Star Wars: Nothing But Star Wars

[Myrddin]

Don't let it end.

 

Ahem.

So apparently it's confirmed the identity of one of the frozen figures from Kenobi episode 4:

Spoiler

The Youngling is the same actor as the Order 66 flashback (Johnathan and Oliver Ho)

More evidence as to Reva's past.

[Soylent Brown]

Obviously the episode has its failings, but I did quite enjoy seeing Obi-Wan shaking off the rust, with Leia in danger.

Him deflecting laser blasts from both front and behind at the same time, then performing a little temporary window repair, was really cool.

I really hope we see our reconstituted Obi-Wan in a rematch with Vader - anger and resentment against poise and control.

[sifth]

28 minutes ago, Soylent Brown said:

Obviously the episode has its failings, but I did quite enjoy seeing Obi-Wan shaking off the rust, with Leia in danger.

Him deflecting laser blasts from both front and behind at the same time, then performing a little temporary window repair, was really cool.

I really hope we see our reconstituted Obi-Wan in a rematch with Vader - anger and resentment against poise and control.

I just wish the CGI for that window looked better. Water is always the most difficult thing to make with CGI.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

This is amazing. This might be the earliest SW fan interaction (before the film was released). The second question is salt. Decades before social media...

Nerd bastards. 

 

[Werthead]

7 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

This is amazing. This might be the earliest SW fan interaction (before the film was released). The second question is salt. Decades before social media...

Nerd bastards. 

Gary Kurtz was an interesting guy. He was somebody who had no problem telling Lucas when his ideas were bullshit and when to shoot them down, and he walked on RotJ when Lucas sold out his original plans for a much happier, toy-selling friendly vision.

[Corvinus85]

The fact that a Worldcon had a future Hollywood star... 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, Corvinus85 said:

The fact that a Worldcon had a future Hollywood star... 

I think that was the Worldcon with the first “Hugo Loser’s Party”…

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

@mormont,

Quote

They have decades' worth of books, comics, animations and video games to adapt or trawl for ideas. They won't be running out of ideas that can sustain 5-8 hours of content for quite a while. That was one of the things that attracted Disney.

Doesn't it worry you though that they've mostly missed with their last two attempts at limited run series? Or how many other movies they produced that have been underwhelming? I hear glowing reviews about a lot of the animated projects, but Disney hasn't done a great job when it comes to live action content.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

14 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Gary Kurtz was an interesting guy. He was somebody who had no problem telling Lucas when his ideas were bullshit and when to shoot them down, and he walked on RotJ when Lucas sold out his original plans for a much happier, toy-selling friendly vision.

"original plans"?

[Rhom]

4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

@mormont,

 I hear glowing reviews about a lot of the animated projects, but Disney hasn't done a great job when it comes to live action content.

How much of that do you think is altered expectations for an animated series?  No one is expecting Emmy Award winning quality from Bad Batch... but when Obi Wan isn't the second coming of The Wire, suddenly its complete and total shit.

[Rhom]

1 minute ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

"original plans"?

I know that I've read that the climax was supposed to be on the Wookie homeworld instead of with the Ewoks.

So other than shrinking the hairy heroes down to three feet tall looking like Teddy Ruxpin, I'm not sure what else was changed to alter the vision.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Rhom said:

How much of that do you think is altered expectations for an animated series?  No one is expecting Emmy Award winning quality from Bad Batch... but when Obi Wan isn't the second coming of The Wire, suddenly its complete and total shit.

Dude, they escaped an imperial base housing the most important parts of the empirebwith a trenchcoat and two shitty sewage hauling speeders.

[Corvinus85]

6 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

Dude, they escaped an imperial base housing the most important parts of the empirebwith a trenchcoat and two shitty sewage hauling speeders.

This description makes it sound like we're watching redneck Star Wars. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

10 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

Dude, they escaped an imperial base housing the most important parts of the empirebwith a trenchcoat and two shitty sewage hauling speeders.

I agree. The rebels are amazing.

Also, 3rd sister let them escape or something.  

[DMC]

19 minutes ago, Rhom said:

but when Obi Wan isn't the second coming of The Wire, suddenly its complete and total shit.

As Kal so artfully put it, I think you can have managed expectations for Boba and Obi-Wan and still recognize that they were disappointments (at least thus far).

[Ran]

As I understand it, the account that Kurtz quit over creative differences on Return of the Jedi is certainly a take... but an alternative take is that Kurtz was almost not hired by Lucas for Empire because he had caused tensions on the Star Wars set with some of the crew, and then in the course of the second film failed to wrangle Irving Kershner who slowed down the pace of filming, leading to great cost overruns and a much-longer-than-planned shoot (I think budget and shoot time both went about twice what was planned). TESB was financed entirely out of Lucas's pocket, and the overruns nearly bankrupted him and nearly lost him control of Star Wars to Fox. 

It's true that Kurtz claimed that Lucas told him that they could have made a film almost as good but much closer to budget, and it's also true that at the time Lucas was telling people that the whole purpose of making more Star Wars was to fund the Skywalker Ranch and all the projects coming out of it -- ILM, Pixar, etc. -- but at the same time the negative aspects of his fairly hands-off approach of delegating authority to Kurtz onTESB during production (i.e. near bankruptcy) led him to reverse course entirely and decide for RotJ that he would be on hand every single day and would hand-pick a director that he felt was more along the lines of a substitute for himself rather than someone tasked with giving the film his own spin (as Kershner was allowed to do.)

And because of that, Lucas's vision of just having other people make more SW films for him while he focused on the stuff he cared about fell by the wayside.

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

"original plans"?

When they made ESB they still had the nine-part saga in mind, so in the original draft of Ep VI they introduced the Emperor but did not kill him, and only killed Vader. Han Solo died in the final battle, which was apparently over Coruscant (or Imperial Centre as it was then called), which was defended by two orbital battle stations that were effectively mini-Death Stars. Depending on what one of fifteen drafts of the outline people were referring too, these metamorphosed into one Death Star, which was under construction by Wookie slave labour (later drafts moved the Death Star to Kashyyyk, not sure if it was called that at the time, and then substituted Kashyyyk and the Wookies for Endor and the Ewoks).

Also in the original drafts, Luke's sister was a new character who showed up from across the galaxy. He and Leia were definitely not meant to be siblings (hence the smooching in ESB).

Kurtz had quite a long laundry list of things he disliked about the film as it transitioned ideas. He hated Luke and Leia being siblings, which he thought was implausible and made the universe too small, and disliked the chasing of the kiddie toy market with the Ewoks. I think he did like the mythic overtones of the saga that had really come to the fore in ESB and he liked the idea of the story being longer and giving more room for the characters to breathe (although he may have also been thinking of longer-term employment opportunities). Introducing and killing the Emperor in one movie (ignoring the plans to do I-III later on to set him up more) seemed to him to be a bad idea, whilst killing Vader but simultaneously revealing the Emperor as a much greater threat who would then be the primary villain in three more movies seemed to work better. I think there was also the WWII analogy, that originally the Empire would have suffered a grievous defeat in VI but not necessarily a terminal one: it was D-Day rather than the Battle of Berlin, and again the idea of the Empire going from being at 100% strength to collapsing as a result of the Emperor's death and one battle didn't seem to sit well with him.

But yes, it is true that ESB went massively over budget and caused them a lot of problems, and Kurtz took some of the blame for that, because he was happy to let Kershner do his own thing. But we should remember that, at least for many years, Lucas did not like ESB at all and considered it the weakest of the original trilogy (if not the first six), and did seem to have had a chip on his shoulder about it being cited as the best film of the series, since it was the one he was least involved with.

[RumHam]

18 minutes ago, Werthead said:

But we should remember that, at least for many years, Lucas did not like ESB at all and considered it the weakest of the original trilogy (if not the first six), and did seem to have had a chip on his shoulder about it being cited as the best film of the series, since it was the one he was least involved with.

What the hell. The more I learn about this guy the less I like him.

[Jaxom 1974]

2 hours ago, KalVsWade said:

Dude, they escaped an imperial base housing the most important parts of the empirebwith a trenchcoat and two shitty sewage hauling speeders.

Huh.  You'd think that would have been the pllot of the animated shows...the old Droids at the least, if not Ewoks...

[mormont]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

@mormont,

Doesn't it worry you though that they've mostly missed with their last two attempts at limited run series? Or how many other movies they produced that have been underwhelming? I hear glowing reviews about a lot of the animated projects, but Disney hasn't done a great job when it comes to live action content.

It's not really connected as far as I can see. My point was that Disney liked the deep well of IP that came with the Star Wars deal, same as the Marvel deal.

Now, so far the Disney SW live action series have done one wildly successful original idea and two of the most obvious ideas, the latter two being somewhat undercooked in various ways. But the problem isn't a lack of ideas for them to mine, is my point. The problem is selecting the right ones and executing it well.