How I realized I was over Star Wars completely

[jjreason]

It may be the photos as well - I'm guessing the aliens will look slightly different once the film comes out - they adjust the lighting & do all sorts of things to hide the defects (as you're well aware). I recall reading Mark Hamill commenting on how stupid they thought the cantina was - how cheap & fake it all looked. They were floored once they saw the final cut, not able to believe how much things changed in post production. I love the creatures of Star Wars too - HUGE, FUNDAMENTAL piece of how & why this fantasy universe stands alone in its ability to take me away.... I'm really hoping the new (and old-new) aliens are spectacular.

[anarky]

The Aqualish were a huge WTF in the prequels. Not saying they should've, but if they'd changed Ponda Baba, it would've made some sense. Same for the Gran. Now Ponda and Ree Yees are apparently hideously deformed outcasts or something.

[Jargo]

Biologically speaking it's possible that there are two sub species with different looks as there are with real animals. I mean taking something like goats as an example, in different regions goats have developed different horn shapes and some goats are much hairier than others, so placing them side by side you can see both are goats but the differences are striking. I can accept that. What's difficult to accept is that Ponda Baba. as you say. is the only Aqualish who looks that way. It's sloppy and careless in a franchise that makes such a big thing about having continuity of design in other ways such as vehicle evolution and the progression of style in Stormtrooper/clone armours.

To be honest, There's so much about SW I have a beef with. I could write pages and pages on it but we've all been over it so much before. Having discovered the cut scenes from the Bluray editions I have a whole new beef with Lucas about his fluffy vision for ROTJ. Cutting the female rebel pilots and the whole death star firing on Endor to destroy the planet, The trivialising of Moff Jerjerrod. It's clear he'd lost the plot by that point and Spielberg was exerting some sort of influence on him. That and his kids. What seems clear to me from going over all that I have this past week is that SW OT was never intended to be a kids movie series. A darker edge is evident in the early treatments that show Lucas saw SW as a political treatise. An allegorical tale. Sure he framed it within this weird sci-fi universe but when looking at the socio-political climate of the early 1970's and the style and tone of films made back then as well as Lucas's early drafts of the scripts, it's obvious how SW was intended to look and feel. Frank Herbert's Dune is what Lucas was going for. Far more serious and far less quirky and cute.

The saddest thing is that Lucas could have had the greatest saga ever committed to screen. If he'd gone with the prequels in the same way he did ANH when he originally shot it and taken that political route and not gone with the schmaltz of bably written love stories and hamfisted comedic characters he could have set up a re-edit of the OT that would have been closer to his original vision. These sequels would have had a different tone and cute fluffy plush Ewok toys would be as derided as they should be.

But, the worst thing about the SW movies by far is the John Williams score. It is great music and Williams is a brillant composer. I love it all dearly but it doesn't do anything for the movies. It is in fact counter productive. The problem stems from Lucas' insistence on thinking of SW as a Flash Gordon serial sort of thing. His habit of wiping from one scene to the next and cute musical transitions. The shite music played by the cantina band, the silly quirky music accompanying the jawas. All of the ROTJ score. And let's be honest there's just so much music throughout all six movies it swamps any performance and dictates what we as audience members might feel individually. If you watch any SW movie with no sound you get a totally different sense of what's going on. My feeling is that it needed a soundscape far more alien and discordant. More Schoppenhauer bizarre. There are moments in Williams' score where we get this but then it reverts back to that symphonic bombast and drowns all true emotional feeling. The best example of the discordant is in the music for the Tusken raiders and the Mos Espa street music. It's alien and jarring and doesn't feel like 'music' i's just musical instruments as sound effects and accompaniment. Exactly as a score should be. The music in SW should be brief interludes and not noticeable. It should assist the setting of a scene rather than be the scene. That's my opinion. I know a lot of people feel that Williams' score IS Star Wars. Fair enough. I would posit that they also don't fully understand what Star Wars is. And also have an undeveloped sense of cinema. Lucas uses Williams to hide the shortcomings of his movies. The powerful orchestral sound masks all the cracks and holes and clumsy edits. Which wouldn't be there if Lucas hadn't totally fucked up and ruined his own film. He's always had the opportunity to go back and redo it the way he wanted but instead he chooses to keep fucking it up further and turning it into some cartoon version for kids. Disney is the perfect home for this version of SW.

Ok, rant over. You can go about your business. Move along, move along...

[jjreason]

That last paragraph is crazy - I can't imagine anyone not liking the scoring.... watching it without would be completely bizarre, like the Slave I chasing Obi Wan in AOTC - a glaring omission in my mind anyhow.

Did you like the Bladerunner scoring by Vangelis? I remember being more electronic & understated, but the last time I watched the movie I felt it "fit" pretty perfectly, regardless of when the movie was released. Might sound a little dated today.

[Jargo]

Now, well, thing is, as I said I love John Williams score for SW but I just don't think it fits. I know I'm a very small minority thinking that but it's something that's bugged me ever since the original theatrical releases. and more so with the altered scores of the special editions.

Interesting that you should mention Vangelis. It is a dated score for Bladerunner but it isn't overpowering. Ridley used sound as much as he did music and therefore was better able to evoke emotional responses and imbue his film with a sense of tension and suspense. It's a totally different sort of movie though. More detective story than sci-fi. Again though i come back to the music being part of the action such as when rachel plays the piano and the score just augments that sentiment. Or at the booze kiosk where there's an old time song on the radio. It just seems the better way to use music so it isn't hammering your senses constantly and just lets you get on with observing the story play out.

The old adage of movie making is show, don't tell and I think it's the same with music. Less is more. And what there is should be less obvious. I mean it's funny how so many classic movies have zero music in them. I think it's really about music coming from some godly place rather than being played on a jukebox or by a band or on the radio etc. If there's no physical way for music to be in a scene I don't feel it should be there on the soundtrack. The cantina, jabba's palace, the Naboo celebration or the Ewok scenes all had legitimate cause for music as they showed musicians. Space battles and intimate moments of drama between two characters don't really warrant full orchestral scoring. Not unless Porkins had a holonet broadcast in his x-wing or Padme carried a kind of ipod. Like in Guardians of the galaxy, Quill's walkman and mix tapes play an integral role and music is justified in places. That's the way to do it. Or in Inception where a particular piece is important. Just not this habit everyone has of bludgeoning the audience with overblown scores that run almost the entire length of the movie. reliance on the score to carry the weight of the emotional impact is lazy film making. Does I make myself clearer now?

[anarky]

On a somewhat related note, it's always, always, ALWAYS bothered me that Lucas used to refer to the Star Wars films as "silent movies with dialogue and sound effects," and both Burtt's and Williams' work is widely regarded to be amazing, but, among the six trillion different releases of the movies, there has never been an isolated score, or score with sound effects, audio track. I'd murder all the puppies in the world for that.

[jjreason]

Sorry Jargo - I meant crazy as in "that's the only person I've ever heard say that" crazy. The idea kinda stood me on my head honestly, I have a very difficult time imaging the movies without the scoring. That being said, I can certainly see your point about being steered emotionally by the strains of the orchestra and I'm sure I have been for years - Yoda lifting the X-Wing out of the swamp comes to mind - to me LOVELY with the music. I'm not sure it would have hit me the same without.

[Ran]

It's been a while since I watched the prequels. I do remember the Aqualish looking different, almost to the point if I wondered if they were the same as Ponda. I didn't pick up on the Gran.

[anarky]

Ree Yees has four (???) huge clubbed fingers. All the other Gran have more normal clawed hands (I think they might have six fingers, with two opposable thumbs). There's also a lot of inconsistency in how the heights are reported, but some sources say all the other Gran are about half Ree Yees' height.

[Jargo]

Another DOH! moment this afternoon. As I'm staring at yet another cantina photo I've never seen before it struck me that Dannik Jerikko is wearing the same uniform as the spaceport official I'd spotted in another photo. Also after checking for costume reference pics he carries a gun. A rebel blaster from what I can tell. So now we have four spaceport bureaucrats in there. All wearing a sort of variation on the Imperial officer uniform. Hasbro's figure of Dannik is so off the mark in every respect it might as well be a different character.

Here's another factoid. The ribbing on the inside of the bar canopy/roof that follows the arc of the bar shape and runs the whole way round, that's the same molding as was used on the Sandcrawler caterpillar treads. If you look at the inside edge of the treads there's a wedge piece with grooves in it. they just cast a whole crapload of them and used them for both sets. How do I know? It says so on the cantina bar set blueprints.

I'm also kinda mind blown that in one take of the Ponda baba death scene he lost his head as well as his arm and Norman Reynolds (art director) rigged the severed arm prop to twitch. How freakin cool would that have been?

One more thing. How come there are so many aquatic/amphibian lifeforms on Tatooine? Aqualish, Ishi Tib, Buboicular, Quarren, Rodian, Nuna etc. It's a planet with a premium on moisture so of all the places to go these aquatics/amphibians choose the desert butthole of the galaxy. LULZ!

I just found out that Wioslea has those flipper hands that Ponda Baba was supposed to have. Only Wioslea has green ones like his/her tentacles are green.

I think the size of Gran thing was retconned after they created mawhonic and realised he'd have to be tiny to be a podracer. All the other Gran in AOTC are Ree Yees sized. Why they couldn't just say Mawhonic was an immature Gran so perfectly sized to fit a pod is beyond me. But yeah Ree Yees does have totally different and much cooler hands though his feet are tiny and human shaped unlike the splayed massive feet of the prequels Gran. I blame Rick McCallum.

[vynsane]

One more thing. How come there are so many aquatic/amphibian lifeforms on Tatooine? Aqualish, Ishi Tib, Buboicular, Quarren, Rodian, Nuna etc. It's a planet with a premium on moisture so of all the places to go these aquatics/amphibians choose the desert butthole of the galaxy. LULZ!

one could fridge logic that one away: they are presumably on the run for something, since they are hiding in a hive of scum and villainy, and decided that the hottest, driest place in the galaxy would be the last place anyone would look for an aquatic/amphibian life-form. that or it just goes to show how desperate they are to escape whatever it is they're hiding from.

[Ran]

Little fact similar to the thing about the aquatic species on Tatooine...Las Vegas has the highest number of Hawaiians outside of Hawaii.

The tentacles on Dannik Jerikko's face are still more annoying that his uniform being off.

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[Jargo]

without the tentacles or holes for hem, the head sculpt at least would be passable.

I am of course forgetting, Vyn, that the Hutts control the outer rim territories even in the prequel era. The Quarren and such seen in TPM are dressed as locals in Mos Espa suggesting they have the misfortune to be slaves. Gragra's backstory states she breeds Gorgs in underground tanks so I imagine for a few credits a Quarren could grab a soak in a Gorg tank. That'd be like someone getting a fish pedicure in a tank at a sushi restaurant that lets you choose the live fish you want to eat. Grim.

Getting back to the new movie. I'm quite liking the look of the new x-wing in black and orange/red. Just figured out who flies that one. I'm a bit slow on the uptake there I think.

Perusing the pictures of Jabba's sail barge I have I realised that the thing has no access for Jabba. There's no break in the guard rail that runs round the deck. He wouldn't fit through the deck hatch we see guards come through and there's no hatchway in the hull sides. Yet in Ralph McQuarries production art for this very sail barge there's a huge doorway in the hull side and on blueprints. And the interior set model we see ramps for his dias to slide down and him on a different dias which is backed up by screencaps and behind the scenes shots. On the set built for the movie though, there is in fact no way for the fat bastard to get aboard and down to the level of his chamber. I have to wonder if the large scale model built for the explosion at the end of the sequence had the door hatch on the far side or if they just omitted it altogether.

On the subject of the sail barge I also got to thinking about the placement of the cannon on the deck. Pretty dumb as it can only be used to fire broadside to any other vehicle. Great if the Khetanna was a proper pirate vessel but it's too slow to be useful for that. Defense wise the cannon is useless against any attack on Jabba from front or back and overhead. The skiffs also have no weapons which is fine as they're swifter and more manoeuvrable but given who Jabba is and the kind of circles he moves in you'd think there'd be more thought put into repelling attack than that dinky little thing Nysad uses and the stupid sluggish deck cannon.

One more thing. If the Khetanna is a repulsorlift vehicle, why is it sitting on the sand when the cannon blasts through the decks? Even if it was powered down it would still float above the ground as all repulsorlift vehicles in the saga do. In fact once Luke has disposed of a few guards it should float a little more freely in the air due to having less load.

I found a Joe Johnston sketch of Boba Fett on an Imperial speeder bike. It's painted up in his colours. Yellow, red, and a sort of teal body colour. Obviously ROTJ era. I did a mock up by recolouring a hasbro speeder bike and it looked disgusting. I'm guessing that at one point Boba was going to whizz around the sail barge on it with the skiffs. so I'm thinking George liked the bike but not the idea of boba using it and he switched it to the Imperial scout vehicle of choice.

[Slicker]

Is it just me or does this new hotel complex in Mecca look a little bit too much like Theed on Naboo?

[Jargo]

The top dome looks like the building they cremated Qui-Gon in.

Today I got to thinking that the entire layout of the Lars homestead is wrong. Going by the view from Luke's perspective as he talks to Aunt Beru from the ridge of the pit courtyard, the garage and entrance dome should be on screen right not the left. the only access to upper levels is the stairs on Luke's right as he looks down at Aunt Beru. The same stairs we see him run up to go to the garage. The dining area is on the left of the courtyard so we see him run off to the garage on the right. Seen from the sandcrawler, the garage exterior is on the left of the courtyard and the opening for the T-16 Skyhopper to go through is missing. Internal shots of the garage show daylight.
So either the entrance dome is reached via a pointlessly very long tunnel, or the layout is wrong. Also the opening for the T-16 may be there but on the right of the courtyard which we never see in ANH, and what we assume is the garage roof is actually a different roof dome. which is then completely screwed up by AOTC which shows nothing there to the right of the courtyard but a few gravestones. I mean seriously, It's one of the most simple sets in the entire saga and they screwed it up. This is what happens when you let college grad stoners make movies.

STOP THE PRESSES! I just found an ANH shot of the droid sale which shows a second earthworks ridge right next to the courtyard and behind the entrance dome. While a good find it's still wrong. the garage dome is way too far away. It's also as I've said on the left when it should be on the right. Or, if Luke is looking down at Aunt Beru closer to the entrance dome and with the sandcrawler at his shoulder rather than his back then the garage should actually be right where the sandcrawler is parked.

Speaking of the sandcrawler, that thing is colossal right? Weighs hundreds of tonnes right? How come the homestead isn't completely destroyed by the thing? The weight and vibrations would effectively be a small earthquake and the walls of the courtyard would crumble. It is sand they've built their home in after all. The sandcrawler would displace an awful lot of the sand into the big hole in the ground if it actually parked so close. Hmmm...