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Warring Across the Stars...With their...Wars....and Stuff


IlyaP

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18 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

You also run the risk of alienating the star wars fanbase - which are still, largely, kids - with something too serious, too dark, and too grey. Star Wars at its core is about very black and white morality and values, and while the audience has matured the property has largely not. Making the Empire look too sympathetic, or making Rebels look too evil, is going to be off-brand and possibly a problem. It's as tonally incorrect as having something in Game of Thrones have heroic knights regularly saving the day and being all honorable and noble and not being exploited; it might be an interesting story, but it isn't right.

I actually don't think this is true, at least any more.

Hardcore Star Wars fans are mostly adults, increasingly middle-aged adults who have been around for a while and are huge long-term fans from way back in the day.

Each successive generation of Star Wars has brought in new fans, but they've also been nowhere near as virulent at the OG 1977 crowd. Recall the hype over The Phantom Menace but, whilst it was solidly successful, it was not as successful as anyone thought it would be (the confident predictions of it smashing past Titanic's box office but it didn't come close; the vast over-orders on the toys which then did not sell anything like in the expected quantities, incidentally destroying the company I worked for at the time). The new fans who came on board at that time were certainly not nonexistent, but they were certainly not as numerous as the 1977 crowd. And Pokemon came out of nowhere to completely obliterate Star Wars in popularity in 1999.

With the Disney era of Star Wars, there has certainly been younger kids getting involved and enjoying the franchise, the little girls dressing up as Rey to watch The Force Awakens (and even that was seven years ago), the Baby Yoda toys flying off the shelves and so forth, but modern kids are not as en masse into it. It's their parents thing, or even their grandparents thing (urgh). Their thing was Marvel, but I'm now regularly seeing young kids who think Marvel is old hat and not interesting any more.

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Just now, Ran said:

They're developing Dunk & Egg at HBO.

Yeah, Hedge Knight is a great example of it being a story about what a noble knight is - and what happens to him and those who he supports. Not a super awesome happy ending, was it? 

Just now, Ran said:

I really think that Andor as a single show is unlikely to do any of that. People who don't like it won't watch it and won't think it means anything to what Star Wars is, just as people who think Clone Wars or The Book of Boba Fett ignore them and focus on the stuff they like. Star Wars as a big tent seems like exactly the right approach.

Counterpoint: reaction to Last Jedi and how that shaped the entire Star Wars brand, and reaction to Mandalorian and how that spun off, like, 5 different properties based on Clone Wars. 

 

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5 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

Not a super awesome happy ending, was it? 

You are shifting goal posts here. You said nothing of endings, you said stories about knights being noble and honorable and saving the day is not tonally in keeping... but literally that's what the Dunk & Egg stories largely are, at least until their final story from what we can tell.

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1 minute ago, Ran said:

You are shifting goal posts here. You said nothing of endings, you said stories about knights being noble and honorable and saving the day is not tonally in keeping... but literally that's what the Dunk & Egg stories largely are, at least until their final story from what we can tell.

Yeah, I don't agree with that. The story starts with a guy faking being an actual knight, stopping someone from being raped, and ends with the noble heir of the kingdom dying gruesomely. It is definitely not the kind of feel-good story I was talking about; it is a story of nobility and honor and the consequences of those actions - and those consequences not being the most awesome thing; point of fact, I'm pretty sure that's precisely what GRRM was going for with Dunk and Egg - an homage to the honorable knight set in Westeros and showing the hypocrisy and consequences of it. 

Another way to say it: I would not expect an 'edited' version of Dunk and Egg where the heir doesn't die a horrible death or the real bad guy to basically get away scot free to happen. If I'm reading Westeros I expect there to be grey in morality, grey in choices and grey in outcomes. If that doesn't happen it would feel wrong. 

12 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I actually don't think this is true, at least any more.

Hardcore Star Wars fans are mostly adults, increasingly middle-aged adults who have been around for a while and are huge long-term fans from way back in the day.

Each successive generation of Star Wars has brought in new fans, but they've also been nowhere near as virulent at the OG 1977 crowd. Recall the hype over The Phantom Menace but, whilst it was solidly successful, it was not as successful as anyone thought it would be (the confident predictions of it smashing past Titanic's box office but it didn't come close; the vast over-orders on the toys which then did not sell anything like in the expected quantities, incidentally destroying the company I worked for at the time). The new fans who came on board at that time were certainly not nonexistent, but they were certainly not as numerous as the 1977 crowd. And Pokemon came out of nowhere to completely obliterate Star Wars in popularity in 1999.

With the Disney era of Star Wars, there has certainly been younger kids getting involved and enjoying the franchise, the little girls dressing up as Rey to watch The Force Awakens (and even that was seven years ago), the Baby Yoda toys flying off the shelves and so forth, but modern kids are not as en masse into it. It's their parents thing, or even their grandparents thing (urgh). Their thing was Marvel, but I'm now regularly seeing young kids who think Marvel is old hat and not interesting any more.

I think this is a fair reading, though I also have school-age children and they (and their friends) are pretty obsessed with Mandalorian and some of the more recent films, including...sadly...Rise of Skywalker. 

That said, I think it might be better to say that it's targeted towards the children who watched those shows and the feeling you got when watching. Some of it is for kids - but some of it is recapturing that nostalgia. And if you're watching something that says Star Wars on the tin, you're not expecting blowjob jokes or tits out or blood spraying everywhere. You're expecting, largely, space samurai to be doing bad-ass things, crazy adventures with no real plans somehow working out due to chutzpah and gambling around possession of slaves. And if you deviate from that at all - having things like heroes going dark, or women existing - then you may have a bad time. 

I think Andor is still on the edge there, but I think it's probably as far as they're gonna take it unless it proves absurdly successful. 

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Andor can certainly be a more mature Star Wars, but in the end it's going to have the Empire be evil and the Rebellion be good. That's not in question.

It's never going to be even comparable to Breaking Bad or anything like that, shows with protagonists who are genuinely bad people who do genuinely bad things. Star Wars likes anti-heroes and even villains well enough as protagonists, it always has - but it will always make sure to redeem them. It's not a setting that will wander far from its moral centre.

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51 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

And Mandalorian did better than both as far as Disney is concerned. 

The Mandalorian is a "big tent" show which throws in stuff for the "grown up kids" who grew up on the original triklogy, for the Millenials who are fans of the prequels and Clone Wars, and stuff for the Zoomers too. 

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

I actually don't think this is true, at least any more.

Hardcore Star Wars fans are mostly adults, increasingly middle-aged adults who have been around for a while and are huge long-term fans from way back in the day.

I think this is correct. The median age for a Star Wars movie goer is firmly in the 18-49 demographic.

Where you see this particularly clearly is in some foreign markets where the original trilogy never played back in the day. Where you don't have a generation of people who saw those films or played with the toys growing up. South Korea, China, Russia, etc. The sequel trilogy didn't do particularly well in those places because there was little nostalgia to drive it. 

 

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5 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

Diego Luna confirmed in an interview what I had suspected. Part of the reason why his background is that he's from a culture with its own language is to explain his accent, since no one else in the SW universe speaks with that accent. I'm curious if we'll meet his sister and if she has the same accent. Though if she left Kenari at the age we see her, her accent could be less apparent or she might have one of the common accents.

Really? I’ve only seen episode 1 but there’s randomly a Scottish guy and the security guy is American, uniquely among his colleagues. It never occurred to me they needed explaining, Star Wars just be Star Warsing.

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16 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Really? I’ve only seen episode 1 but there’s randomly a Scottish guy and the security guy is American, uniquely among his colleagues. It never occurred to me they needed explaining, Star Wars just be Star Warsing.

Well all the accents of human characters are from GB, Ireland, and the US. Other humanoids that speak the common language may have a different accent, such as some twi'leks having French accents.

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I should think that by now the news has made the rounds, but if not:

From now on Vader's cybernetic body will be accompanied by a true "robot" voice. James Earl Jones has signed away his rights to being the voice of Vader. From now on, when we see Vader in a new production, it will be Jones's voice created with AI. By the way, Jones is 91. I dread the day.

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6 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I should think that by now the news has made the rounds, but if not:

From now on Vader's cybernetic body will be accompanied by a true "robot" voice. James Earl Jones has signed away his rights to being the voice of Vader. From now on, when we see Vader in a new production, it will be Jones's voice created with AI. By the way, Jones is 91. I dread the day.

Didn’t this already happen in Obi Wan so we got the Star Wars equivalent of ‘Smithers you Are Really GOOD at turning me On’ ?

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The latest Andor was good. The show seems to be taking to heart the idea of evil being born from mundanity, with the Imperial office politics (low-key but excellently played) and Mon Mothma's political issues crossing into her home life being really interesting, despite relatively low stakes at this time. Seeing Imperial Coruscant being grimy and industrial compared to the brighter Republic period was also a nice touch.

Stellan Skarsgard's performance in particular is absolutely amazing, as you'd expect. Anton Lesser as the the Imperial major was also great, especially his brusque imperial manner being combined with his acknowledgement of his subordinates' successes rather than just being on their cases the whole time. This is a show which is sweating the details and reaping the benefits of it, rather than just ignoring them and chiselling away the foundation of the suspension of disbelief.

On 9/23/2022 at 7:34 PM, KalVsWade said:

So did Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. 

And Mandalorian did better than both as far as Disney is concerned. 

Rise of Skywalker did okay but disappointingly. The marketing costs for the mainline trilogy Disney Star Wars movies were so insane that the films needed to make back three times their budget (rather than the more normal two) to make a solid profit. On that basis, Rise of Skywalker made maybe $175 million profit, compared to the $1.6 billion profit of The Force AwakensSkywalker didn't lose money but it was not a huge a success by those metrics. Rogue One, which seems to have had a lower marketing spend, seems to have made a fair amount more profit, whilst Solo of course actively lost money (even using the traditional x2 calculation, Rogue One made more money than Rise of Skywalker).

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I do wish they would release more than one episode at a time for Andor. While I enjoy the way they're approaching the story, the attention to detail, worldbuilding, characters and dialogue, the plot is a very slow burn. We were introduced to so many more characters in this episode.

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Just now, Corvinus85 said:

I do wish they would release more than one episode at a time for Andor. While I enjoy the way they're approaching the story, the attention to detail, worldbuilding, characters and dialogue, the plot is a very slow burn. We were introduced to so many more characters in this episode.

Yup, I think they should have released them in 4 batches of 3 (or even 6 of 2). A slow-burn show isn't a bad thing, but I think it's a questionable fit for Star Wars with its traditional faster pace and more constant action.

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Funny how this is the most mature I’ve seen SW be. No pointless action and over the top lightsaber crap. Heck it makes me feel like I’m watching The Wire at times. To think if not for a podcast I listen to, I might have skipped this show. It’s such a nice breath of fresh air.

 

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