Pretty much, yeah. That’s one thing that I thought the sequels got right: How do you follow up the greatest villain in cinematic history, without making the new guy a pathetic fanboy wannabe? Answer: You don’t. You accept that he’s going to be a pathetic fanboy wannabe.
It wasn’t because his face was burned by acid or hot lava or something like that. It’s just they’re terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.
That, and if you looked like pouty emo Kylo, no one would take you seriously.
Just like in The Dark Knight Returns there was a street gang of fanboy wannabes that all wore Nixon masks, are we going to see the future of street gangs wearing blue suits red ties and trump masks?
I’ve said before that I think the reason that Star Wars was a huge success and did so well is that it took all the pulp science fiction as a given and portrayed all that mind-blowing stuff naked and unashamedly.
For years movie studios had been dabbling in science fiction, but didn’t really want to portray its tropes. I think they were afraid of alienating the vast majority of moviegoers. They didn’t think such off-the-wall stuff would “play in Peoria”. So we got watered-down and dumbed-down fare like Moon Zero Two and Damnation Alley, despite the success of the TV show Star Trek (which they took off the air because it was expensive and didn’t do great in the ratings – until someone broke the statistics down and saw that it was doing great in the categories they wanted to reach – young people with money). We’d get something like Forbidden Planet or 2001 every now and then, but the studios continued to play it safe.
Then along came Lucas and made film with all the tropes and the trappings (if not the substance) or all that popular Sci Fi out there – Evil Empires and Rebels, Insterstellar Empires, Robots, Weird-looking aliens, That staple of SF, the Spaceport Bar. Blasters. Hyperspace travel. Weird mental capabilities and cults. Star Wars embraced then all. And he did it with the verve of the old Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers serials. The hell with scientific realism. After the slow pace of Kubrick’s gorgeous 2001, the rapid-fire serial-based action of Star Wars grabbed you by the lapels and didn’t let go until the end.
Lucas cobbled it together from Akira Kurasawa Samurai epics (especially The Hidden Fortress, with its proto-C3Po and R2D2, its kick-ass princess and Lovable Rogue), Dr. Doom with a mask that even covered his eyes and a samurai helmet on top, a climax taken from clips from Squadron 733 and the Dam Busters (as I pointed out in a long-vanished issue of Teemings). I realized when I saw Lucas’ student-film version of THX 1138 that he’d used the frequency-shifting noisy radio transmission in that film and copied it to the chatter between the X-wings to give it all an air of versimilitude. He covered it with a coating of dirt to make it look lived-in instead of pristine (as all futures seemed to look until John Carpenter’s Dark Star show us the REAL future) and wrapped it all up like a futuristic fairy tale (“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” instead of “Once Upon a Time…”) and everyone was hooked.
I watched is seven times in the year it came out. I knew a guy who saw it 39 times in the same period. It played at the Charles Cinema in Boston for a full year unbroken. Then the re-released it to show the trailer for the sequel and everyone rushed back, both to see it and the trailer for The Empire Strikes Back. (It was reported that they had to guard the trailer against theft.)
This was my evaluation of it at the time. A little later people started seeing the warts in the depiction. Hey, howcum Luke and Han got medals by Chewbacca didn’t? The robots are basically treated like slaves. Why aren’t there any people except white people in this universe? They fixed these things up gradually. Empire got us Lando Calrissian as a rogue who was morally ambiguous and wasn’t not white. Chewy eventually got his due.
It’s not just that she was some minor royal on some minor planet. Bael Organa was a big member of the Rebellion, and Leia was fast taking on a leadership role. She was instrumental in transporting the Death Star plans. In fact, they were hoping the Imperials would respect the diplomatic immunity of her vessel as a member of the Galaxtic Senate.
Afterwards, she was also the remaining ruler of the destroyed Alderaan and played an honorary role for all the surviving Alderaans (who were in space or in other planets, etc).
And as her role in the Rebellion grew, she shed the Princess label and became General Organa.
Hey, I love the first two and think Jedi is pretty good. It is fun and about being fun.
I’m just an analytical processor, so I overthink a lot of things. To me, the analysis is just an extension of my enjoyment, a way to take part in the universe.
I will admit the prequel and sequel trilogies are disappointing. Some of that is because I’m no longer a ten year old.
For an example, after Empire and seeing Luke levitating objects, my first thought was why couldn’t he levitate himself? So my Luke Skywalker could fly.
Similarly, in Jedi when Luke is being chased by the rancor, he throws a rock to trigger the button. Why didn’t he use the force?
I’m sure there are fanwanks that could explain away these inconsistencies. That’s not the point. It amuses me to speculate on variations to the story.
Fair enough. I mean, I’m a fan of the movies, but I only ever read a couple of books - mostly “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” and the Han Solo one of the same era. I have not gotten an invested in the EU and haven’t tried to follow the tv shows, as good as I hear they are.
This is, I guess, a way for me to relive my childhood by digging in to the movies I fell in love with and exploring how I would improve the stories.
Well he does seem to enjoy getting reinflated manually.
I would say yes. Airplane is after all a farce. A sentient autopilot is legit.
Absolutely! My head spun trying to follow the plot.
Hard to judge the outcome of something not made, but it does sound superior in a number of ways.
But, as I noted upthread, all of that was only implied, at most, in the actual movie. We SW fans/nerds know all of that, but much of it was established in other sources (novels, comic books, later movies and TV shows, etc.) If all you have to go on (and what @Dinsdale is describing) is that first movie, none of that is necessarily clear.
Using the Force requires focus and concentration. Throwing a rock just requires throwing a rock. 
If you only see the movie, then all you know is that she’s a princess, and an important member of the Rebellion. And that’s all you need to know, because it’s a fairy tale, and important princesses are exactly what you expect to find in fairy tales.
In hindsight, the brevity of the opening crawl is actually better than I remember. Just from that, we know there’s an Empire and there was a Senate and some kind of rebellion against it. Rebels vs Evil Empire set up quite nicely with general audience knowledge to fill in obvious gaps. We don’t need a lot more information than that to set things up for the first movie.
By contrast, the Episode VII crawl was not great - who is the First Order? How are they related to the Empire? There’s a New Republic, I guess? But also some kind of separate Resistance? Who are they and how are they distinct from the Republic?
Also, in hindsight, whatever else is true of George Lucas as a director, he’s actually pretty good at filming and editing WWII style dogfights. Between this movie and “Red Tails”, he’s got that stuff locked down, even if inspired or lifted directly from other movies. None of the space dogfighting in the sequel trilogy resonate in nearly the same way.
Wow, looking back on this trailer, it looks incredibly corny. And the voiceover with howlers like “light years ahead of its time” and “a billion years in the making” make it even worse.
I guess they hadn’t come up with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…" yet.
Not just dogfights - he’s also good with fleet battles and large infantry engagements. At least with the OT, it feels like there’s some actual tactics in play in the major battles. Often, he does it with just a bit of radio chatter: “They’re targeting the medical frigates!” or “Concentrate all fire power on that Super Star Destroyer!” give the sense that there’s more to combat than just running at the other guy as fast as you can while shooting.
Granted, it’s not a super-high bar. The Battle of Hoth stands out from most modern fantasy/sci-fi* war movies for the way the defending force actually holds their fortified position, instead of immediately abandoning them in favor of a mass charge.
*Or even historical dramas: lookin’ at you in particular, Last Samurai
Yeah, it’s not good. And it doesn’t really do a good job of establishing, or even teasing at, the actual story; it’s mostly just a bunch of action shots from the film, in random order.
We were discussing our recent viewings with one of our kids, and they said something along the same lines - that each generation favors the trilogy of films that came out when THEY were young.
Fair but those were directed by other people. I was mainly looking at the first movie.
It may also be a generational thing. Action sequences, whether hand to hand or large scale battles, seem to be directed differently now than a generation or two ago. Even the LotR films suffer from this to some extent. There may be some relevant institutional skills and knowledge that have been lost as that generation retired.
When I was 15, three of my friends and I spent nearly every Sunday during the summer of 1978 watching three straight showings of Star Wars. Not a single one of those questions sprung to mind. Our enjoyment was entirely uncritical. I’m not sure if that is because I was only 15 or if nobody back then let those sorts of things bother their enjoyment of a good story.
Distance from WWII is almost certainly a part of it - Lucas grew up on WWII films, which were often based on real events and so were depicting real (more or less) tactics. And there would have been lots of experienced people in the film industry who had actually served, and brought their personal experience to the set. Subsequent US military actions usually didn’t involve significant air or sea opposition, and not a lot of grand scale infantry engagements, so you have both less representation of that stuff in newer media, and less experience with it behind the camera.
One of the most popular TV shows among my age group in 1977 was Baa Baa Black Sheep. Lucas’ audience was already well versed in dogfights.
Some of those generations are wrong
There[ was a British show called Wings about World War I pilots that was quite a hit too.
I noticed and complained about Chewie’s medalsnub in 1977. I think I even had a letter to the editor on that subject published in Starlog magazine.
I’d miss if I threw the rock.
Yes. But my comment was in response to @Dinsdale pronouncing her a “minor royal from some minor planet,” and that’s not the impression the movies give at all.