He no nuts, he’s crazy!
Dude, every year the cons have swarms of women wearing Slave Leia outftis, there was an ep of Friends about Slave Leia, she also shows up on shows like Chuck and so forth. There really is a phenom here, it’s not just my personal tastes.
Not much on that incest angle, though. But I guess that’s your thing.
That’s all after-the-fact though. You can’t credit “Lucas’s genius” there when clearly all he was doing was calling back to pulpy tales and pin-ups ala Princess of Mars. There’s no indication he was purposefully plucking some sort of cultural chord.
I’d LOVE to watch Princess Leia being condescending to a full-sized Wookie.
“Hey! Gimme back my hat! I NEED that hat! Here, have a granola bar! Yummy, huh?”
(I haven’t watched it with sound, but it CAN"T be any better than without sound.)
Yes, but what kind of bum deal was that for Obi Wan? Why didn’t he get to be a ghost as a young man?
The film is 30 years old, for crying out loud.
Everyone knows it always was, at its heart, a kids’ movie. A kids’ movie.
Stop looking at it through Masterpiece Theatre Citizen Kane Edition Goggles and maybe you’d appreciate it a little more.
I agree with this.
But, it can still be slammed for the fighting teddy bears, a flaw that was evident when it first came out.
The whole trilogy was a call back to pulpy trends. Sandworms out of Dune. Blasters. The bar. Lucas was the first person to do so without shame. Not to mention his explicit use of the hero’s journey as structure.
Agreed.
That’s such a terrible argument only give voice by the poor state of the worst children’s entertainment. As if children’s movies shouldn’t be held to a *higher *standard.
The Incredibles was “a kids movie!” and it was also arguably the best superhero movie of all time.
Audience is no excuse. Quality is quality and flaws are flaws.
I disagree.
There are obvious and definitive different standards applied to a kids’ movie, and an adults’ movie.
Ewoks=kids’ movie. Kids LOVED the Ewoks=success!
Simple plot=kids’ movie. Kids easily followed and understand the plot=success!
The film was, and still is, an outright success (ie did/does NOT suck) based completely and entirely on the predication of its target audience.
Why would that not be true?
Glad to hear it. By the way if John Carter had been more true to pulpy trends, it might have sold more tickets. Especially how Dejah Thoris was over-dressed.
Since you brought the meme up, it’s also assumed that stormtrooper armor isn’t intended as a protective measure. It’s designed to draw blaster fire to protect actual high-value targets. (And maybe trigger the enemy’s internal kill count limiter. Zapp Brannigan is actually an Imperial.)
I disagree with your idea that kids LOVED ewoks = success.
I was a kid when the first trilogy came out. The target audience? It was me.
I also disagree that Ewoks = kid movie, although not completely. If you look at the first two movies, there were very few cuddly creatures thst kids would relate to. I think Lucas put them together as adult-themed movies, and realized a bit too late (i never understood why) that kids were the ones that would be buying star wars crap or asking mom and dad for star wars crap. But you can’t take a plastic R2D2 to bed, at least not like a fluffy Ewok.
The plots in all three SW movies IV,V,VI were straight-forward, but the dialog wasn’t. It may have been sci-fi standard, but as a kid, I had a hard time following everything with the made-up names, planets, star systems, etc. As an adult, it is easy to follow, but as an 8 year-old, not all the time.
However, as a kid, I remember thinking that ROTJ was not a great movie. And the Ewoks were one of the big reasons why. Even as a kid, I understood that suspending reality was necessary for some science fiction, but the ewoks were an insult to everyone, including kids. We could tell that there were “little people” in fuzzy bear costumes. They looked fake, they moved like earth-bound “little people”, and they were thrown in so Lucas could make lots of money on stuffed Ewoks. Imdon’t think he made as much as he wanted.
Lucas, it turns out, has no idea what little kids will like or relate to. If you think he does, take a look at Jar-Jar Binks and explain that to me. He wasn’t cute. He wasn’t fun. Kids and adults loathed JJB. He’s not a punch-line for nothing.
Finally, the plot, even though it was simple, did not mean it had to be a kid’s movie. Adults can easily enjoy a kids movie if done well.
A perfect example of this is The Incredibles, as dr_drench correctly pointed out. You can’t give Lucas a pass for making a crapola movie because kids were going to watch it. In fact, ROTJ was probably watched by more young adults than anything, since they were the kids thst grew up loving the first two Star Wars episodes. He should have made ROTJ at least on par with the first two. The third movie seemed like a money grab, a lazy effort to cash in on the franchise. I din’t think it is fair to say “it’s a good kid’s movie, so it’s ok that it wasn’t very good.” First, i think that premise is wrong, which is something Pixar has proven over the years. Second, ROTJ was a weak movie, regardless of who the target audience was.
Yub yub
Did it really take 67 posts for this universal, utterly lame handwaving excuse to appear? It’s usually the first thing hauled out when someone utters any criticism whatever of the movies.
“Halt discussion! Kids movie! No criticism!”
Apparently there’s nothing - nothing – in the canon movies that this doesn’t excuse. Even were they utterly different in every detail than they exist now. Even if new details, no matter how awful, were added. Nothing.
Jesus.
No one who saw RotJ in theatres has a right to feel disappointed at Episode One. They were both entertaining but flawed rehashes of better moments. Both jam together adult elements (Falseflag politics+ Racial disharmony in the Phantom Menace and brutal gangsters+slavery in ROTJ) with childish toy-adverts. Both have a tacked on race scene, prepostously stupid guards and a low-tech race defeating an advanced army (though at least EP1 had a reason for it).
A New Hope was a fantastic and ground-breaking retelling of the hero’s journey, The Empire Strikes Back was a genre Masterpiece.
That being said, I’ve enjoyed every Star Wars except Attack of the Clones.
I alway thought (and still do) that the Death Star was the original that was mostly damaged, but they were able to repair what remained even though it did look completely destroyed after Star Wars.
To me Luke and Leia being siblings was a last minute addition because Lucas put himself in a corner with Yoda’s "there is another’. Rather than come up with a new character, he just pulled that out of his ass.
I understand I got a bit side-tracked by a response to my original post, which stated “at its heart” the film is/was a kids’ movie.
My main contention in this thread is that the film is 30 years old, and difficult to look at objectively. There are many movies from the late '70s and early '80s that I had very fond recollections of, but having viewed a couple of them recently, I almost can’t even finish watching them, thinking “Wow. I can’t believe I thought this was great.”
Beyond that, my initial feeling was that perhaps the level of scrutiny some are levelling at RotJ would be better suited for films that were/are ostensibly more serious endeavours, a la Dune or perhaps Blade Runner. It’s a space adventure with children in mind, as a large part of its 1983 audience, and should be looked at as such.
PG rated kids movies?