Funny Pics II: The Revenge

[Cygnia]

[Duke Bushido]

I don't get it.  Yes, those movies were terrible.

 

As were their predecessors.

 

The quality of Star Wars writting did not change.  You had thirty years of growing up before you saw the sequels.

 

That is the difference.  That is the _only_ difference.  They have all been beautiful, visually stunning garbage.  Like my ex.  As an adult, that wasn't enough for you.  For young you, it was everything.

 

 

Edited August 18 by Duke Bushido

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

I'll simply say "I disagree."

[Hugh Neilson]

For me, the turning point was the Ewoks.  An element not in the original plan, if we believe the reports that the outline would have had Wookies on Endor, not as Han's co-pilot.  By Movie 3, merchandising was a clear consideration and cute Ewoks would sell (even if they almost ate some of the main characters early on).

[Ternaugh]

1 hour ago, Hugh Neilson said:

For me, the turning point was the Ewoks.  An element not in the original plan, if we believe the reports that the outline would have had Wookies on Endor, not as Han's co-pilot.  By Movie 3, merchandising was a clear consideration and cute Ewoks would sell (even if they almost ate some of the main characters early on).

 

"No. There is another."

 

 

[slikmar]

10 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

I don't get it.  Yes, those movies were terrible.

 

As were their predecessors.

 

The quality of Star Wars writting did not change.  You had thirty years of growing up before you saw the sequels.

 

That is the difference.  That is the _only_ difference.  They have all been beautiful, visually stunning garbage.  Like my ex.  As an adult, that wasn't enough for you.  For young you, it was everything.

 

 

You may be right about the Writing, but the originals had the advantage of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, both of which improvised when they felt the dialogue was incorrect and had the clout to pull it off. As a comparison, see Luke's lines instead.

Edited August 19 by slikmar

[Duke Bushido]

43 minutes ago, slikmar said:

. As a comparison, see Luke's lines instead.

 

 

There are several lines that Hamill famously refused to say- one so bad that he remembers it to this day, amd has quoted it to audiences regularly.

 

I don't know it precisely, but something referencing sneaking on to the death Star-  to the wffwct of "and a station that size probably only has security against big ships and fleets and won't be looking for a ship this size--  

 

I don't know; I ran across it on YouTube a couple years ago.  Evidently he is _still_ angry about having to explain to Lucas that "nobody talks like that!"

 

 

 

[Bazza]

 

[Hugh Neilson]

I always enjoy the "death star vent was totally unrealistic" views. Visit a war museum and see how often military tech has gone into the field only to have major flaws discovered.

[Grailknight]

On 8/18/2024 at 9:28 AM, Duke Bushido said:

I don't get it.  Yes, those movies were terrible.

 

As were their predecessors.

 

The quality of Star Wars writting did not change.  You had thirty years of growing up before you saw the sequels.

 

That is the difference.  That is the _only_ difference.  They have all been beautiful, visually stunning garbage.  Like my ex.  As an adult, that wasn't enough for you.  For young you, it was everything.

 

 

 

I have to disagree.

 

The first movies were sci-fi fairy tales. They were targeted at a younger audience.

 

The prequels had the handicap of predestination attached to them. That can cover the poorly executed and improbable romance but there was no excuse for totally unbelievable heel-turn. " Those guys that raised you and trained you defend the weak and helpless, they're full of it! After we get rid of them, we can work on how to save your love. Now go kill all the pre-teen students!"

 

The sequels had no excuse. The defeated Empire has somehow hidden a military industrial complex larger relative to the New Republic's than the US' or China would be to Grenada. Artillery/Bombardment ships charge in without their fighter escort. All ships regardless of size besides fighters, move at precisely the same sub light speed so that weeks of pursuit don't open or close the distance. Hundreds of the most advanced battleships in the galaxy are somehow parked in the upper atmosphere of a planet but can't navigate altitude independently.

 

The comic pretty much nailed it. Lucas struck unexpected gold with the first films, put out the prequels as a low-quality money grab and sold the sequels to Disney who brought in cholera infected cattle herds to thoroughly crap the bed all over while Lucas could stand back and say " It's not my fault!"

[DShomshak]

Eh, I remember seeing Star Wars (no numbers yet) when it first came out and thinking it was a fun bit of piffle. Homage to pulp SF and old movie serials? And not pretending to be anything more? Sure, at this it succeeded. And even at that age (13, I think) I rolled my eyes at people who gassed about its "spiritual dimension" from the talk about the Force.

 

(IIRC it was Baird Searles, film/TV reviewer for Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who noted in his review that cinematic SF tended to be 20 years behind print SF, but Star Wars pushed it back to 40 years.)

 

A couple years later, I thought Empire Strikes Back was better. Added a bit more personal melodrama. More of the classic tropes of the mystic mentor, friends who becme enemies who become friends again, etc. Not coincidentally, Lucas didn't write it: Leigh Brackett, and actual old-time pulp SF writer, did. (At least the first draft.) Again, though, pulp that didn't try to be more than pulp.

 

And then Return of the Jedi. Oh, god, what a horrible, wet, stinking fart that was. I mean, yes, the climactic conflict between Luke, Darth Vader, and the Emperor played out by the numbers as it was supposed to, competently enough. And it was in a sense rational for the Empire to decide that hey, let's try rebuilding the Death Star minus the unintended Blow Up Button. (Edit: To the extent such a weapon makes sense at all. Well, for Pulp Villainy...) But doing so was not good story because the antagonist needs to try something new. The Ewoks were, yes, so blatantly designed for merchandising to kiddies that it was insulting.

 

And it went downhill from there. Over the years it's become irrefutable that Lucas is not a good writer. Willow, yes? Howard the Duck? And the higher he aims, the worse he misses. And yet the Star Wars movies kept making money, so I guess somebody must like his style.

 

The only movie in the franchise I've seen (I have not seen them all) post-Empire that I think had decent storytelling was Rogue One. And that was "A Star Wars Story" but not actually Star Wars. It was pretty good because the core of the movie wasn't how the Rebellion got the plans for the Death Star. It was (spoilers) how each of the characters reached the point where they were consciously willing to die for the cause.

 

Reasonable people may differ, but I am done with the Star Wars franchise. People other than Lucas may be able to do decent storytelling with it, but I want a more reliable return on my investment of time.

 

Dean Shomshak

Edited August 19 by DShomshak

[Pariah]

[Cygnia]

I like the last pic.

[Old Man]

Partial to the whale-shark-like first option.

[Cancer]

Are the eyes really googly?  Do they actually roll around due to movement?  That matters here.

[Duke Bushido]

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:05 PM, Grailknight said:

I have to disagree.

 

The first movies were sci-fi fairy tales. They were targeted at a younger audience.

 

We are going to have to disagree.  Granted, I can do that amicably, so we shouldn't have problems between us personally about it.  I mean somehow I have been in the Star Wars-hating minority for decades now, and have managed to remain relatively innocuous about it.  Mostly, I suspect, because I have never been someone who thought my opinion became fact just because it was _my_ opinion, and I have _always_ understood that different people are going to enjoy different things.  For example, Nutella is a thing that I very much detest, and Ranch dressing tastes, to me, like someone else has already eaten it.  I love almost _nothing_ more than jumping on a bike and going nowhere in particular all day long, yet 3/4 of the people I encounter while refueling love nothing more than telling me about the (apparently) hundreds of their relatives and thousands of their friends that were killed "by a motorcycle" while prophesizing the exact manner in which one will kill me.

 

So I get it: to each his own, etc.

 

However, it seems fair to point what we are disagreeing on:  considering the dialogue that various cast members have mentioned being cut, and the nature of it (in terms of both complexity and exposition), I will never be convinced that this movie was aimed specifically "at children;"  I find that reinforced by the fact that at that time, few children got taken to see any movie that was not labeled as "for kids" or "Disney," and the fact that the biggest fans of the first movie were more or less of the same demographic that was buying sci-fi novels and magazines and watching other meager offerings.

 

I whole-heartedly believe that "it was for children" was, like "loud pipes save lives," something someone once said in defense of his appreciation for what was- again, my opinion here, and not an objective fact- something that they liked and weren't comfortable admitting that objectively, it wasn't great.  Similar-minded folks repeated it until, at some point, folks had managed to get enough of a sounding board going that it became a dubious "fact."

 

And again: opinions, like buttholes, are unique to their owners, and they all stink if expressed too often in public. It is okay to like something that isn't great, without making excuses for liking it.  As an example:

 

The Last Starfighter and Annie were in theaters at the exact same time.  Annie, by established standards of judgement at the time, was by far the superior movie, and I hated it.  For one, it did not have Catherine Mary Stewart in it.

 

The Last Starfighter, by contrast, I _loved_, to the point of taping it when it came on HBO a year later and watching it, literally _every single day_ for the eighteen months it took to wear out the drug store VHS onto which I had recorded it (yes. Every single day).  And, as a bonus, it had Catherine Mary Stewart!  So..  win/win, right?

 

Yeah: I accept that it was _not at all_ a quality movie, and Dan O'Herlihey (yeah, I _know_ that is spelled... off a bit...) And Robert Preston must have owed people some pretty big gambing money to be in it, but hey-!

 

I also don't defend my appreciation of it, because I don't have to.  No one has to _justify_ liking something.  You just like it.  Knock yourself out.  Don't expect me to like it because you do, and I won't make you watch Adventures in Babysitting (my absolute favorite movie _of all time_, period.  Followed by Romancing the Stone, if that means anything to anyone). 

 

Eh...  I seem to have digressed.  Doc should be glad to see that, at least. 

 

anyway, the dialogue the actors quite often refused to recite throughout Star Wars suggests it was intended for the "normal consumers" of sci-fi, roughly 17 to 32 years old, and that is that demographic with whom the movie seems to have resonated, so on that front, I would say it succeeded quite well.

 

Enjoy the movie for whatever it is about it that you enjoy.  I will _never_ deny that it is visual _candy_, even though it is obvious through his constant revisions that Lucas doesn't seem to think so.  Oddly, I find the  versions with added CGI to be _less_ visually appealing, so I am not sure even Lucas knows why it is so popular.

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:05 PM, Grailknight said:

The prequels had the handicap of predestination attached to them.

 

The prequels had the handicap of George Lucas doing the writing.  Given the span of three kinda-long movies, you can pull off a convincing heel turn.  You can pull it off in a single movie if you have a little bit of writing talent, particularly if you already know that your audience is already primed to buy into it.  For Pete' sake, the old TV show Knight Rider did a better heel turn- and then recovered!- in the space of a 42-minute episode, and let's face it: Knight Rider was not renowned for the quality of its writing.

 

I don't personally believe predestination was the problem there.  I believe it was "Lucas should stick to writing (or maybe reading a few) Little Golden Books" more than anything related to a time crunch.

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:05 PM, Grailknight said:

there was no excuse for totally unbelievable heel-turn. "

 

Agreed.  That was terrible.  However, it provides me a wonderful head-canon re-write to a scene in the original movie:

 

"The light saber.  A simpler, more elegant weapon for a more elegant age (like, fifteen years ago!).  This was your father's light saber.  He used it to murder a preschool.  He would want you to have it."

 

Oddly, that changes the quality of the script in no significant way.    opinion, of course.

 

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:05 PM, Grailknight said:

The sequels had no excuse. The defeated Empire

 

That "defeated Empire" bit has no excuse.  The defeat of the Empire, as presented in the first three movies, is totally unbelievable.

 

We blew up a Death Star!  Yay!  The Empire is defeated!

 

Let's ignore a galaxy-spanning infrastructure of who-know-how-many land and orbital bases and a few thousand Star destroyers and dreadnaughts and whatever-else.  We took out the big space station, we win forever; yay!

 

Then it turns out that we _didn't_ win, because unlike the Decapodeans, the Empire had _two_ Mobile Oppression Palaces!  So we take out _that_ one, and we win for real, forever and ever; let's get some prequels going-  nah; I've got _plenty_ of money, and clout, and a big chunk of land; let's just wait until the toy sales slow down, in case people need to be reminded how awesome I am at writing.  Okay, now we have prequels, and oh boy, are they every bit as good as the first three.  Well, the first one and the third one, anyway.  It actively bothers me to this day that the one in the middle- the linking one that needed you to have seen the first to know the characters _and_ that you knew going in would end with nothing resolved because you knew a finale was coming, was head and shoulders above its bookends, and yet even at that, it was still only "decent." 

 

Even in Futurama-  a _cartoon_- a _twenty-two minute_ cartoon- when the Decapodeans decided to conquer earth, then to leave earth's subjugation to a single mobile oppression palace and a handful of bureaucrats, we still knew there was a massive fleet.  We watched them leave!  And taking out the mobile oppression palace did _not_ stop the mighty Decapodean Empire; it simply freed the one planet that was dominated by that one fortification.  Of course, it managed to do this from start to finish and remain compelling throughout in the span of twenty-two minutes. 

 

Lucas can _type_, but _typing_ ain't _writing_....

 

So we have blown up both of the death stars and now we win.  As before, there are who-knows-how many dominated planets, covered in troops and supplied by armadas of colossal space triangles, but nah- we give up.

 

That is akin to "well, Sir, the missile strikes took out both Fort Richardson in Alaska and Robins Air Force base in Georgia."

 

"What?!  Oh no!  Both bases?  We will have to surrender!  There is no way we can continue to fight with only 99 percent of our military might and chain of command completely intact!  It doesn't matter if the navy is completely untouched; let's just call it for the enemy and go home.

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:05 PM, Grailknight said:

has somehow hidden a military industrial complex larger relative to the New Republic's than the US' or China would be to Grenada.

 

Yeah.  I don't think they were sneaking around building them.  I think that this was some extremely small part of all of the  infrastructure the Empire straight up forgot it still had after the second Death Star was blown up because a bunch of teddy bears got involved in guerilla warfare.

 

I also didn't mind that they were "hding them, somehow-"  at least, I didn't mind that anywhere _near_ as much as I minded "they blew up our big fort; we surrender unilaterally."  I didnt mind it because in the words of Douglas Adams, "space is big.  Really, really big."  You could probably hide something in it.  Something really, really big, even.

 

Except in Star Wars, of course, where every planet seems to be within empty-bladder range of every other planet.

 

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:05 PM, Grailknight said:

Artillery/Bombardment ships charge in without their fighter escort. All ships regardless of size besides fighters, move at precisely the same sub light speed so that weeks of pursuit don't open or close the distance. Hundreds of the most advanced battleships in the galaxy are somehow parked in the upper atmosphere of a planet but can't navigate altitude independently.

 

Yeah, I think that is a "quality of writing" thing, but it is genuinely not one iota worse than that which came before it (except for Empire, of course, which for some reason, was an okay movie if you didn't mind the no-need-for-a-pit-stop-or-a-refuel quick run to the "remote" Dagobah system.  With only one cockpit full of air, even.

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:05 PM, Grailknight said:

The comic pretty much nailed it.

 

The first eight or ten issues of the comic were, to me, pure gold (I even put Spiners into a few Traveller games back in the day).  I didn't know why, but it went downhill rapidly after that.  It would be decades before I learned that the guy who wrote the first bit of the comics had not actually seen the movie and was working from a set of story synopses for the characters presented to him to get started.  He eventually did see it, and all subsequent writers had seen it as well.

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:05 PM, Grailknight said:

Lucas struck unexpected gold with the first films, put out the prequels as a low-quality money grab and sold the sequels to Disney who brought in cholera infected cattle herds to thoroughly crap the bed all over while Lucas could stand back and say " It's not my fault!"

 

 

Here is an unpopular opinion: any one of the sequels (except the first) was superior in every way to the first six movies, from the POV of a sci-fi fan with zero investment in the franchise.  The first sequel was the first movie all over again.  Like the third movie was.  "We have to destroy the Death Star!"  I remember leaving the theater with my kids in tow (they wanted to see it, and weren't old enough to go by themselves) and muttering, out loud, "I can't believe I just paid money to watch the same movie _again_...."

 

Everything after that was leaps and bounds above everything that had gone before.

 

Even more unpopular opinion?  Solo wasn't bad.  Even _more_ unpopular opinion?  Rogue One was the best movie to ever bear the Star Wars name (except for that stupid "kyber crystals fuel light sabers and are the hearts of dead suns, yet are surprisingly unheavy" nonsense).

 

No; these comments are not intended to be inflammatory to _anyone_.  These are mere opinions, and from a person with no investment in characters, story, or franchise (most of the ships looked, to me, way cooler than most any other sci-fi property up to that time, and most of them since- except rhe Cygnus.  There will _never_ be a ship as glorious as the Cygnus, but that wierd greenhouse ship in the movie I can't remember the name of has a similar aesthetic ), they are based, instead of on the coolness of plot or what my favorite characters did or did not do or how closely they behaved to how I thought they should behave; they are based upon how well-written they were, how well-executed they were, and how easily I did or did not willingly suspend my disbelief.

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:16 PM, DShomshak said:

Eh, I remember seeing Star Wars (no numbers yet)

 

 

Ditto.  Though I was... Seventeen or eighteen?  I drove do see it, at any rate.  I remember it coming back around to the theater with the "Episode IV" tag on the marquis and thinking "God!  They made three more of those things?  Already?" and just passing it over. 

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:16 PM, DShomshak said:

when it first came out and thinking it was a fun bit of piffle. Homage to pulp SF and old movie serials?

 

 

I think we might be the same person, Sir, because I, too, thought it nicely captured the nonsensical, high-action content of the old movie serials!  Yeah, I am not the oldest person on earth, but I am _just_ old enough to have caught a few Zorro, Rocketman, and Buck Rogers serials before they disappeared forever.  Fortunately, just a few years later, our public access channels when I moved into my twenties aired a lot of them opposite Saturday cartoons that played on the stations I couldn't get.

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:16 PM, DShomshak said:

And not pretending to be anything more? Sure, at this it succeeded. And even at that age (13, I think) I rolled my eyes at people who gassed about its "spiritual dimension" from the talk about the Force.

 

Ditto, again.

 

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:16 PM, DShomshak said:

(IIRC it was Baird Searles, film/TV reviewer for Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who noted in his review that cinematic SF tended to be 20 years behind print SF, but Star Wars pushed it back to 40 years.)

 

That is a bit harsh, I think.  The movies were fun to watch, and the SFX were not just a benchmark for everything else that would follow, but downright inspirational.  I think overall, it pushed science fiction _forward_ in terms what could be represented on the screen, and what viewers would expect to see in the future.

 

The story and the writing were awful, but honestly, that doesn't really hurt the genre, at least not at that point.  Science fiction at that point was rarely well-written; most of it survived on either horror aspects or exploring interesting ideas-  Soylent Green, Logan's Run-even...  Gah!  What was the one...?  The guy stranded on a drifting bio ship (greenhouse kind of thing) staving off the slow madness of isolation with three robots names Huey, Louie, and Dewey?  And we don't actually realize that he _has_ lost it until he has the robot funeral?  Which makes us question pretty much everything up to and after that?  Boring beyond belief, but compelling, well-written, and thought-provoking.

 

That level of writing, combined with the visual effects Star Wars pioneered?   

 

Nah; saying it set science fiction _backwards_ is too much, I think.  At worst, it helped a lot of people who already didn't like sci-fi decide that the whole genre was just silly garbage.

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:16 PM, DShomshak said:

A couple years later, I thought Empire Strikes Back was better. Added a bit more personal melodrama. More of the classic tropes of the mystic mentor, friends who becme enemies who become friends again, etc. Not coincidentally, Lucas didn't write it: Leigh Brackett, and actual old-time pulp SF writer, did.

 

Well that explains a lot.  I actually did not know that (and honestly, I have never been,interested enough in Star Wars to have done any kind of serious research into it.  It explains why I always found Empire to be a relatively decent movie, and why it always confused me that the ones before and after were.... not good.  (Except for speeder bikes.  Those rocked!  But again, it's terrible writing:  there could not possibly exist a worse environment in which to use those-  like massive walking tanks pressing all of their immense weight onto three points ON THE FREAKIN' SNOW seemed like a great idea....  Seriously!  _That_ was the place to use Speeder Bikes!

 

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:16 PM, DShomshak said:

Over the years it's become irrefutable that Lucas is not a good writer. Willow, yes? 

 

 

Yes-ish, anyway.  I have to not question it to hard because my wife liked it.

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:16 PM, DShomshak said:

Howard the Duck?

 

Nope.  That, too, was awful.  But today I learned _why_, so thank you for that.

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:16 PM, DShomshak said:

And the higher he aims, the worse he misses. And yet the Star Wars movies kept making money, so I guess somebody must like his style.

 

You have a lot of things going on here outside of his style: the impressions made on you in your youth are the strongest, deepest, most heartfelt impressions you will ever form.  If the visuals of Star Wars captured you so powerfully that you paid little heed to the writing, it will _always_ be a great movie.  This is one of the biggest reasons I don't try to dissuade people from liking it, and one of the reasons I understand that different people are going to like different things.

 

Then you have the wish fulfillment of the space wizards: who _doesn't_ want to be a warrior wielding ancient magic that gives him the ability to wipe the floor with legions of trained soldiers, all with a kick-butt sword made of lasers?!  I don't even _like_ Star Wars and I think that sounds awesome!  And to know that only the rarest and most special of people got to be one of these powerful and universally-respected mystic warriors?  That is a metric crapload of wish fulfillment right there, and if it captures you in your impressionable period, forget about it.  If that is precisely your kind of fantasy anyway, then age or maturity isn't going to matter much, especially when it is visually presented as _beautifully_ as Lucas presented it.

 

After that, we have the thing that has kept religion going since time immemorial (besides the "join us or be killed" aspect, I mean):  indoctrination. 

 

Everyone wants to introduce their kids to what they themselves loved as kids.  And it _works_.  It isn't like I woke up onw day and decided "I want to be a great mechanic!"  I grew up doing it.  I grew up in a family of bikers.  (Farming didn't take root in me; thank God).  I got my first bike when I was nine, and I have never had less than three or four since.  When I met my wife, I owned fourteen.  To varying degrees, indoctrination works.  If it didn't, Harley Davidson (one of the largest religions in the western world) would have gone out of business in the seventies.

 

 

 

On 8/19/2024 at 1:16 PM, DShomshak said:

The only movie in the franchise I've seen (I have not seen them all) post-Empire that I think had decent storytelling was Rogue One. 

 

Seriously, Dude; are we the same person?!  Post a picture or something....

 

 

 

 

At any rate, I will whole-heartedly endorse anyone's love of Star Wars, and I will be just as excited _for you_ as you are when a new Star Wars thing comes out, because I know it brings you joy.

 

As long as you can understand that I am never going to appreciate the thing as much as you do, and you can accept that I won't but that I will still be happy _for you_, then we can very much arrive at an amicable disagreement.

 

 

 

 

 

21 hours ago, Cygnia said:

I like the last pic.

 

20 hours ago, Old Man said:

Partial to the whale-shark-like first option.

 

 

Either of the left column pictures.  Wonderful.

Edited August 20 by Duke Bushido
Touchscreen-induced Typos, as always

[Pariah]

Nice butte!

 

[Pariah]

[slikmar]

6 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Eh, I remember seeing Star Wars (no numbers yet) when it first came out and thinking it was a fun bit of piffle. Homage to pulp SF and old movie serials? And not pretending to be anything more? Sure, at this it succeeded. And even at that age (13, I think) I rolled my eyes at people who gassed about its "spiritual dimension" from the talk about the Force.

 

(IIRC it was Baird Searles, film/TV reviewer for Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who noted in his review that cinematic SF tended to be 20 years behind print SF, but Star Wars pushed it back to 40 years.)

 

A couple years later, I thought Empire Strikes Back was better. Added a bit more personal melodrama. More of the classic tropes of the mystic mentor, friends who becme enemies who become friends again, etc. Not coincidentally, Lucas didn't write it: Leigh Brackett, and actual old-time pulp SF writer, did. (At least the first draft.) Again, though, pulp that didn't try to be more than pulp.

 

And then Return of the Jedi. Oh, god, what a horrible, wet, stinking fart that was. I mean, yes, the climactic conflict between Luke, Darth Vader, and the Emperor played out by the numbers as it was supposed to, competently enough. And it was in a sense rational for the Empire to decide that hey, let's try rebuilding the Death Star minus the unintended Blow Up Button. (Edit: To the extent such a weapon makes sense at all. Well, for Pulp Villainy...) But doing so was not good story because the antagonist needs to try something new. The Ewoks were, yes, so blatantly designed for merchandising to kiddies that it was insulting.

 

And it went downhill from there. Over the years it's become irrefutable that Lucas is not a good writer. Willow, yes? Howard the Duck? And the higher he aims, the worse he misses. And yet the Star Wars movies kept making money, so I guess somebody must like his style.

 

The only movie in the franchise I've seen (I have not seen them all) post-Empire that I think had decent storytelling was Rogue One. And that was "A Star Wars Story" but not actually Star Wars. It was pretty good because the core of the movie wasn't how the Rebellion got the plans for the Death Star. It was (spoilers) how each of the characters reached the point where they were consciously willing to die for the cause.

 

Reasonable people may differ, but I am done with the Star Wars franchise. People other than Lucas may be able to do decent storytelling with it, but I want a more reliable return on my investment of time.

 

Dean Shomshak

Sadly, Willow, although fun, was basically the original Star Wars, to the point some friends of mine watched it muted using the lines from Star Wars in its place and they fit a little too well.

[DShomshak]

2 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Seriously, Dude; are we the same person?!  Post a picture or something....

 

I'm afraid I don't have any. But we are not the same person: You've had a life. Quite a full one, topo. I haven't. Utterly boring, apart from writing a few game supplements that turned out fairly well. But the best parts of my life were sitting at a desk, wiggling my fingers on a keyboard.

 

Be glad you are you. Even with the heart attack, it sounds excellent.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

PS: Is the movie you were trying to remember Silent Running?

 

PPS: I'll see your Last Starfighter and raise you a Battle Beyond the Stars! And I wish I could give the name of an even more deranged SF/Fantasy Seven Samurai knock-off, probably from Hong Kong, which was one of the most enchantingly disheveled movies I've ever seen. Microbudget, made no flipping sense, but dang it was fun. But I onky saw it once, on TV, and I have no idea what the title was.

 

I suspect we could propose many more objectively bad movies that were nevertheless a lot of fun, but I suspect we have derailed the thread enough.

Edited August 20 by DShomshak

[rravenwood]

2 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Gah!  What was the one...?  The guy stranded on a drifting bio ship (greenhouse kind of thing) staving off the slow madness of isolation with three robots names Huey, Louie, and Dewey?  And we don't actually realize that he _has_ lost it until he has the robot funeral?  Which makes us question pretty much everything up to and after that?  Boring beyond belief, but compelling, well-written, and thought-provoking.

 

Yep, that's Silent Running for sure.  I've always had a soft spot for that, having first seen it on TV as a little kid.  (No worries that you think it's boring )

[Ternaugh]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

 

 

We are going to have to disagree.  Granted, I can do that amicably, so we shouldn't have problems between us personally about it.  I mean somehow I have been in the Star Wars-hating minority for decades now, and have managed to be relatively innocuous about it.  Mostly, I suspect, because I have never been someone who thought my opinion became fact just because it was _my_ opinion, and I have _always_ understood that different people are going to enjoy different things.  For example, Nutella is a thing that I very much detest, and Ranch dressing tastes, to me, like someone else has already eaten it once.  I love almost _nothing_ more than jumping on a bike and going nowhere in particular all day long, yet 3/4 of the people I encounter love nothing more than telling me about the (apparently) hundreds of relatives and thousands of friends that were killed "by a motorcycle" while prophesizing the exact manner in which one will kill me.

 

So I get it: to each his own, etc.

 

However, it seems fair to point what we are disagreeing on:  considering the dialogue that cast members have mentioned being cut, and the nature of it (in terms of both complexity and exposition), I will never be convinced that this movie was aimed specifically "at children;"  I find that reinforced by the fact that at that time, few children got taken to see any movie that was not labeled as "for kids" or "Disney," and the fact that the biggest fans of the first movie were more or less of the same demographic that was buying sci-fi novels and magazines and watching other meager offerings.

 

I whole-heartedly believe that "it was for children" was, like "loud pipes save lives," something someone once said in defense of his appreciation for what are- again, my opinion here, and not an objective fact- something that they liked and weren't comfortable admitting that it wasn't great.  Similar-mindwd folks repeated it until, at some point, folks had managed to get enough of a sounding board going that it became a dubious "fact."

 

And again: opinions, like buttholes, are unique to the owners, and they all stink if expressed too often in public.  As an example:

 

The Last Starfighter and Annie were in theaters at the exact same time.  Annie, by established standards of judgement at the time, was by far the superior movie, and I hated it.  For one, it did not have Catherine Mary Stewart in it.

 

The Last Starfighter, by contrast, I _loved_, to the point of taping it when it came on HBO a year later and watching it, literally _every single day_ for the eightteen months it took to wear out the drug store VHS onto which I had recorded it.  And, as a bonus, it had Catherine Mary Stewart!  So..  Win/win, right?

 

Yea: I accept that it was _not at all_ a quality movie, and Dan O'Herlihey (yeah, I _know_ that is spelled... Off a bit...) And Robert Preston must have owed people some pretty big gambing money to be in it, but hey-!

 

I also don't defend my appreciation of it, because I don't have to.  No one has to _justify_ liking something.  You just like it.  Knock yourself out.  Don't expect me to like it because you do, and I won't make you watch Adventures in Babysitting (my absolute favorite movie _of all time_, period.  Followed by Romancing the Stone, if that means anything to anyone). 

 

Eh...  I seem to have digressed.  Doc should be glad to see that, at least. 

 

anyway, the dialogue the actors quite often refused to recite throughout Star Wars suggests it was intended for the "normal consumers" of sci-fi, roughly 17 to 32 years old, and that is who the movie seems to have resonated with, so on that front, I would say it succeeded quite well.

 

Enjoy the movie for whatever it is about it that you enjoy.  I will _never_ deny that it is visual _candy_, even though it is obvious through his constant revisions that Lucas doesnt seem to think so.  Oddly, I find the  versions with added CGI to be _less_ visually appealing, so I am not sure even Lucas knows why it is so popular.

 

 

The prequels had the handicap of George Lucas doing the writing.  Given the span of three kinda-long movies, you can pull off a convincing heel turn.  You can pull it off in a single movie if you have a little bit of writing talent, particularly if you already know that your audience is already primed to buy into it.  For Pete' sake, the old TV show Knight Rider did a better heel turn- and then recovered!- in the space of a 42-minute episode, and let's face it: Knight Rider was not reknowned for the quality of its writing.

 

I don't personally believe predestination was the problem there.  I believe it was "Lucas should stick to Little Golden Books" more than anything related to a time crunch.

 

 

 

Agreed.  That was terrible.  However, it provides me a wonderful head-canon re-write to a scene in the original movie:

 

"The light saber.  A simpler, more elegant weapon for a more elegant time (like, fifteen years ago!).  This was your father's light saber.  He used to murder a preschool.  He would want you to have it."

 

Oddly, that changes the quality of the script in no significant way.    opinion, of course.

 

 

 

 

That has no excuse.  The defeat of the Empire, as presented in the first three movies, is totally unbelievable.

 

We blew up a Death Star!  Yay!  The Empire is defeated!

 

Let's ignore a galaxy-spanning infrastructure of who-know-how-many land and orbital bases and a few thousand Star deatroyers and dreadnaughts and whatever-else.  We took out the big space station, we win forever; yay!

 

Then it turns out that we _didn't_ win, because unlike the Decapodeans, the Empire had _two_ Mobile Oppression Palaces!  So we take out _that_ one, and we win for real, forever and ever; let's get some,prequels going-  nah; i've got _plenty_ of money, and clout, and big chunk of land; let's just wait in case people need to be reminded how awesome I am at writing.  Okay, now we have prequels, and oh boy, are they every bit as good as the first three.  Well, the first one and the third one, anyway.

 

Even in Futurama-  a _cartoon_- a twenty-two minute cartoon- when the Decapodeans decided to leave earth's subjugation to a single mobile oppression fortress and a handful of bureaucrats, we still knew there was a massive fleet.  We watched them leave!  And taking out the mobile oppression palace did _not_ stop the mighty Decapodean Empire; it simply freed the one planet that was dominated by that one fortification.

 

So we have blown up both of the death stars and now we win.  As before, there are who-knows-how many dominated planets, covered in troops and supplied by armadas of colossal space triangles, but nah- we give up.

 

That is akin to "well, Sir, the missile strikes took out both Fort Richardson in Alaska and Robins Air Force base in Georgia."

 

"What?!  Oh no!  Both bases?  We will have to surrender!  There is no way we can continue to fight with only 99 percent of our military might and chain of command completely intact!  It doesn't matter if the navy is completelty untouched; let's just call for the enemy and go home.

 

 

Yeah.  I don't think they were sneaking around building them.  I think that was some small part of the leftover infrastructure the Empire straight up forgot it still had after the second Death Star was blown up because a bunch of teddy bears got involved in guerilla warfare.

 

I also didn't mind that they were "hding them, somehow-"  at least, I didnt mind that anywhere _near_ as much as I minded "they blew up our big fort; we surrender unilaterally."  I didnt mind it because in the words of Douglas Adams, "space is big.  Really, really big."  You could probably hide something in it.  Something really, really big.

 

Except in Star Wars, of course, where every planet seems to be within empty-bladder range of every other planet.

 

 

 

 

Yeah, I think that is a "quality of writing" thing, but it is genuinely not onw iota worse than that which came before it (except for Empire, of course, which for some reason, was an okay movie if you didn't mind the no-need-for-a-pit-stop quick run to the remote Dagobah system.

 

 

 

The first eight or ten issues of the comic were, to me, pure gold (I even put Spiners into a few Traveller games)  I didn't know why, but it went downhill rapidly after that.  It would be decades before I learned that the guy who wrote the first bit of the comics had not actually seen the movie and was working from a set of story synopses for the characters presented to him to get started.  He eventually did see, and all subsequent writers had seen it as well.

 

 

 

Here is an unpopular opinion: any one of the sequels (except the first) was superior in every way to the first six movies, from the POV of a sci-fi fan with zero investment in the franchise.  The first sequel was the first movie all over again.  Like the third movie was.  "We have to destroy the Death Star!"  I remember leaving the theater with my kids in tow (they wanted to see it, and weren't old enough to go by themselves) and muttering, out loud, "I can't believe I just paid money to watch the same movie _again_...."

 

Everything after that was leaps and bounds above everything that had gone before.

 

Even more unpopular opinion?  Solo wasn't bad.  Even _more_ unpopular opinion?  Rogue One was the best movie to ever bear the Star Wars name (except for that stupid "kyber crystals fuel light sabers and are the hearts of dead suns, yet are surprisingly unheavy" nonsense).

 

No; these comments are not intended to be inflammatory to _anyone_.  These are mere opinions, and from a person with no investment in characters, story, or franchise (most of the ships looked, to me, way cooler than most any other sci-fi property to that time, and most of them since), they are based, instead of coolness of plot or what my favorite characters did or did not do or how closely they behaved to how I thought they should behave, upon how well-written they were, how well-executed they were, and how easily I did or did not willingly suspend my disbelief.

 

 

 

Ditto.  I remember it coming back around to the theater with the "Episode IV" tag on the marquis and thinking "God!  They made three more of those things?  Already?" and just passing it over. 

 

 

 

I think we might be the same person, Sir, because I, too, thought it nicely captured the nonsensical, high-action content of the old movie serials!  Yeah, I am not the oldest person on earth, but I am _just_ old enough to have caught a few Zorro, Rocketman, and Buck Rogers serials before they disappeared forever.  Fortunately, our public access channels when I moved into my twenties aired a lot of them opposite Saturday cartoons that played on the stations I couldn't get.

 

 

 

Ditto,again.

 

 

 

 

That is a bit harsh, I think.  The movies were fun to watch, and the SFX were not just a benchmark for everything else that would follow, but downright inspirational.  I think overall, it pushed science fiction _forward_ in terms what could be represented on the screen, and what viewers would expect to see in the future.

 

The story and the writing were awful, but honestly, that doesn't really hurt the genre, at least not at that point.  Science fiction at that point was rarely well-written; most of it survived on either horror aspects or exploring interesting ideas-  Soylent Green, Logan's Run-even...  Gah!  What was the one...?  The guy stranded on a drifting bio ship (greenhouse kind of thing) staving off the slow madness of isolation with three robots names Huey, Louie, and Dewey?  And we don't actually realize that he _has_ lost it until he has the robot funeral?  Which makes us question pretty much everything up to and after that?  Boring beyond belief, but compelling, well-written, and thought-provoking.

 

That level of writing, combined with the visual effects Star Wars pioneered?   

 

Nah; saying it set science fiction _backwards_ is too much, I think.  At worst, it helped a lot of people who already didn't like sci-fi decide that the whole genre was just silly garbage.

 

 

 

Well that explains a lot.  I actually did not know that.  It explains why I always found Empire to be a decent movie, and why it always confused me that the ones before and after were.... not good.  (Except for speeder bikes.  Those rocked!  But again, it's terrible writing:  there could not possibly exist a worse environment in which to use those-  like massive walking tanks pressing all of their immense weight onto three points ON THE FREAKIN' SNOW seemed like a great idea....

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes-ish, anyway.

 

 

 

Nope.  That, too, was awful.  But today I learned _why_, so thank you for that.

 

 

You have a lot of things going on here: the impressions made on you in your youth are the strongest, deepest, most heartfelt impressions you will ever form.  If the visuals Star Wars captured you so powerfully that you paid little heed to the writing, it will _always_ be a great movie.  This is one of the biggest reasons I dont try to dissuade people from liking it, and one of the reasons I understand that different people are going to like different things.

 

Then you have the wish fulfillment of the space wizards: who _doesn't_ want to be a warrior wielding ancient magic that gives him the ability to wipe the floor with legions of trained soldiers, all with a kick-butt sword made of lasers?  And to know that only the rarest and most special of people got to be one of these powerful and universally-respected mystic warriors?  That is a metric crapload of wish fulfillment right there, and if it captures you in your impressionable period, forget about it.  If that is precisely your kind of fantasy anyway, then age or maturity isn't going to matter much, especially when it is presented,as _beautifully_ as Lucas presented it.

 

After that, we have the thing that has kept religion going since time immemorial (besides the "join us be killed" aspect, I mean):  indoctrination.  Everyone wants to introduce their kids to what they themselves loved as kids.  And it _works_.  It isn't like I woke up onw day and decides "I want to be a great mechanic!"  I grew up doing it.  I grew up in a family of bikers.  (Farming didn't take root in me, thank God).  I got my first bike when I was nine, and have never had less than three or four since.  When I met my wife, I owned fourteen.  To varing degrees, indoctrination works.  If it didn't, Harley Davidson (one of the largest religions in the western world) would have gone out of business,in the seventies.

 

 

 

 

Seriously, Dude; are we the same person?!  Post a picture or something....

 

 

 

 

At any rate, I will whole-heartedly endorse anyone's love of Star Wars, and I will be just as excited _for you_ as you are when a new Star Wars thing comes out, because I know it brings you joy.

 

As long as you can understand that I am never going to appreciate the thing as much as you do, and you can accept that I won't but that I will still be happy _for you_, then we can very much arrive at an amicable disagreement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Either of the left column pictures.  Wonderful.

 

My friend Richard and I went to see The Last Starfighter and Night of the Comet at the old Huntridge Theater here in Las Vegas back in 1984. Both were wonderful movies, made brighter as you noted by the presence of Catherine Mary Stewart. Rich was a good friend and a bit of a munchkin when we would game, but he loved playing Champions and FH (and unsurprisingly, Palladium). He's been gone for over a dozen years now (from cancer), and I miss him.

 

The movie with the three robots was Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern. My parents were big science fiction buffs, and it was one that my Mom introduced me to back when local stations ran movies in the afternoon. I watch it occasionally, but I need something cheerful afterwards. The soundtrack's composed by Peter Schickele--better known as his alter-ego, P.D.Q. Bach.

 

Rogue One is excellent, as is the prequel series, Andor. You could remove the Star Wars trappings from Andor, and it would still be an excellent story. Empire is probably my second-favorite of the movies, and the Prequels and last trilogy didn't really resonate with me the same way.

 

 

[Old Man]

58 minutes ago, Ternaugh said:

Rogue One is excellent, as is the prequel series, Andor. You could remove the Star Wars trappings from Andor, and it would still be an excellent story. Empire is probably my second-favorite of the movies, and the Prequels and last trilogy didn't really resonate with me the same way.

 

Andor is easily my favorite SW show after the original trilogy, possibly even better than one of those.  And I almost skipped it because Leia and BoBF were so terrible.

[Duke Bushido]

2 hours ago, DShomshak said:

I'm afraid I don't have any. But we are not the same person: You've had a life. Quite a full one, topo. I haven't. Utterly boring, apart from writing a few game supplements that turned out fairly well. But the best parts of my life were sitting at a desk, wiggling my fingers on a keyboard.

 

Be glad you are you. Even with the heart attack, it sounds excellent.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

PS: Is the movie you were trying to remember Silent Running?

 

PPS: I'll see your Last Starfighter and raise you a Battle Beyond the Stars! And I wish I could give the name of an even more deranged SF/Fantasy Seven Samurai knock-off, probably from Hong Kong, which was one of the most enchantingly disheveled movies I've ever seen. Microbudget, made no flipping sense, but dang it was fun. But I onky saw it once, on TV, and I have no idea what the title was.

 

I suspect we could propose many more objectively bad movies that were nevertheless a lot of fun, but I suspect we have derailed the thread enough.

 

1 hour ago, rravenwood said:

 

Yep, that's Silent Running for sure.  

 

1 hour ago, Ternaugh said:

 

My friend Richard and I went to see The Last Starfighter and Night of the Comet at the old Huntridge Theater here in Las Vegas back in 1984.

 

 

Loved night of the comet!  We built an entire homebrew game around it and played it for an entire summer.

 

And yes; Catherine Mary Stewart made it that much more fun to watch.  Honestly, the guy- the truck driver character--  was it Hector?  No matter; he stole the whole show for me.  He was disturbingly relatable, and still fun!

 

 

1 hour ago, Ternaugh said:

The movie with the three robots was Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern.

 

 

My thanks to all of you for giving me the title; I appreciate it.

 

Forgive the use of the word "boring."  I had already done a considerable bit of thumb typing, and was looking for a shortcut to describe that it was absolutely not an action movie or a thriller; it was a very compelling character exploration, and well done while remaining very slowly, "quietly" paced.  All the excitement is generated in you the moment you realize that he was always well-around the bend, and holding himself together out of pure habit.

 

I would like to reply to some of the other comments, but as a smarter person than I am has stated, "we have hijacked this thread long enough."

 

Thank you all!

 

 

 

[mattingly]

11 hours ago, Pariah said:

Nice butte!

 

 

 

I like big buttes, and I cannot lie.