Recently I posted a Star Wars topic. So here’s another one. Because that’s just how bored I am.
Ever since I first saw Star Wars (I saw it a bit late since I was born in '82), I was hearing about how Lucas planned to do episodes 1-3, and how the original movies are episodes 4-6 (God forbid if I called A New Hope ‘Star Wars 1’ and a fan was nearby, I’d get such a verbal thrashing). Then after doing 1-3, he’d go ahead and make 7-9. Who the heck jumps into their story midway, then goes backward, then forward. Did Lucas plan this from the beginning as some grand marketing scheme, or did he kinda punt and evolve the story on the fly as Star Wars gained massive popularity? The reason I ask is episodes 1 and 2 seem very different from 3-4. For one, they suck. But also, everything has a different tone and feel to it. Did Lucas always plan the storm troopers to come from a clone army? I really doubt that he did, since there are no clues to this in the original trilogy and cloning wasn’t a hot topic back when the movie was first released. The same applies for the word trade (sorry, “Trade Federation” plot element. We didn’t get any political crap in the original trilogy did we? My theory is that there was never any plan for making episodes 1-3, but a rumor started which gained popularity, so he decided to appease the fans by making the prophecy come true.
It’s been said by many that he had all 9 mapped out in advance, but I don’t believe it for a second. His storylines are so poorly planned that I don’t think he has more in mind than what he’s currently shooting. For anyone who thinks everything was planned from the beginning, watch TPM, AoTC, and then the original 3 movies in that order and see if it even feels like the same series. The first three were not bad, if a little sophomoric, but the next two (would be the first two? prequels confuse) were just terrible.
I think he had a basic outline for all nine stories, including the Clone Wars, etc, but nothing like a fully fleshed synopsis or anything. For example, the Clone Wars were mentioned in the first film in the first conversation between Luke and Obi-Wan.
He had nine movies planned out, all right, but not THESE movies. ROTJ wasn’t supposed to be the end… Luke was originally planned to turn to the Dark Side, Leia WASN’T his sister, and the last three films featured the search for Luke’s real sister, training her, and then attacking the Emperor, Luke, and TWO Death Stars in the sky above the Imperial capital (which wasn’t named Coruscant at the time). 'Course, those latter three movies were scrapped… along with the three original prequels.
Then, a Howard the Duck later, the point at which Lucas clearly went insane, he decided it would be a great way to acquire oodles of cash by making three more Star Wars movies. So he shat on a piece of toilet paper and used that as a script, and created The Phantom Menace. And the rest is history…
Hell, I’d rather see that than the actual movie that he made.
SPOOFE, I agree that the plotline that you describe for episodes 7-9 is far cooler than what they did in ROTJ. Do you know what he originally planned for episodes 1-3? Surely it would be better than what he’s done so far.
To me, it feels like Lucas has taken a few vague references from the original trilogy to past incidents, and made them look stupid. The Clone Wars used to sound so mythic and mysterious. And now, Episode 2 suggests that the stormtroopers were clones of Boba Fett’s dad. What?? This is along the lines of Leia being Luke’s sister–it’s as though Lucas just thought of some crazy plot twist and put it in, without any regard to continuity. Space opera? More like a space soap opera.
I remember thinking that Anakin’s conversion to the dark side would be interesting to watch. Now, he just strikes me as a surly teenager, and I couldn’t care less that he’s going to join the dark side.
But I know I will watch Episode 3 out of the slender hope that maybe, just maybe Lucas can make something decent out of the mess that he’s made. Slender, I said.
Have you ever heard the plot of an opera described before? The reason soap operas are called soap operas is because the plots resemble classic operas’ plots. Since they are geared towards housewives soap is one of the things that was commonly advertised in the commercials.
So, what we need is a time machine. We go back to pre-Howard the Duck Lucas, pump him full of sodium pentathol, find out everything we can about his plans for the next movies. Kill him, replace him with a double, and then make the kick ass movies you’ve described. No Howard the Duck, no Radioland Murders and whatever else he shat out in the years between Empire and AOTC. Whatcha think? Any Dopers want to get cracking on designing a time machine?
As has been said before, the “Episode IV - A New Hope” thing was not on the original “Star Wars” release. The opening crawl said simply “STAR WARS” and “It is a time of civil war…” etc. etc. The “Episode IV” part was added to a later release of the film, after “The Empire Strikes Back” was already in the works. There is NO evidence that Lucas had any sort of 6- or 9-movie plan when he made “Star Wars,” and I personally believe he came up with it after the fact.
SPOOFE is entitled to his opinion; IMHO, it’s malarkey, and Lucas came up with the whole silly scheme after it was obvious there’d be at least one sequel.
The “A New Hope” title is a very recent innovation; 1997, or thereabouts. Nobody called the movie “A New Hope” until six years ago. If you’re talking about the movie released in 1977 that won a bunch of Oscars, the correct title is “Star Wars.”
You can clearly see that the basic ideas in the three original movies could easily have been one single story outline - Young boy rescues princess and becomes hero, dashing rogue is pursued and captured, rogue is rescued and bad guy is defeated. Once he wrote all that down, he saw it was too much to fit in one movie, so he divided it into a trilogy and fleshed each one out with extra ideas as he went on.
The prequels were even vaguer outlines describing who some of the characters were, where they came from, why things were the way they were. These ideas are still intact, but are now fleshed out completely, in ways most people don’t seem to like very much.
The three sequels of 7 - 9 had no storyline planned, he just foolishly said it was what he was going to do in a couple of interviews back when he was idealistically believing anything was possible. He scrapped that idea very early on, I think, but the fans won’t let go of it.