Lucas still takes Star Wars seriously...

All the proof you need is here...

http://www.rebelscum.com/photo.asp?image=http://euro.rebelscum.com/euroscum/uktoyfair2005/uktoyfair2005_rubies_cat19.jpg

........oh,........... that's too bad. Our last, best hope of a high quality movie with good dialogue and balance between scene and scenery is lost if he is still convinced he needs to be so entirely involved as he was with the previous two.........episode 1 was ok, maybe even good....better if not so much emphasis on his "variety of environments" and special effects capabilities.

Episode II was just plain disappointing, making the romantic pair seem stiff and unconvincing, much less engaging. If I had not scene Natlie Portman do so much better work than that, I would have thought it was her who was blowing it.........but I don't think it was.

I think Mr. Lucas has lost the sense of thery and universe that he had when he did episodes 4-6. The passage of time, changes, and growth can do that.........

Ok, ......that's what I get for thinking I can skip the link until AFTER I reply......and now I see a pair of rolling eyes finishing the opening post and am just going to quietly walk backwards out of here for a while.........

Interesting 2AM, I personally found Ep1 to be weaker, maybe due to JarJar, and thought Ep2 at least was fairly decent.

Where is "Star Wars: THE FLAME THROWER" ?!?

Mel Brooks was so spot-on with that shit.

erm... assuming that's not a joke, blame that on Lucasfilm Licensing.

You have got to be fucking kidding me!

I may actually get the Yoda and Vader one for my parents' dogs.

...Yeah, right.

Interesting 2AM, I personally found Ep1 to be weaker, maybe due to JarJar, and thought Ep2 at least was fairly decent.

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I actually liked the episode 1 way of showing how jedi knights operated in a typical "negotiation" situation as wll as the whole mito.....whatevers. The biblical stylings of the birth of Anakin were a bit much or at least too thinly veiled. Mostly I liked watching the jedi tandum work.

If they had come up with better chemistry between Kenobi and Skywalker and especially between Skywalker and Amidala, I would have given the edge to episode 2.

People are surprised by this?

George Lucas's original idea for the forest battle was to have it be Wookiees fighting the stormtroopers. Instead he cut the Wookiees in half and called them Ewoks (hoping no one notice the similarity in names). He thus took a wonderful idea involving the tremendous power of nature (can you think of any better force of nature than Chewie?) and turned it into a cutesey-poo slapfest that made little to no sense. And why?

To make more money, of course!

After that, pet costumes were only a matter of time.


As to the prequels -- yes, they have problems. But I've noticed something. The younger generation of fans enjoy the prequels just as much as the originals. Operating on this fact, I've decided that any Star Wars movie is spectacular if they get to you young enough.

Consider: the weakest parts of Episodes I and II were the dialogue, especially love dialogue -- but dialogue is always the weakness of a Star Wars movie! Sure, the originals did have a few wonderful ad libs by Harrison Ford, but most of the talking was junk. When you're eight, though, you don't care.

So that's Lucas's secret: get 'em while they're young.

But the originals didn't get me while I was young. I was too young or nonexistant when they first came out and by the time I was old enough to be a consumer of more than shiny things the hoopla had died down enough that I never saw the movie until I was into my teens and concerned about little things like dialog, at least to the extent of being annoyed by pidgin english. It's not that we didn't get how annoying the flamboyantly gay robot was it's that the damn slapstick salamander is exponentially worse.

Beside we tend to both underestimate childrens' intelligence and oversell the importance of catering to them.

He thus took a wonderful idea involving the tremendous power of nature (can you think of any better force of nature than Chewie?) and turned it into a cutesey-poo slapfest that made little to no sense. And why?
.
To make more money, of course!

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Uh... nope. He chopped Wookiees in half and made Ewoks because he did want to do the low tech primatives victorious over the technologically sophisticated Empire. Chewie had been shown to be skilled in technology up the wazoo throughout the two films prior. It would defeat the point to then have the Wookiees trying to take on a position of technologically primitive when all of what we'd seen of them prior told us Wookiees were well aquainted with technology.

The only Wookie we saw was Chewie who, yes, was a good with machines. But there's nothing that says that's typical of Wookies. Having a planet of Wookies of varying degrees of intelligence (like humans) but decidedly low tech would make perfect sense. Chewie would be the rare Wookie how was traveling about through space and therefore picked up tech skills.

But Star Wars was never about realistic construction, it was of broad strokes. That's why planetary environments are all of one time. Tatooine = Desert Planet. Dagobah = Swamp Planet. Yavin's Moon = Jungle Planet. Endor's Moon = Also Jungle Planet. Cloud City's planet who's name I forget = Air Planet. Big broad strokes. I don't see why Wookiees would be made to be any less broad.

No, I mean the Wookies would live on "No Tech/Forest Planet" or whatever, just like the Ewoks. Chewbacca would be the one exception.

I remember reading one backstory about Han and Chewie, but don't know if it's "canon:" Chewie was enslaved by the Empire. Han Solo was a pilot for the Empire. When he saw Chewbacca's abuse (and maybe that of a whole bunch of Wookies used as slave labor), he freed them and thus became a fugitive. This explains his supreme piloting skills (he joined the military because that was the place for the best pilots, not out of any specific political loyalty), his rogue lifestyle, his strong natural sense of morals, and his association with Chewie. Also, IIRC, Chewie tagged along with Solo to act as his bodyguard and to look out for him as a way to return the favor.

This could have taken 5 minutes to explain.

Since the Empire already had a presence there, it is reasonable they would use the strong Wookie population as slave labor. Chewie's return as a free wookie and the coming of the rebellion could incite the wookies to rebel.

I personally think this would have been wonderful. Not only would it be a Nature defeats Technology thing, but also a slave revolt. It would also put a more "human" (heh) face on the population that the Empire was oppressing (we never really see many people suffer under the Empire, only our heroes).

It sure would have beat the Teddy Bear War.

I also remember the Wookie's planet Kyshyyk or some shit, was supposed to be a forest planet. Endor was a forest moon. It seems like they might have been doing down that path at one point...I think it would have been neat to have the Wookies being subjacated into building the next Death Star...

In fact -- depending on who you believe -- it's possible that Wookiee slaves built the first Death Star. Some of the comic books covered it, I believe, only barely canon but the possibility is there....

So in my private version of RotJ, the Wookiees were being used again, and some escaped, and they didn't have much in the way of technology because they could only take what they could grab on their way out the door... but who really needs technology when you're seven feet tall and routinely pull your enemies' arms off?

Ah, well. Someday I'll master the technological skills to do a "Phantom Edit" style operation on RotJ....

Ok, we get to see a whole army of Wooks in Ep3, right before they get enslaved, and they seem technologically advanced. I see this as GL apologising for Ewoks, Gungans and all that other rubbish...

GKE, I think you were refering to one of the really old Han Solo novels. They were great, probably not canon, but good fun.

Ah, but GL never allowed any of the authors to show Han and Chewie's first meeting. I believe he gave roughly that outline so they could have it as background, though.