Anyone else over Star Wars?

[well_he_s_back]

Terminology like “younglings” is a big turn-off from Star Wars right there.

[Terrifel]

@Shawn1767

An analogy I like to think of is this: friends don’t give you charisma, but the more charisma you have, the greater the chance of having more friends. So, if someone has a lot of friends, you can infer that they have a lot of charisma.

In the** Star Wars ** universe, people with extremely high charisma are hosts for microscopic organisms known as midicalrissians.

[Marley23]

Yeah, I got over it a little while after Phantom Menace. I saw that a few times, then when the hype died down a few months later, I said to myself, “Hey, wait a minute. That sucked!” I wasn’t going to see the second one, but I was in college and I had a bunch of friends who wanted to go to a midnight screening in costume. I went and had a blast - but the movie was even worse. Friends talked me into Revenge of the Sith also. That one bucked the trend a little and had a few parts that were close to what they should have been, but I think it fell short for the same reasons the other ones did. It’s a very strange thing, although I see others have mentioned it: it was like George Lucas had absolutely no idea what people liked about the original movies.

[jackdavinci]

The original three I loved (yes I even loved the ewoks, the love triangle, and the second death star). The prequels were a big disappointment, and now I am “over” Star Wars. I didn’t bother with the clone wars cartoon, I’m not buying the visual guides, I don’t bother with the wookiepedia, etc. A combination of factors:

1. As a kid I was probably less critical and more able to just enjoy a story without over analyzing it.
2. The prequels were a long time in the making and hence couldn’t live up to the hype.
3. Mostly though, the stories weren’t great, the drama fell flat, the dialogue was horrible (there were several good actors but there’s only so much you can do with poorly written script and a bad director), and a lot of the plot and character behavior didn’t make sense.

I’d love to see what a more indy type director would have done with the potential story arc.

[Bosstone]

@jackdavinci

I didn’t bother with the clone wars cartoon

You might reconsider this. AFAIK, Lucas had almost no hand in the Clone Wars cartoon; Genndy Tartakovsky, who’s a genius at animation, directed it. It does an excellent job of salvaging the prequel material and is vastly more entertaining than the movies. It even makes Anakin look good. Lucas knows fuck all about the setting he created, but Tartakovsky’s a definite fan and quite competent.

[Hypno-Toad]

@rjung

Not sure what being “over it” entails, but while I’ll still sit down and watch the original trilogy if they happen to be on the air, it’s not like I’m rushing out to fill my house with Star Wars bric-a-brac or memorize the life history of background Jedi #5,323.

This is what killed it for me. Much of the mystique of the Star Wars setting was removed by the fans who went to such great lengths to “flesh-out” the setting. I remember references like “the spice mines of Kessel” or “That bounty hunter on Ord Mandell.” These were places mentioned by characters with no exposition or follow-up. This gave the universe a “larger” feel because you didn’t know anything about those places. They were mysterious allusions. Now there’s a Wikipedia entry on each one to remove any chance of feeling wonder or mystery.

Other than one novel, “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye,” I have never made an effort to learn anything about a Star Wars person place or thing that isn’t specifically in the movie. Please do not tell me what a hydro-spanner or fluvial damper is.

[Steve_MB]

@neorxnawange

I’m completely off it now. It was the prequels that did it. I could write a book with everything wrong with the prequels, but I’ll keep it short here. For me the main problem with the prequels wasn’t necessarily their quality (poor storytelling, bad dialogue, terrible acting, purposefully distracting and manic CGI), those things made the prequels themselves bad. The worst thing about the prequels is that the were so bad that they made the first three films bad retroactively. They did this by destroying the entire mythic structure that held up the original films.

Take the Jedi for instance. Originally the Jedi were an ancient warriors cult surrounded by mystery. We heard the stories about how they stoically held out against the tide of evil that swept through the galaxy in centuries past. They were men of principal, dignity, and action who were above the petty concerns of politicians and bureaucrats. For them it was good vs. evil, and they were willing to give up their lives for the sake of good. Then the prequels showed us the truth. The Jedi were really a bunch of self-important snobs who blindly acted as errand boys for a corrupt and failing government. They lived by a bizarre and backwards code of conduct that taught them to stand by when they should be acting, interfere when they should be standing by, and to equivocate when they should be speaking the truth. They were more than willing to use their powers, and even to kill, to settle random trade disputes, but god (or should I say midi-chlorians) forbid they do anything at all to free slaves or bring down developing armies of darkness. They prided themselves on their ability to tune into the most profound spiritual fluctuations of the universe, yet they were unable to realize that they were working directly for the most evil person in the galaxy. It should also be mentioned that an alarmingly high percentage of the Jedi tended to turn to the dark side and become all out evil anyway. It is no wonder they were only able to keep up their membership by kidnapping toddlers and brainwashing them. Then of course they came across in general as, well, a bunch of pricks.

Wow. That so neatly summarizes the basic problems with the prequel trilogy…

[saoirse]

@Hypno-Toad

I agree with **Rickjay ** and Stranger…

Lucas “over-explained” everything with the prequels. The prequels took what had been seen as a long lost “golden age” in Star Wars and turned it into a rather poor story. Larger than life heroes and villains were turned into ordinary people with annoying habits.

I think the problem is that the prequels concerned themselves with the politics of the government. Not because it was boring (although it was), but because it requires a big picture of the universe Lucas created. That decision made it almost impossible for the prequels not to suck, along with making the Jedi a creepy cult of mutant freaks.

[Subterraneanus]

I was over Star Wars about two days after I saw it in the theater in 1977.

[Rocketeer]

I can ignore the prequels just fine, and I do. What really pissed me off was the re-editing of the first movie. Han shot first, god damn it.

[BMax]

Yeah, I was 12 years old the first time I saw Star Wars in the theater with my boy scout troop on the second weekend it was out. A couple of the guys were there for their second and third viewing. It totally fucking blew me away. Being a total antisocial little nerd who lived in a fantasy, guess what theme my fantasy world world had that year? Same theme my junior high yearbook had the next year.

And three years later when ESB came out I was blown away again but not so much…even though it was a technically better movie, that magical age had passed by.

By time the third one came out, I waited until it hit the dollar movie house. Yeah, I liked seeing Billy Dee Calrissian get more action, the way Luke had become a bad ass and wore black, and I loved Carrie Fisher in the gold bikini, but the fucking muppets and the goddamn teddy bears ruined the whole trilogy IMHO.

I have to confess though, I did go see all 3 crappy prequils in the theater, #2 &3 on opening weekend. Yeah, they sucked. The second and third less than the first, and after the first viewing I thought the third just barely didn’t suck.

@Rocketeer

I can ignore the prequels just fine, and I do. What really pissed me off was the re-editing of the first movie. Han shot first, god damn it.

And thank God for salvation Army, where I was able to purchase the 1995 box set of VHS tapes of the original trilogy, without the addition of Greedo shooting first, craptacular-CGI-fakey Jabba the Hut, and the “scum and villiany” of Mos Eisley being two droids doing a “na-na-na-na-na-na” and a bonk-bonk on the head.

And since I bought them about 2 months ago, I guess that means that I’m still not “over” Star Wars.

[Wakinyan]

They threw out the masculine anti-hero with the Clark Gable smile, Bogart dark side, the childish vanity of male heros since Achilleus - Han Solo - and replaced it with Jar-Jar Binks.

They threw out the close to omnipotent dark force, told of in mythology and folk lore since dawn of men, lurking and mysterious, powerful and tempting, ghostlike and fascinating - and replaced it with the ambitions of a snotty brat.

They threw out the mystery of all, and replaced it with a virus.

Of course, there’s nothing left of the Star Wars numinosum when theater closed this time.

The man blew it.