Today* marks the 10th anniversary of the old EU being decanonized.
*Well, for me–it’s probably yesterday for where a lot of you guys live
A few years back some people uncovered a master copy of the Swedish TV version, and upscaled and color-corrected it. It’s a different cut with some scenes removed. They’ve only uploaded 35 minutes of it to YouTube, but they’ve said fairly recently that they’re eventually going to release the whole thing to archive.org.
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wruAk8GbaJ8
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwfFZmXEBmM&t=193s
(Note that the YT version features alterations to the soundtrack to bypass YT’s DRM)
- Even if this was supposed to be some insane strategic gamble on Leia’s part, they still make no effort to evacuate the base, like they do with Echo Base in Empire Strikes Back. The moment Leia arrived at Yavin, they should have initiated an evacuation of all personnel except for the fighter pilots necessary to attack the Death Star.
- And then even after they miraculously blow up the Death Star via Luke’s one-in-a-million shot, instead of immediately evacuating, they still don’t evacuate the base. Instead, they stay around for an award ceremony. It’s unclear why a fleet of Star Destroyers doesn’t immediately show up at Yavin and obliterate the base.
I guess maybe all their transports were tied up elsewhere and couldn’t arrive until a while after the DS had been destroyed?
I really hope that K-2SO will be handled properly in season 2. He’s in the unfortunate position of being a comic-relief character in a show which isn’t supposed to have comic relief. I worry that they’ll have to add in humor to make him fit in (or elsewise his portrayal will be inaccurate to Rogue One to accommodate the difference in tone.) Ideally, his quotes should come across as blunt/edgy, as opposed to comedic. It’s a minor thing, but the addition of comic relief would really change the feel of show, and not for the better.
Fundamentally flawed though TROS may be, I do think it has a fantastic space opera vibe that’s been absent since the OT (other stuff like Rebels notwithstanding.) I also appreciate the sense of scale, with them visiting like 10 different planets. It may contribute to the rushed narrative, but it really feels like there’s an entire big galaxy out there.
I don’t think it’s available any longer, but this is–
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Clone-Wars-Micro-Series-Original-Broadcast-Restoration-Chapter-Format-RELEASED/id/109799
And they’re more accurate restorations than these, too.
The Ewoks in ROTJ were descended from the survivors of a ship that crashed on Endor millenia ago, hence why they speak a “primitive dialect” of an existing language. They’ve been there so long that the story of how they got to Endor has become mythology, rather than history, to them; for example, the ship had a protocol droid onboard which survived but later “died”, who has been glorified as a kind of god.
My understanding is that George Lucas maintains he intended for the Jabba scene to be in the movie, but they lacked the money to create the alien Jabba he wanted using stop motion or something.
It’s exceedingly likely that Jabba was originally intended to be a human; it’s been covered thoroughly here-
https://web.archive.org/web/20140928112036/http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/jabba.html
According to Paul Hirsh (one of the editors) in his biography, Lucas came up with the alien Jabba idea in post-production, but it had to be dropped due to being impossible to achieve with contemporary special effects technology.
If it helps:
#1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfRjN3txdM
#2 has been deuploaded, but a partial reconstruction is available here: https://twitter.com/heyitswindy/status/1764848211343057233
#3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y06AxkJviRQ
#4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oebz9lNo4pA
#5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvI1bNfleFs
And this one; not sure if it was aired during the actual TV broadcast or if it’s a commercial that was aired adjacent to/around the same time as the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6pSxiUEnLU
There are quite possibly others that have yet to resurface, if they will at all.
Yeah, Disney’s anti-tobacco crusade is weird. They act as though banning cigarettes from their films will cause kids to not smoke, as if they won’t ever see someone smoking in public, or won’t learn about smoking later in life.
One of the Bad Batch episodes features a trigger warning for earthquake/tsunami depictions, which was similarly bizarre.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is massively overrated. It’s oversimplistic, repetitive, and a bit boring; it doesn’t have much of an actual story beyond spoiled brats touring the factory and getting killed off in various ways. As someone who’s read most of Roald Dahl’s books, it’s easily one of the poorer entries in his canon.
James and the Giant Peach is similarly overrated.
I can give Lucas a bit of slack for the lucklusterness of the PT and ROTJ, since he was ultimately just trying to make pulpy Flash Gordon-esque adventures, not high-art movies. ANH and ESB, however, were so good that they’re generally considered to have entered into the realm of high art. He then fell into a trap where his subsequent films were expected to be masterpieces as well, and I agree that he could have definitely done better on them. But since he really knocked it out of the park on his first 2 SW films, fans’ expectations were higher than his.
Idea: what if Luke/Leia’s mother was a Jedi? And she got hunted down by Vader, who he saw as betraying him, and was killed, but Obi-Wan saved Luke and Leia?
I think they were trying to copy The Mando naming convention.
Yeah, that was my idea.
^i prefer when titles are “simple,” so this woulda been what I went with, if it were up to me.
For me, it’s not that I like simple titles, it’s that I like the cohesion of the titles. It feels like they all just fit.
(And not gonna lie, your “the” titles are way better than mine.)
Huh, I had no idea they were making such good progress on it. I’ll still watch it, even though I’m not really excited.
Ep1: The Summoning
Ep2: The Mission
Ep3: The Chase
Ep4: The Escape
Ep5: The Battle
Ep6: The Confrontation
Considering that each episode had a budget of ~15 million, that should be fine; it’ll actually be higher-budget than the existing episodes. I am glad that they aren’t going with an extravagant budget on par with the ST.
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/-Official-Certified-BTC-Hacker-For-Hire-iBolt-Cyber-Hacker/id/115143
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/TOP-CRYPTOCURRENCY-RECOVERING-COMPANYHACK-ANGEL/id/115162
It’s amazing how much the animation has improved from the early days of TCW to the Bad Batch.
My issue is that I have zero interest in any stories pertaining to Jedi anymore. Between Filoni and Abrams, the Jedi have been thoroughly ruined in all eras.
At the risk of getting mildly off-topic, easily my favorite thing about the Ahsoka show were the Dark Jedi. They aren’t cartoonish as the Sith, and they definitely come close to the OT (especially ANH) idea of the Jedi as wandering warriors. There are traces of this in Ahsoka’s portrayal as well, and we definitely get this vibe in Visions too. That’s how I’d love to see Jedi in future content, though the PT/TCW/EU idea of the Jedi is so entrenched that it’s not likely to leave anytime soon.
This feels kind of right:
Exactly this. So many Jedi survived that, if you look at ROTS, Order 66 feels meaningless. It removes any/all of the emotional impact it had in that movie.
Plus, the idea of a Jedi surviving Order 66 has become incredibly cliché to the point that it comes across as lazy writing. It seems as though every Star Wars TV/EU writer thought “a Jedi survives Order 66 story would be cool” without realizing that dozens of other writers had the exact same idea. It’s cheapening too, as it makes the idea of Obi-Wan and Yoda being the last remnants of the Jedi seem dubious. The Obi-Wan show was especially terrible about this, with the existence of an Underground Railroad for Jedi, and there are apparently so many survivors that there just happen to be two survivors on the same remote backwater planet (the other Jedi on Tatooine in Ep1.) It makes you wonder why the survivors didn’t team up to stage a coup to overthrow the Empire or something, since there evidently were enough of them to do so.
I must be experiencing Star Wars fatigue (at least for brand-new content) right now. I have no interest whatsoever in this show, despite all signs pointing to it being technically good.
Really, I think the issue is just that all the new content is just too run-of-the-mill. I’d like them to make something imaginative for once.
Ahsoka’s shuttle in the live-action show is cool. A mobile home in space, esentially.
Y-wings are cool too.
- At the end of The Rise of Skywalker, both Rey and a redeemed Ben Solo survive. We have a small time jump of some years, and the last thing we see is the two of them standing before a class of students in the New Jedi Temple on Naboo, telling them about the adventures of Luke and Anakin Skywalker, and teaching them the importance of redemption.
This one (or something similar) actually is probably doable (sans Kylo) with current technology using footage from the Rey movie, if there’s a scene featuring something of the sort. Though what Rey is saying might have be a bit different, even with AI lines.
According to the “Icons Unearthed” documentary, Lucas came up with the “Vader is Luke’s father” idea before Brackett’s draft was written, which is interesting. I assume that for whatever reason, he didn’t tell her—maybe the idea hadn’t been 100% finalized by that point? Though I haven’t actually seen the documentary (I’m just going off what I’ve heard from others), so although it’s clear that he had come up with the twist before Brackett’s script, I don’t know how finalized the idea was. I suppose it’s also possible that Brackett knew about the twist but ignored it, but it doesn’t seem likely that she’d ignore such a major plot point.
Also interesting is that the Kaminoans were basically recycled from this draft, which has similar aliens on Bespin. They’re described as having a similar appearance, they ride flying whale creatures, and IIRC their use of saber-darts (including the term itself) was an idea taken from this draft. It’s entirely possible that the Kaminoan city was inspired by Cloud City too, what with its similar appearance. It’s unclear whether all of this was Lucas’s concept, or if it was Brackett’s concept that he borrowed. However, if Lucas couldn’t be bothered to tell Brackett about the Vader father twist, it seems unlikely that this was one of Lucas’s ideas—unless this was a concept that Lucas (or McQuarrie) had come up with much earlier. So even if Lucas considered Brackett’s script flawed, assuming the Bespin aliens were her idea, he still was willing to borrow some concepts from it.
