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Moichandising!
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Buck Rogers and Captain Video have also been mentioned in various Lucas bios.
You’re correct about Flash Gordon. In fact, Lucas had set out to make a Flash Gordon film, but couldn’t acquire the rights. Those went to Dino de Laurentiis instead, and resulted in the 1980 film starring Sam Jones.
The problem, of course, is not the pod race, but the setup. There’s nothing wrong with a good action sequence; that’s the whole point of adventure movies. They just had a ferociously terrible script that made the pod race seem very obviously stapled in.
Consider the action sequences in another Lucas-produced film, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” All are setup action sequences but the movie is so well written that they just flow along with the story. The truck chase scene, for instance, is a pretty stand-alone sequence, put into the movie entirely because it’s awesome. It adds nothing to the story; they could have had Indy capture the Ark at the airfield. But it flows perfectly from the preceding scenes and you don’t feel the movie saying “Okay, here’s an excuse for an action sequence… okay, here we go!”
Han Solo (Solo? Get it?) Luke Skywalker (Skywalker! Like he’s in space!) Darth Vader, Chewbacca et al. are all retarded names. Lando? Yoda? Tatooine? The fishy-lloking race being called the Mon Calamari? Come on.
The difference is that if the movie’s well written you don’t care. Names are different in that galaxy, no problem, as long as the movie’s awesome.
If the prequels hadn’t been bad movies, I am 100% confident you wouldn’t have really much cared about the names. But they WERE bad movies, in part because of many of the things you yourself point out - they’re simultaneously childish and without a sense of humour - and so all that stuff seems irritating.
Nah, that doesn’t fly. The only name I really have trouble accepting from the prequels is Dooku. The construction is too childish and too similar to “dooky” (made all the worse by my memories of the Disney Gummi Bears cartoon and “Dooky”, the orcs’ pet name for the villain, used to undermine his badass quotient). It’s just silly.
The other names are pretty standard for fantasy or space opera.
I’ll give you Mon Calamari, but as far as I can remember, they never actually used that name in the movies. For the rest, it may just be long familiarity, but none of those names strike me as particularly retarded. I really don’t get the complaint about Han’s last name, because at no point in the movie is he presented as a loner, or someone who works by himself. From the first moment he’s on screen, he’s sitting next to his co-pilot and partner. Aside from the 'droids, he’s the only major character who is introduced as having a preexisting relationship with another significant character.
To be strictly fair, not all human slavery has been American-style chattel slavery, either: in the movie it seems to be more like indentured labour with extreme prejudice, akin to 19th Century Russian serfdom.
I had no problem with the names in the original trilogy; ever since I saw the movies as a kid they’ve seemed pretty natural and also pretty appropriate, with all of the right sound symbolism and the kind of lightheartedness that tells you that you’re in a mythical adventure story. You can’t say that Luke Skywalker or Han Solo is sillier than, say, Doc Savage or Indiana Jones or Rusty Venture, and everything else (Chewbacca, Wedge Antilles, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lando Calrissian) is easy to pronounce in English and doesn’t sound awkward.
Compare those to Shmi, Watto, Padme Amidala, Nute Gunray, Qui Gon Jinn or even Mace Windu. (Or Senator Palpatine. I know that name comes from the original trilogy, but it’s virtually never heard in the films because it sounds silly. Or icky. We get no such courtesy in the prequels.) They’re all so intentionally alien that they don’t sound good to English-speaking ears. Some of them (like Dooku) have an inherently funny sound.
I particularly hate what the prequels have done with Darth(s). In the original trilogy, it was just a somewhat mysterious, abstract, assumed name with a menacing sound. THen “Darth” becomes a title (was this known in the original trilogies, or is it something Lucas invented later?) and all hell breaks loose. Pretty soon we have a bunch of evil dudes picking names that are the baddie equivalent of the recent slew of pseudo-latin mix-and-matchcorporate names. Sidious and Tyrannus are the new Altria, the new Lucent, the new Thrivent Financial, the new Accenture whatever-the-hell-that-is.
Now that I’m convinced that there are bad guys running around with names like Darth Tagonist or Darth Evolent or Darth Killventure or Darth Deathient, the magic’s gone.
Props to Vader for having better taste than that, though.
I think it was deemed to be a title as of the KotOR video games, but take that with a grain of salt.
It unfortunately ruins one of Alec Guinness’s lines in the first movie, which I just recently watched again. Vader: “When I left you I was but the learner, now I am the master.” Obi-Wan: “Only a master of evil, Darth!” At the time it was used as a first name, but after having it beaten into my head as a title, it just sounds weird now.
Those lines were already ruined long, long before the prequels. (The word is student, George).
True, but learner has a cadence to it that student doesn’t. It flows better and makes it more memorable.
I realize I’m going all Comic-Book-Guy (but I suppose we all are), but Anakin’s pod actually did bug the shit out of me. You accelerated by pushing two huge levers forward from above your head.
What happens when you accelerate forward? You get pushed backward. That pod’s design was impossible to use, midichlorians or not.
What always baffled me (and I liked the prequels better than most people) is what the Trade federation is. They’ve sent battleships to set up a blockade to prevent trade with Naboo, which is in the Republic. So the Republic sends two Jedi to negotiate. (And not, say, two accountants).
But isn’t the Trade Federation a part of the Republic too? They have a floating pod thing and representatives at the Republic counsel chambers. So why are they setting up a blockade against…themselves? And what / why exactly are they “trading” with themselves?
It would be like me having to “trade” office supplies with a co-worker and one day he wants me to pay for them, and when I refuse he locks the supply cabinet, so I call security.
I think the formalness of it suits Guinness’s character, addressing him by a title instead of a name. Like saying, “Only a master of evil, Sir!” And while the whole Vader = Anakin thing may have been backfilling, it doesn’t make sense for Obi Wan to be calling his former student by a first name that he never used when they were friends.
And I agree with pepper about “learner.” That’s always sounded weird and awkward to me, even when I was a kid.
There’s nothing weird about that. They’re all part of the Republic, but they’re still separate polities. The US and China are both part of the UN. If the US ever decided that it actually gave a shit about Tibet, we could start enacting trade sanctions against China. We might even attempt to enact a blockade (how, I have no idea), and there’d be nothing inherently contradictory about the fact that we both send members to the same political body.
I guess that makes sense.
Of course if, in your example, China showed up at the UN and said the US set up a blockade, and we claimed they had no proof, they’d probably be smarter than Queen Amidala and actually remember that there’s two Jedi in town that witnessed the whole thing.
I agree that, at the time of the original SW, “Darth” was being treated as a first name. As a fanwank, though, it’s not too incredible that Obi-Wan would use it as a formal title, a la “Only a master of evil, Baron!” or “Only a master of evil, Governor!”
“Pupil” would have been better than “learner,” and is also two syllables, FWIW.
I think everyone’s looking at this the wrong way. The problem with the prequels isn’t that there are plot holes or inconsistencies, it’s that the entire premises of the movies are just horseshit from the beginning. The Clone Wars and the Trade Federation and six-year-old Anakin Skywalker are stupid, boring plots to make a Star Wars movie about.
People are arguing about the minutiae of Anakin’s pod design and the politics of the Trade Federation and the word “learner” - I think that’s missing the big picture. The big picture is that the prequels WERE NOT COOL. There was nothing about them that was cool. As I said before they were both too childish and too serious at the same time. They lacked all the swashbuckling bravado and self-deprecating humor of Harrison Ford in the original movies and the chemistry between him and Leia, the supporting characters were stupid, and the bad guys weren’t cool enough. That’s why they were shitty movies, not because the design of Anakin’s pod was unrealistic.
Ben Kenobi as Ben Stone! Suddenly I’m hearing Michael Moriarty saying this line…
I loved it 'cause it’s my last name. 
What bugged me about Phantom, along with most of what the OP says (which was hilarious, btw, kudos to you sir!): I was expecting the trilogy to focus much more on Obi-Wan vs. Vader, and Kenobi was almost a non-entity here. You have a guy like Ewan MacGregor – great casting, does a good Alec Guinness impression, and he could easily have been the cocky Han Solo-esque young version of Ben, someone who tried and failed to get control over his charge. So why not hire an older Anikan? Instead they focused on Jake Lloyd, who’s not exactly at Henry Thomas, Haley Joel Osment or even Drew Barrymore levels of acting here. Craziness.
It’s a classic writer’s mistake: starting the story too early. The trick is to cut to the chase. Lucas was too self-indulgent, and no one had the nerve to say him nay.