The Nerdy Times-Episode 41-Star Wars and George Lucas Part 2
Website: http://incompetech.com
In this weeks episode Dan and I continue our discussion of Star Wars and George Lucas.
(download)
Filed underStar Wars
Are Star Wars Fans Dumb?- An Open Debate of Style Over Substance
I guess what prompted this question was a tweet that Darth Maul was voted the number one character players wanted to see in Soul Calibur V. Why? Is it because Darth Vader and Yoda were in the last one or is it because he's a cool character?
What makes Darth Maul cool? Is it because he dresses in black and looks like the devil? That's points for style, but there's no substance to it. Is it because he uses a double-ended lightsaber and can take on two Jedi Knights at the same time? Again that's style, but, what do we know about Darth Maul? The answer is nothing.
If you judge the character on the film he was in, the only one, you know nothing about him other than he's Darth Sidious's (aka Palpatine) apprentice. He has two lines of dialogue in the entire film, two fights, kills one person, then is sliced in half and falls down a pit. What's to like? I'd have liked to have seen more of his character. I'd have liked them to have developed him over the course of the series and enjoyed watching becoming a true villain. I'd have like if that movie would have stuck to its own rules when it said, "Always two there are, no more, no less." Which means when he died Palpatine had to start all over.
In the new movie, however, and in the tie-in cartoon, Palpatine has Count Dooku and Dooku has Asajj Ventress...so that's three. And what do we know about any of these characters? Dooku used to be good, but is now bad, and Asajj Ventress is really...a female Darth Maul Rip-Off.
Why does anyone care about Dooku or Asajj? Dooku was played by famed horror actor Christopher Lee, so is the character riding on the tales of Lee's coolness? Asajj is just and angry female replacement for an unedeveloped character they killed too soon. Why isn't she the number one voted character for Soul Calibur V? Or Dooku for that matter?
If I had to make an argument for why any of this is cool in the eyes of Star Wars fans, it's because Jedi have lightsabers and use the force. The characters aren't cool, the fact that they weild incredible power is what people like. In fact since the original trilogy was finished the Force weilding characters have grown ever more ridiculous in power to the point that they have made all the other characters in the Star Wars universe useless.
Through comics, books, and video games these characters have done things like:
Pulling star ships out of the air
hurling people away by the dozen
cloaking planets
absorbing powerful energy blasts
To give you an idea of how stupid things have become and that what Star Wars fans really crave is a stylistic visuals over substance I need only bring up Darth Vader and Obiwan Kenobi.
In the original trilogy, which for you younger folks is episodes IV, V, and VI, the story was set for the entire Star Wars universe. This movie not only set up the story, but also the style of how things were done. Darth Vader's story is presented in glimpses. We learn at first that Obiwan and he were friends, that Anakin was a good pilot and friend and that Darth Vader beytrayed and killed Anakin. When Jedi rolled around we learned that Anakin was seduced by the dark side, and betrayed himself and there for murdered who he was. Obiwan confesses that he felt, incorrectly, that he could train Anakin as well as Yoda. This leads you to believe that Obiwan was a young ambitious, and over confident.
In the movies however Obiwan is a stone, not an overconfident upstart. Anakin was assigned to Obiwan, and it was he that was emotional and wreckless. It was said that Anakin was seduced by the darkside, I take issue with that. Anakin was peer pressured by the Dark Side. If you're seduced by something, you want to do it even though you know its wrong. In the movie Anakin is very afraid of his dark emotions and is reluctant to give in to them. He even feels bad when he does. The only reason he turns to the dark side at all is to get a power to save the life of his wife. Anakin was seduced by Padme's beauty and his emotions for her, not the darkside. If Anakin had never dreamt of her death, I doubt Palpatine would have been able to turn him at all.
All of these inconsistancies are overlooked because fans of the series know that once all the stupid story is out of the way they'll hear the humming and clashing of lightsabers and the pretty lights will dance.
Need more proof? In Return of the Jedi, Luke asks Leia about her mother; Leia says she doesn't remember much, her mother was beautiful, but sad, and died when she was very young. Yeah, like when she was about four seconds old. Padme died, of a broken heart, right after giving birth to Luke and Leia. So how did she remember anything? Had she no love for the children she carried enough to care for them more over the love she had for her psychotic ex-husband.
Think I'm picking on the prequels too much? Let's go back to Return of the Jedi. Same scene as before Luke and Leia are talking and Luke is trying to get Leia to use the force to search her feelings to realize that she is his sister. She says in that moment that she knows and that somehow, she's always known. That means in Empire when she kisses Luke to make Han jealous, she knew that she was kissing her brother!
In Star Wars, Luke is upset when Uncle Owen won't let him apply to the accademy until the next year. What accademy was Luke looking to join? I assumed it was a military accademy and wanted to be a pilot, but he seemed pretty eager to join the rebelion. I don't imagine that the rebelion ran an accademy where they accepted applications.
In Star Wars why wouldn't they shoot the escape pod that R2 and C-3PO escaped in, just because there were no life signs? Were they saving money on lasers? If the Death Star plans could be stored on the tiny disk Leia sticks in R2 wouldn't it be reasonable to think that the plans they were there to retrieve might have been on board? They should have dispatched a shuttle to go down and retrieve the pod right away.
When soldiers were finally dispatched to go down to the escape pod, how did he know from a single piece of metal that it was from a droid? How badly damaged were R2 and 3PO that they were shedding huge washers off their person? Shouldn't have something started to grind? Did he really need to hold up a washer and say "Look sir, droids!" I thought that the foot prints and tire marks were enough evidence that robots were the ones that left the pod.
In Star Wars did Luke and Han stun or shoot the Stormtroopers that they stole the uniforms for? If they shot them, why wasn't there blast marks or holes in the armor? If they stunned them, what did they do with the two guys that were in the armor? For that matter, what did they do with the two guys who were part of the scanning crew? I don't recall hearing them shot, you only heard the trunk fall down. That's four bodies that we never see leave the Falcon. Was Han a slave trader too? Did Chewie eat them? Are they trapped like Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames in a secret smuggling hold waiting to be violated durring some long smuggling mission?
In Empire strikes back how did the Wampa stick Luke to the roof of the cave? Does he have an icy breath blast? If so, why didn't he attack Luke with it over hitting him? What was the purpose of hanging him? Why not just snap his neck like the Tauntaun?
Why did Han think it would keep Luke warm to be stuck inside a Tauntaun that had just died from exposure? Why didn't Han die of exposure? Was his coat heated that well? If so, couldn't they have made the Tauntaun's artic vest coats to keep warm?
Getting back to the prequels. Why are the Jedi's called peace keepers, but they can't fight wars for people? How can you keep the peace without fighting occasionally? In Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith they were fighting along side everybody, but the people of Naboo need to have their claims of invasion verified?
If the Force comes from midichlorians (a microscopic bacteria), and Jedi have the highest counts of midichlorians in their blood, why aren't they allowed to have children and pass it on? Why can't they have relationships and get married? Couldn't they go through some emotion cleansing ritual that kept them calm and logical? Are the only emotions that can come from love anger, betrayal, and revenge?
If Jango Fett is the best DNA material to maker super clone soldiers, then why did he hire another assassin to do his dirty work for him? Jango Fett showed little to no skill and I have no idea why he was chosen to be all the clones. Mace Windu slice his head off almost instantly?
Why do no other Jedi have doom-like dreams about what is looming over them. The only one of them to have any precognative power about their impending doom at the hands of some inept clone troopers is Yoda. Aren't you supposed to have mastered feeling disturbances in the Force before leaving Jedi School. They can take down scores of Federation droids deflecting laser bolts by the baker's dozen, but, a couple of clone troopers have got them beat.
It's no wonder that the Sith "limited" themselves to two at a time; the Jedi are so hopelessly inept that any more than that would have looked like bullying.
At the end of Revenge of the Sith, Vader and Palpatine are overlooking the skeletal framework of the Death Star; so, the work we see done in the film had to have been done between episodes two and three. I would guess this to be a period of about two to three years. So this means that the Empire would have had a fully armed and opperational Death Star in another three years, not completed, but with working weapons and deffences. I would expect it to be like the one we saw in Jedi. By the time Luke and Leia were six I'd expect the majority of the Death Star to be complete. so roughly fourteen years before A New Hope the Empire would have had an opperational Death Star able to quash any reblious uprising wherever they might raise their head. Yet, everyone on board the Millenium Falcon seemed completely surprised to see it. So the empire left this project in secrecy for twenty years never using it?
Where am I going with all this? I'm saying the series had style and substance durring the original trilogy. We had come to love and root for the characters, so, issues with certain plot points went overlooked because everything else was so good. You had a balance among the characters in the story so that Han and Leia were just as interesting and useful as Luke.
After the original trilogy was done there was a fan outcry for more. People wanted to not what happened after Jedi and what the Clone Wars was and how exactly did Anakin get seduced. They were natural questions left by a series that starts with Episode IV. When books began being written, people raced to the shelves to read the ongoing adventures, and this is where things started to go wrong. In the books the Jedi began building in power, and the focus became about the Force and the people who could weild it. Each book expanded the power of established characters and created new characters who could do new and even more amazing things. So by the time the first prequel was in pre-production, the story had driven the fans in to Jedi power freaks. The first movie was usless people following Jedi around watching them do flashy stuff with lightsabers and the Force.
Star Wars was also known for having groundbreaking special effects, so this too had to get amplified in the new movies. The story seemed to take a distant third to the flash and spectacle of what had become popular. The story of the prequels were so bad, that fans of the series could only site lightsaber fights and effects as things that were good about them. When people started to sit down and talk about the story it just created arguments. There are people out there who actually make the argument that "at least it's more Star Wars". Really, it doesn't matter if it's crap, as long as it's more Star Wars? I think thismhas become the mission statement of the Star Wars franchise.
It doesn't matter how much Lucas changes the original trilogy visually or in story. They don't care that the story is so poorly constructed that it makes no sense no matter how you look at it. Just keep making Jedi more powerful, and everything more flashy, and the fans we'll gladly eat whatever is puked down their troat.
Does this bother me? It does. Why? Because at one time I was a fan. I loved the original trilogy and had watched those three films probably more than any other in my life. I know every word and every sound. I had the toys, red read some of the books, I wanted to make movies because of my love for these films. I was incredible excited for the prequels and I hoped, in vein, that each sequel would somehow makeup for the previous failure. They didn't. I find myself now walking through stores forcing myself to look away from anything Star Wars. Why? Because I remember what it was and I know no matter how cool thngs look now, it all just sucks. It's like getting over an addiction, I used to be addicted to Star Wars, now I just want it out of my system. I don't know if it will ever be good again, but I can no longer hold out hope as long as Star Wars fans live by style over substance.
The Nerdy Times-Episode 39-Star Wars and Geroge Lucas Part 1
Music-Title: Conflicted Artist: Kevin MacLeod
Website: http://incompetech.com
This week Dan and I discuss our long fan history involving Star Wars.
(download)
The Nerdy Time-Episode 22-Movie Rants and Other Such Nonsense
Music-Title: Conflicted Artist: Kevin MacLeod
Website: http://incompetech.com
In this weeks episode of the Nerdy Times we talk about a little bit of everything. We also have three, count them, three contests with prizes to be awarded. How can you win these "major awards?" I'll tell you below:
Contest #1-Explain the Plan- A week ago Dan and I discussed the 2004 Battlestar Galactica and maintain the firm conviction that the Cylons had no plan whatsoever despite what the title credits claim. Think you can prove us wrong? Then send us an e-mail with the subject line "The Plan" and in about 3 paragraphs or less, make us believe. The first convincing e-mail we recieve will be read on the show and we will send you a home-made Mechwarrior necklace.
Contest #2-How many basic story plots are there and what are they?- Dan brought up the fact that there are only so many story variations out there because all stories, no matter how great our small, can be traced back to some basic plot concepts. Your job? Tell us how many there are and what they are. Your prize? You guessed it! A home made Mechwarrior necklace. Send your e-mail with the subject line "Plot" to win.
Contest #3-Own Your Nerd- This one is both easy and hard at the same time. Take a picture of yourself, smiling, holding your DVD or VHS copy of Battlefield Earth staring John Travolta! All entrants will have their picture posted on the site, but the first three I recieve will win a home-made Mechwarrior necklace! Send all your e-mails with the subject line "NERD".
Here's the adress to e-mail: GameKnightsPodcast@Gmail.com
Enjoy the show!
Oh, and you prequel fans in desperate need of re-education click here and prepare to be deprogrammed!
http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/
(download)
