that little metal door, and it was a good idea. Something like it would be a good idea for these new DVD formats.
Oh, and those "little trays" you are talking about, they were called "caddies," but that's hardly the same thing, because 1. They were kind of expensive, not like the cheaper way of doing it I'm suggestiong, and 2. You had to remove the CD from one plastic case and put it into another, which was a fantastically stupid way to go. Current cases only cost a few cents each... Just make a similar case which doesn't open but does allow a player to spin and read the disk, and you're done.
Crickets were heard chirping in response to announcements from several massively-multiplayer online games which were not World of Warcraft.
Audience members, who nearly outnumbered the company spokesmen, called it the biggest non-Blizzard MMOG announcement since the last Shadowbane expansion.