Luke’s ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ are really Obi-Wan’s brother and his wife. It comesupin the ROTJ novel.
As of the end of Episode 1, no one alive in any other Star Wars movie except Vader has seen 3PO. Maybe Ani doesn’t recognize the droid now that he has the coverings. Or maybe Anakin recognized 3PO and got all misty-eyed behind that mask, and we just can’t tell.
–John
OK, but none of this explains how Palpatine/Darth Sidious could sit there right under the Jedi Council’s collective nose and escape detection.
You’d think someone would say, “A presence I detect. Strong in the Dark Side it is. From Senator Palpatine it seems to emanate.” or words to that effect.
BTW, I don’t believe that Leia and Luke are related in any way, by blood or marriage. The way the revelation came in “Return of the Jedi” was too contrived, with not so much as a hint in the two preceding movies.
I hated ROTJ. The only way I was able to maintain the suspension of disbelief while watching that movie was to hold it up with a chain hoist. And I was fifteen at the time.
The connection between Owen, Beru, and Luke’s nephewness to them is part of the new episode, 2, coming out in a couple of years time. If you guys really want to know, I can tell you (email me if you like) but otherwise it’s a sort-of secret that shall be revealed when the movie hits theatres in May, 2002.
Yeah, hiding under that floor board in the Millenium Falcon was really believable.
Guess all those scanning bots and droids couldn’t locate anything under a sheet of metal floor board 1/16 of an inch thick.
It was a smuggler’s hiding spot, so it was shielded specifically to avoid detection by scanning droids and such.
Not Darths. Sith. Sith Lords. Darth is more like, the title. The Sith is the name of their “group”, I guess you could say.
BTW, does anyone else read the novels like I do? Who is your favorite NON-movie Character-mine, as I said, is Mara Jade?
Ah, but they got off before scanning started. They just hid from sight until then.
IIRC (been a while since I’ve seen it):
Scanning team walks on board with big box. Thuds heard.
“Hey, could you give us a hand up here?”
Stormtroopers look at each other, walk on board. Shots. Escape.
Kilt-wearin’ man wrote:
Pshaw. Vader let Han shoot at him. He wanted to show off his way-cool I-don’t-even-need-a-light-saber-to-deflect-your-shots power to prove what a studmuffin he was.
The Sith lords have a lot of practice at hiding from the Jedi. A LOT. As in a thousand years or so of practice.
Owen and Beru are related to Obi-Wan? Nuts, and I was going to come on and say “Hey! Guess what! Luke and Leia had a mother, too!” Darn.
And Philbuck’s recollection of the sequence events wrt the scanning of the Millenium Falcon is correct.
I read a lot of the novels that come out. My fav. character is Grand Admiral Thrawn. He just exudes an aura of authority and respect… Timothy Zahn rocks!
And the Sith were able to hide right under the Jedi’s noses for the same reason Yoda was able to hide from the Emperor and Vader for so long. Yoda was able to ‘mask’ his force presence by balancing it out with the dark force generated by the Cave where Luke fought ‘Vader’. Sidious/Palpatine and Maul use the light side force that the Counsel itself generates to hide themselves in the same way. That, and a thousand years practice doesn’t hurt either. 
OK, but I still don’t buy that Luke and Leia are twins.
BTW, I read in the proverbial * somewhere* that Darth is a contraction of Dark Lord of the Sith, which takes much to long to say, especially in the middle of a drawn-out lightsaber battle.
I had a lot of fun on a Star Wars- oriented message board last year, posting under the moniker Darth Callista. The high point was when, through the magic of a chat room, I led an assault on the secret Rebel shipyard at Ord Aidell, and was attacked on the bridge of my own ship by a young apprentice Sith, while the assault was in progress. We determined that he was posessed, or insane, or both, and prevailed upon my Sith superiors to spare his life.
I also requested the Luke Skywalker not be killed until I had the opportunity to tell him he was lousy in the sack- the famous Talking Killer Fallacy.
Eventually, though, we ran out of fun schemes for defeating the Jedi and the New Republic, and I got bored and wandered off into the deserts of Tatooine, where I perished from hunger, thirst, and ennui, leaving all the ships and weapons and cool stuff I had taken from the “rebels” in battle to one of the other posters.
Yes, I’m even trying to read them in chronological order, I’m up to the last book in the Black Fleet crisis trilogy. As for my favorite NON-movie character, I’ll let you guess
I knew this thread would take off like gangbusters. Although I haven’t read the novels, and don’t take anything as canon but the movies - and even some of them is questionable.
DKW, I agree that analyzing the details of the movies is not for everyone, and not going to pan out. To quote the phrase a reviewer used on Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, I’ll say that “applying geek-like levels of scrutiny” is sometimes the sign of a true fan. I like it so much I disect it.
Yes, I realize all the fighters had the proton torpedoes, and Luke was on the final run (basically on three fighters left anyway). But what bugged me was that Luke had to be the most junior recruit. He was completely untested in battle. Sure his buddy Biggs was there and knew him, but how did any of the other rebel leaders have any confidence in his ability as a pilot? He didn’t do any flying to save the Princess, so even that prestige shouldn’t be worth command slot in the flight wing. But for some reason Biggs and Wedge defer to Luke to make the attack run, and them serving as wingmen. That was a new criticism I hadn’t caught before, but suddenly it doesn’t make sense to me. Why didn’t Biggs take the run and let Luke be his wingman? (I mean besides the obvious plot ploy that Luke was the hero of the story.)
I still say that line about Obi-wan becoming “more powerful than you can possibly imagine” is rather hyperbolic.
The Greedo scene, the original point was that Greedo thought he had the draw on Han. He had his gun out, Han’s was still holstered. So he felt confident in gloating before killing Han, especially since he gave the offer to be bought off. Sure it’s a bad move on his part, especially not making Han keep both hands on the table. That’s his bad judgment that Han out plays him with. That scene worked rather well, and while Greedo’s a gloater, he’s not a blind uncoordinated gimp with a twitch. In other words, I could see him being a decent bounty hunter/Jabba lackey by being an arrogant gloater, but not by being a lousy shot from 3 ft away.
SPOOFE Bo Diddly said:
That answer is unsatisfactory. Why wouldn’t he have been able to direct Luke to Yoda if he had lived through the Death Star and gone with them? I can accept that somehow the confrontation with Vader was required. He was acting as the distraction so the others could get to the MF. Maybe some return to the student thing. But that line is so over the top compared with the “reality”.
I don’t think Jabba should have been bigger. I think the size was about right. You have to remember that in Jedi he is on a raised dias and so it’s hard to compare the size easily to the one walking around at the same level. I would be curious to see an attempt to reshoot that one part of the scene. I suspect that would have been harder to do. My thought would have been digitally having Jabba turn around as the simplest save - getting stepped on seems out of character.
I agree that Mos Eisley being a crowded place and a vast mix of low and high tech was interesting. I accept most of the new footage of the city, enhanced backgrounds and such, giving it a more metropolitan feel. I just specifically was referring to the one scene being too cluttered with crap walking in front of the camera. Did it really need both a lizard beast and a droid floating between the landspeeder and the camera, while the confrontation/conversation was occurring? I think that was bad editing. Not bad contrast to the setting, just bad movie-making.
SPOOFE, I think it’s ironic that you use a book by Kevin Anderson to back up a point, then for your next point you mention that one has to be careful which books are used for corroborating information. Your choice of material seems to be one that many afficionados find distasteful.
As far as Han going to pay off the bounty hunter, that bugs me a little to. I admit he changed his mind not to abandon Luke and the rebels in their dire moment of need. But how come he didn’t then go pay off Jabba?
Robot Arm, I like your comment about the MF being new and amazing and then being a piece of junk.
JamesCarroll, that’s the point I was trying to get to - they had a lousy strategy. Why fly so far along the trench? Was it an effort to get out of the way of most of the surface guns, so used the walls of the trench to limit their vulnerability? It appears they needed a fairly long distance for the tracking and aiming computers to home in. I guess that was why.
It did seem odd to me that Ben would hide Luke on Vader’s home planet.
Snooooopy, I think it was realistic (at least as far as SW goes) that it took some time and effort to charge up the main planet buster gun. That part makes sense to me.
Harvey, the Imperials attack and invade the transport ship because they know Leia stole important information and they wish to regain it, plus that confirmed their theory that Leia was in the resistance, and gave them excuse to arrest her. The movie shows that they only learn of Leia’s backup plan to launch the droids after the fact, thus trying to hunt them down. In fact, they obviously didn’t know which droids, because it was only after reaching the surface and finding the pod that they realized there were droids at all. I suspect the destruction of the Jawas was because they didn’t know which droids to destroy, so they figured destroy them all. The Jawas would of course hate that - their livelihood and all - it’s just so much easier to kill all the Jawas and frame the sand people. After all, it’s not like Jawas are people. (Note how there seem to be only human Imperial troops. No funky shaped stormtrooper armor to accommodate tentacles.)
As for TPM, we finally learned the dastardly secret that plagued mankind - who was the infernal dolt who programmed C3PO to be such a whining prig. I mean that always struck me as odd - you build a protocol droid, something that seems to serve the purpose of being a polite and respectful servant, and then give it a snooty personality?
Here’s another question: in TPM they make a big deal about Annikan being too old to start the training - he’s like 9. Whereas Luke didn’t start any force training until he was like 18 or so. So why wasn’t Luke too old?
Kilt-wearin’ man, I don’t think it’s established that Han shook off any Jedi mind trick. I suppose you could interpret it that way, but seems a stretch. If Ben were going to mind trick Han, wouldn’t it have been to get a better deal?
Thea Logica said:
Then it wouldn’t have been such a surprise. But in fact, it is hinted at previously. In Empire, who is it that Luke reaches out to when he’s hanging under Cloud City? Leia. Yoda and Ben are talking after Luke runs off to save his friends, Ben says Luke is their only hope, and Yoda replies, “No, there is another.” Certainly in A New Hope there is no hints, and it looks like Luke and Leia could be headed for a hookup, but in Empire we see that change. It was almost a bigger shock that Vader was Luke’s father than that Luke and Leia were related. That certainly wasn’t forshadowed - unless you count the scene in Degobah where Luke confronts the Spectral Darth in the cave and cuts off its head, only to see his own face.
My two cents:
Re Luke’s status in the attack: I figure he didn’t have any status in terms of military training or real battle experience, but the Rebellion has been functioning as a rag-tag bunch of volunteers with a certain turnover rate; they had to scramble into this battle with only a fast briefing, and they need all the help they can get. Maybe Biggs or somebody vouched for his shootin’ ability and Luke himself brought up his Force potential, and they figured this would be the kid to hit that four-foot target. Notice they don’t get on his case about turning off his targeting computer – even with all that is at stake, they seem to figure he knows what he’s doing.
Re Han and Greedo: I always viewed Greedo as a minor thug, a punk who seriously underestimates Han. He must be somebody’s nephew. Jabba is just some sort of local gangster, right? He doesn’t really want Han dead – he’ll never get his money back that way. So Greedo is seriously overstepping the bounds of his authority with the “I might forget I found you” ploy. (Yeah, give me the money…and then I disappear without a word to Jabba, and somebody else comes after you… How stupid does he think Han is?) Count me in as one of the folks who thought the new scene with Jabba was unnecessary – “Sure, pay me back whenever you can, old buddy!” Plus he looks like a half-melted Shrinky Dink.
I would be disappointed if Luke and Leia weren’t really siblings. The forces that be go to all that trouble to hide them, one with the royal family and one in an isolated town on a desert planet (And with an uncle who doesn’t seem to be loyal to the Rebellion! Is it a coincidence that Obi-wan is only a few miles away? Is he supposed to keep an eye on him? He acts as if he’s never met him, though he knows who he is, holding the lightsaber until it’s time.). Luke and Leia must be important. About Anakin being nine already and Luke being 20 before starting his training, I figure that ideally the training is supposed to start as early as possible, but in the last couple of generations, with their numbers dwindling and having to hide, they’re doing the best they can or something. Luke seems to pick it up awfully quickly.
I think it’s weird they don’t know about the Death Star. Isn’t there some outcry the first time it’s used? Sure, Luke and Obi-wan have been isolated, but you’d think Han and Chewie would have heard rumors at least.
I always figured the Stormtroopers on the Death Star didn’t have to be good shots, because serving on the Death Star is like being in the National Guard…how often are you going to be tested? Sure, it serves as a prison/Empire headquarters, but who’s going to infiltrate it, if nobody knows what or where it is? They, too, are probably all somebody’s nephew.
And the Stormtroopers kill all the Jawas because they can. Who’s gonna stop 'em? Who cares about a bunch of gypsy junk dealers, anyway? Who’s even gonna notice they’re missing, out in the desert?
Wait, that IS the first time we see the Death Star being used, isn’t it? Forget I said anything.
But, how frustrating for the builders of the Death Star! They use it ONCE…and it’s destroyed what, a few hours later?
Hey, what does TIE stand for, as in TIE fighters? I know it’s an acronym for something.
TIE: Twin Ion Engine.
This almost an awful question, because it’s too hard to pick just one. I’m especially fond of the X-Wing series, and my favorite pilots are Nawara Ven, Ooryl, and Gavin Darklighter. I also like how Wedge and the other pilots only briefly shown in the films really develop as interesting characters in the books.
BTW, if you’ll remember correctly, Yoda told Obi Wan’s ghost that he couldn’t train Luke, as the boy was too old.
Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are not blood relation to Luke.
Also as to the value of an education from “The Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy,” I don’t think the Stormtroopers’ inaccuracy can be justified by their station. Yes in Ep IV the troopers we see are stationed on the Death Star and probably not the best the empire has to offer, but they’re still Stormtroopers, not navy crewmen (remember the black-helmeted technition that starts the firing sequence?).
They are highly trained troops upon whom the strength of the Empire is dependent. It’s unbelievable that farmers and princesses should be able to outshoot them, unless force potential has some effect on accuracy.
quotes are from starwars.com (official site)
As to Luke getting trained even though he was old, I’d say it was because they were damn desparate. He was strong (stronger than his father, who was the strongest to date, I think), even if untrained.
As for them letting him lead, what, are they going to ask him to pull over? And, remember, he has trained under a Jedi master, and he has had combat experience (at least once, on the Falcon), and he was already known as a good pilot (on Tatooine, at least by Obi-Wan), so it’s not odd they let him fly. And he just happened to get in first.
Going from a few random memories, I think the X-Wing game had it that there was a field of some sort in the trench that made ships fly a lot faster, making it easier, once you’ve gotten into the trench, to cover a lot of ground really fast. And also, if there’s no one behind you, you can put all your energy to the forward shields. The guns in front will be deflected, and the guns behind you won’t be able to touch you because you’ll be over the horizon before they can turn.
And the stormtroopers are such bad shots because if they weren’t the story would be pretty short and boring, and wouldn’t sell well. “Once upon a time a hick farmer rescued a princess and both were killed. The emperor whose troops killed them went on to rule the Galaxy with an iron fist for hundreds of years, terrorizing the populace and making everything just, plain, bad.”
Am I a geek yet?