You don’t say…

This show is going to benefit a lot from binge re-watching. Episode 5 was the most fun so far, and really dials up the stakes for most of the characters, but ultimately it’s a long action set piece with a predictable reveal in the middle of it. Nothing much happens.

And while the reveal was predictable, it was also fine. If those motherfuckers had denied me DARTH BORTLES(!!!) I would have set the building on fire. Best acting and best character in the show so far, and really getting to chew the scenery with Sith philosophy that would be absolutely fanboy-friendly catnip if it were being delivered by a white male with a name they recognized.

I don’t love everything about this show, not by a long shot, but beyond our villain, Sol is likeable, Jecki and Yord grew on me just enough I was mildly sad they killed them, and also surprised. There has also now been lightsaber combat that’s better than anything in TV Star Wars. I actually want to find out what really happened and what the exact nature of the stain on the 4 Jedi souls is, so I guess that makes a show like this a success.

I do wish they’d offered a bit more of a lore dump to remind me about Cortosis, though. I really thought Jason Mendoza was permanently breaking lightsabers and was very confused when they started working again.

No more spoilers than necessary by mentioning it, but young me had his mind blown with how you won the final battle in that game.

I agree. Whatever analogy works or doesn’t, there is a pretty significant disconnect, and he falls on the worse side of it.

It goes from quirky tinkering that maybe deprives the world of new and good projects (but probably doesn’t, if his heart wouldn’t have been in them), to a weird, anxiety-fueled ego trip lording the power that copyright laws give him over the audience that his (very collaborative, I might add) works found for themselves after he and his colleagues sent them out into the world.

The biggest thing to me is that he just doesn’t realize, or maybe doesn’t accept, that those same little kids who strolled by his car in 1977 formed core memories that are meaningful to them, just as his build process was to him. I would be much more sympathetic to Lucas if it were a car, because it would be the only one.

Even now, Disney would fall all over themselves to find a way to make more money off Star Wars without having to go to the expense of actually making more Star Wars. The only two options here are that holding it back was part of the contract, or it’s part of the soft understanding to maintain goodwill with him. If George Lucas would give his blessing to a restoration project, I have no doubt an official one would proceed. All he has to do is acknowledge that the fans who want the “bad version” love it for their own valid reasons, and it can openly exist alongside his preferred vision.

It’s more that those formats are all very lossy, and all of them even had a few changes, notably the perspective shift that comes from tacking on “Episode IV” to the crawl. The 2004 Box Set, IIRC, was George’s only crack in the armor, and it’s literally nothing more than a “STFU, you spoiled babies” rip of those same laserdiscs to DVD.

The teams in the story are trying to find film prints, which should have enough data to make a good 4K transfer with only “cleanup” instead of the more dramatic efforts needed to upscale SD copies or extract the guts of the originals from SE copies.

“Grow up. These are my movies, not yours.”

So, George Lucas is a car guy. American Graffiti is the closest thing to an autobiography he ever made (though it’s not that close), and Tatooine Luke before the sizzle-sizzle smoky barbecue scene is probably a close second. To that end, I’ve always thought that a car-guy metaphor is probably the best way to understand this disconnect George Lucas has with the fans.

Star Wars is his hot rod. It’s the fast little thing he cobbled together in his garage from spare parts and his own sweat. Yes, the guts came off a factory line somewhere. Yes, he may have bought some parts at the store. Yes, he commissioned some bespoke upholstery. In the end, though, it’s his vision, his baby. He merely rolls it out every once in a while for everyone else to see.

Then, he takes it back to the garage. You know, that paintjob wasn’t so great after all. Maybe we could add a removable hardtop instead of it being an open roadster. A new crate engine would make it so much faster and cooler! Then, when it’s ready, he rolls it back out…

…and he’s completely befuddled when people get pissed off. He cannot understand for a single second why the version from the last autoshow, the one with the pinstripes with the wrong shade of red that he let somebody else apply because he was busy, meant something to these people. It’s just his project to tinker with it, and now he has the money and time to do it right, but “right” will change when he feels like he’s come up with something better. Isn’t it cool that he took off those generic tires and added some sweet whitewhalls? And if it isn’t, what does it matter? Go get your own car or ogle somebody else’s. What right do people have to be upset that he made changes, and it’s rude to tell him that they want him the old one back.

Eventually, there are so many people complaining about the new parts and the changes to old parts that he just can’t enjoy taking it out for a spin anymore, so he sells it to the local car museum. It’s sad in its way, but it ignores that fundamental disconnect:

Stories are not fuckin’ cars.

He put art out into the world, art that connected with people at crucial moments in their lives, some of them in very specific and detailed ways. He never viewed himself as a custodian and a guiding hand for the benefit of the audience, but rather as its owner, the one person who had a right to make legitimate changes to the story, even if it already existed and had made a mark on the world. Gene Roddenberry would be an interesting comparison, because while he certainly had some rigid ideas too, they were higher level and not quite so deeply personal.

“I’m putting my vision out for the audience to accept or not,” will result in more personal art, often therefore more interesting, and indeed I don’t think anyone begrudges George the right to make his changes. It’s just the mental disconnect that other people’s experiences don’t matter at all, that rankles. This is especially true when he could indulge those people’s nostalgia passively, because it’s not like the original versions affect the existence of the special editions. That might hurt his feelings though, because if you like the original version better, then you’re implicitly criticizing his more “authentic” vision. It comes off as petty and out of touch.

This was… fine? Morgan had no conflict though. It’s just a paragraph from wookiepedia that’s been animated. The Barriss half was better, if still a bit by the numbers.

Harsher than I would say is necessary, but agreed that Filoni has created more issues than he’s solved in live action. Maybe it was partly still crawling out of the COVID mindset, but Ahsoka felt so oddly small, both as a story and a production. Give him twice as many episodes to let the characters breathe in between the world building, and the relative freedom from production restrictions that you get in animation, and it would have been better.

Gilroy told a smaller story, but somehow it felt more expansive. The money was spent in ways that made it feel right, and when they needed to dial it back? Boom: arc in a plastic prison, instead of traveling to a completely different galaxy only to film in one sand dune and one hallway.

Lucas infamously finds ESB to be the most confusing SW movie.

I’ve always thought this was a little bit of a disingenuous argument from George Lucas‘s camp. I mean, who did he ask? Steven Spielberg? Ron Howard? Why not dig up the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock while we’re at it?

There would have been any number of really solid directors below that tier, who could have done a better job with the actors than George Lucas did. Hell, Richard Marquand from Return of the Jedi was there as a non guild director from British TV, pretty much specifically and only to make sure that the actors gave reasonable performances, and waddaya know? For all the weaknesses of that movie, The cast still makes it perfectly watchable and enjoyable.

You get a handful of people dedicated to posting content and facilitating discussions, and sure, I’d subscribe and engage where the engagement is. The Star Trek instance has home very well for them I think.

That said, lemmy federation has never really worked exactly how it was envisioned; it’s more like there’s just escape hatches without losing literally everything if a large instance goes dark or goes to shit.

For first time viewing, release is the only order that makes any sense whatsoever. Every movie was originally made by people who had seen the prior movies, for an audience that had seen them.

The callbacks won’t work right as foreshadowing, and no other movie introduces an audience to the setting like ANH does. Themes are built upon over time, reveals happen in the context of actually giving a shit about people and events from earlier movies.

Even if George wanted people to watch the PT first, and I’m not at all convinced he did, it just doesn’t work that way.

You know why Qui-Gon is the only Star Wars character to stay dead from a gut-stab?

Man was exhausted from carrying the entire film.

Liam Neeson single handedly makes TPM more watchable than either AOTC or ROTS.

Because Stardates in the 24th Century are based on a complex mathematical formula, a precise correlation to Earth-based dating systems is not possible.

Hand successfully waved.

This is the only TTRPG I ever played as a kid, and that only a couple of times, but it was very influential. So much of its source material was either official or became official in the old EU, to the point where the original Zahn trilogy had their own sourcebooks released. There was no wookiepeedia, there was “that kid down the street who knows the shit from the RPG books.” I even coded a QBasic version of Sabacc based on the WEG rules, though the “AI” was nothing more than a cardback blackjack algorithm.

Ahhh, go jump into a U-barrel, Ya Fingy! 🤣

Rods from God, indeed.

Wooper as the partner and a Cubone at 2:12. Is this the long-awaited Pokemon Star Wars crossover? As some prophecy probably foretold?

1. From the thumbnail I thought they’d pulled in Victor Garber for a moment. A lot of folks liked it more than I did, but some subtle The Orville fan service would be low hanging fruit.

2. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, does “watching a frustrated puppy” like Sonequa Martin-Green.