I thought that it was already well-known that George Lucas wrote the prequels because he grew to hate that which he created; and, by extension, hate us for being so gauche as to love it, and demand more and more of it for entirely the wrong reasons.
This suggests the prequels were a deliberate screw-you to what drew people to the original http://t.co/H8vnKO2kkH pic.twitter.com/uZ85m6mYgl
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) October 8, 2015
…Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I did not read this Mike Klimo guy’s Ring Theory and I have no intention of doing so, largely because it’s twenty thousand words long and that’s a lot for a Wednesday night. But I’ll be honest: even if it was George Lucas’s intent to argue that good and evil are meaningless human constructs I’m still not going to buy into that particular bit of sophomoric bullshit. If only because I’ve met very few people who genuinely believed that and still managed to come across as being well-adjusted individuals. Yes, yes, I know: shallow of me. Still, there it is.
Moe Lane
Eh, I think Lucas was good at the special effects of mid 80s tech, and hit the sweet spot with the very first film. And either he or someone close to him figured out how to make quite a bit of money off of that. Beyond that, any sophomoric philosophical, er, male cattle dung isn’t worth the pixels it’s printed on.
It’ll be kind of interesting to see what happens with the next film. It’ll be pretty, have cool CGI effects, and aliens, but you could say that about the Transformers movies too.
For all the crap Disney gets hit with by certain communities they certainly know how to foster, protect, and develop their IPs. For what it is, I trust them not to screw up Star Wars even if I don’t much care for the director they tapped out for the job. Even if they drop the ball with the next installment, I’m certain it will be more watchable than any of the prequels and they’ll certainly work hard to repair the damage (rather than double down on it).
I have some hopes, if only because a lot of the cast is clearly visibly hyped to be in a STAR WARS FILM, MAN. And that there were actual sets and everything.
Disney has announced they’re creating a Star Wars themed area — expanding from just a single ride — at the Studios. They need the films to do well to promote the park.
Now, why they signed on to make an Avatard themed area at Animal Kingdom, and what Star Wars Land means for the Muppets Bd Mama Melrose’s and Pizza Planet and the Osborne Spectacle…
And let’s not forget about Indiana Jones. I don’t see that franchise laying fallow for long under the Mouse’s yoke;-). Paramount gets to keep the distribution rights to the prior films but Disney holds all those cards as well going forward. As I said before, I trust them to handle their IPs well… or at least better than any other studio I can think of (grumble…Sony).
First of all, I think it’s clear that Star Wars Episode IV was originally a stand-alone. The fact that Leia was obviously taken by Luke, the use of Darth Vader as a secondary villain, deferring to Tarkin even. The narrative pattern of mentor leaving just in time for the hero to succeed ‘on his own.’
Sure, there were doors open to sequels, because what writer doesn’t want more $$. But it was a self-contained story. Nothing in it indicated this was “Vader’s story.” And it wasn’t until Darth became a thing that the Sith ideology and Vader’s backstory even became important. So we get the ‘middle trilogy,’ with Star Wars as Episode IV, because George gets so wrapped up in the backstory, he forgets there’s a reason backstory stays largely in the background. (Common error of middling writers.)
As a result, my vote goes for machete order. Forget Episode 1, no really. It’ll make you much happier.
For all his bad instincts on the storytelling front, I’m doubtful Lucas is a nihilist…or that the social\political commentary that can be dredged out of the Star Wars is anything more than shallow superficial skiffy. Not knocking the entertainment value of Star Wars but it still essentially follows Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey template (or ineptly reverses it) and the usual ton of storytelling shorthand that goes with it. The ring ‘master-plan’ theory falls apart notably on the fact that Lucas has been shoveling BS about Star Wars an awfully long time. I remember before Empire that he had plans\outlines for 9 movies (breaking the 6 for the Ring). I’m highly doubtful he scrapped the last three in his ‘outline’ (assuming it existed at all) so he could close the ring with the prequels (at 6).
Granted, it can be fun to poke the folks who read far too much into the disjointed philosophical backdrop (and then ease back and watch the fun) by pointing out that both the Alliance and Imperial civilization depends on massive scale chattel slavery. Besides the droids, the Republic can’t even find enough citizens to fight their wars and resort to enslaving clones.
I remember hearing George Lucas speak when Ep IV came out and at that time he said there were nine movies planned.
I read an interview with Lucas shortly after the original movie came out. He said that he’d had three movies planned out in his head, and Star Wars would have been the middle of the three. He just didn’t have the money to do them all.
In the first movie of the trilogy, Luke’s father and Darth Vader were rivals, and eventually they would duel on the edge of a volcano. Both would fall in — Luke’s father would die, and Darth Vader would be horribly mutilated. In the third movie, the Good Guys would win the war and restore the Republic.
The two droids were to have been the thread that tied the movies together, and at the end of the third movie the audience would learn that the saga was being told by the droids to Luke and Leia’s grandchildren.
But with the success of Star Wars, Lucas saw the opportunity to make more than one sequel, hence The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
The Empire Strikes Back originally was NOT intended to reveal that Darth Vader was Luke’s father … because he wasn’t. But Lucas thought that Leigh Brackett’s script for The Empire Strikes Back was weak — it was just more of the same, it didn’t have anything memorable in it. Oh, and Luke sees the ghost of his father in this version. Leigh Brackett was very ill by then and couldn’t continue; Lawrence Kasdan took over, threw out almost all of Brackett’s script, and wrote a new one based on the Big Reveal.
Don’t believe me? Leigh Brackett’s original script is on the Web at http://scyfilove.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Star-Wars-The-Empire-Strikes-Back-Brackett-Draft.pdf