The name they use for the movie in marketing it to the general public isn’t the name of the movie?
The name everyone knows it by and refers to it as, isn’t the name of the movie?
Just for fun, I pulled up a number of reviews of ROTJ, which was released in 1983, two years after this change you mention. If they changed the name of Star Wars to ‘A New Hope’ in 1981, the reviewers for the major publications surely were aware of this, right?
Nope.
Or at least if they were, the phrase ‘New Hope’ is absent from every review I read. And pretty much everyone was comparing ROTJ with its two predecessors.
That’s certainly an absolutely valid way of thinking about it. An equally valid way of looking at it is that the name of the movie is the title that’s shown on the screen at the beginning of the film. I don’t have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. Like I said, I thought you were complaining about the change made to the actual film when “Episode IV” was added to the opening crawl. I’m less interested in what they put on movie posters.
Under the title, there was a crawl, where it told you that this was Episode IV. And under “Episode IV,” it did indeed say “A New Hope.”
And there was no messaging to say, “oh by the way, the big ‘Star Wars’ isn’t the name of the movie anymore, it’s this way smaller title at the top of the crawl.”
So you’re saying that they changed the name of the movie, but didn’t bother to make it clear to anyone that that’s what they were doing, and all the studio’s references identifying “Star Wars” as the name of the movie were merely marketing. They changed the name of the movie, but didn’t bother to make that clear to anyone for nearly two decades.
You’re doing some serious violating of the First Rule of Holes.
I have mixed feelings about the sequels, but I don’t see what retconning them would do. So little happened that nothing will hamper other stories. I guess if you want to use the original three you would have to set it before the sequels, and if you wanted to use Palpatine, it’ll be even more absurd, but both of those seem like small constraints.
Also, I don’t think it is accurate to say they didn’t have a plan for the sequels. I think they had a plan, but it was the blandest, most boring plan possible - remake the original trilogy with new characters, but Rian threw a monkey wrench (imo intentionally) into that plan. He did his job of remaking Empire, but set it up so the third one couldn’t just be a remake of Jedi. He killed the Palpatine retread, didn’t freeze Poe to give an excuse for a Jabba’s palace side mission, and tried to cut off the Kylo Ren redemption arc by having Rey try and fail at it already. I was somewhat disappointed that they just tried to remake Jedi anyway.
Think of it like “acoustic guitar”. Yes guitars were just known as “guitars” since men wore pantyhoes. But later it becomes unclear and people just want clarity. “Episode IV” is clear, “A New Hope” is clear, “Star Wars” is ambiguous and can lead to misunderstandings.
Agreed. One thing I’ve noticed about good fictional universes is that they are usually much bigger than the piece we see. It’s a challenge for the movie format to allude to this wider universe, given a standard 90 minute runtime (books and video games have more freedom to do this without wasting time).
But nonetheless “Episode IV” speaks to that kind of mindset of us peeking in on a piece of a bigger story and a bigger world, even if it was not something Lucas thought to put on the initial run.
But it wasn’t just remaking the originals that JJ was tasked with, it was whole-heartedly embracing the stupid fanboy bullshit interpretation of everything wrong with Star Wars. Ewoks, Han shooting second, politics, and moral ambiguity are out. Even though none of those things are what was actually wrong with the prequels or Special Editions, and there is nothing wrong with the original version of ROTJ at all other than the recycling of the Death Star plot from the first movie. The pandering to stupid fanboy bullshit that people who actually have taste in movies don’t care about would have excised Ewoks from ROTJ if it had the power to do so, because that group has always performatively hated them and failed to understand either who movies are for or what the function of Ewoks in the story is.
I think anyone who hates Ewoks is kind of missing a central point of Star Wars. In the face of huge firepower and intimidating technology, the power of the “human”/“primitive furry animal” spirit is even more powerful. Luke doesn’t drop the bomb into the Death Star until he turns the computer off and trusts the Force as Obi-Wan’s voice guides him to do. I’m not sure if there was enough emphasis on the more mystical aspects of the Force in the ST or if Rey was just not enough of a protagonist to command the screen the way Luke did. In any event, the ST is done and it’s time to move on. The Mandalorian has done an excellent job of carrying the torch and telling new stories from the galaxy a long long time ago.
Yeah, but there was still something endearing about it. Maybe people didn’t take this adventures in space story THAT seriously yet. There was no talk of canon in the old days. Somewhere along the line I think it got too serious. The sequels have some fun moments, but not that many. I dunno. The Mandalorian strikes the right balance. Each season runs 10 hours—enough for five feature films. They’ve shown it can be done. It’s not that Star Wars isn’t relevant; they just need to find interesting ways to tell new stories.
Well, they were planning to cook and eat Han. Pretty hardcore creatures there.
I agree with Lucas’ decision to switch from wookies, as wookies wouldn’t work for the “mighty technological empire defeated by primitives” theme. After all, Chewbacca could fly a spaceship. Also, there was a claim it was easier to costume and cast small Ewoks than find a shitload of really tall people to be Wookies. (Peter Mayhew was 7’ 3") Maybe hire a couple of NBA teams?
Gee, I wonder if that might just have been a metaphor for an imperialist superpower being outsmarted militarily by a smaller and not-as-well-equipped guerilla force defending their forest homeland against said outsiders trying to impose their hegemony on them.
Good thing there hadn’t been any major recent conflicts in American history that such a thing might have paralleled, or this would just be awkward.
Gee, I thought the Empire was an allegory for Nazi Germany.
Are you implying that the North Vietnamese(fuzzy teddy bears) supported by Communist China and the Soviet Union were the good guys, and The USA has become the Evil Empire by Return of the Jedi. Allegorically speaking?
I wouldn’t be the first person to make that comparison, and given Lucas’ known political leanings, it’s hardly a stretch to compare the ROTJ Empire to the US and the Ewoks to the VC.
The Ewoks hew much closer to how America has traditionally seen the Viet Cong. They are an indigenous population responding to an imperial power encroaching on their home. The use of traps and snares by the Ewoks recalls the portrayal of jungle warfare in Vietnam. Lucas is on record about wanting to create the Ewoks as a fuzzy, furry version of the Viet Cong.
This is a radical and subversive notion. Return of the Jedi took one of America’s most hated enemies and turned them into a mass-market commodity. At the same time that more adult-oriented pop culture was mediating the legacy of the Vietnam War in films like Uncommon Valor or The Twilight Zone , Lucas was selling a teddy bear version of the Viet Cong to an entire generation of youngsters.
It’s been a long time since I read it too, but I always just interpreted Thrawn as the Star Wars version of Sherlock Holmes. This example you cite is of course particularly absurd, but as an archetype it wasn’t that far out of the realm of plausibility. I’d handwave that away as a lazy piece of writing more than a intrinsic flaw in the character…but yeah, lazy writing. Didn’t spoil the character and story for me.
Agreed, it’s an amazing fanwank that fixes SO many things. Of course neither Rian Johnson or JJ Abrams were smart enough to include this correction. I stand by the argument that adding that technology was a galactically stupid bit of story but this is a really artful resolution to it. That said, last time Star Wars tried to science up some shit we got the Midichlorians so maybe its for the best that they didn’t try.
It’s not as good as the other fanwank IMO because this reads like a solvable engineering problem. It’s like if they can come up with a new shield tech that works with the tracking tech, suddenly you’re back where you started. Also, shields are only so strong in the SW universe. So ramming with a capitol ship seems like it should always work unless shields are very overpowered. Making this a issue of some kind of quantum entanglement is a thorny issue that operates on the margins of scientific understanding works really well in future stories. Basically this makes it so that both the tracking tech and the Holdo maneuver are both fundamentally limited by physics, which is kinda cool.
I disagree. For this to be true you have to assume that every exec at Disney is colossally stupid. They just paid a fortune for the most prized piece of IP in the world. To think that they didn’t care about the legacy and overall narrative arc make absolutely no sense at all. It is a hypothesis that goes out of it’s way to forgive Abrams and Johnson and lay it all at the feet of some cartoonish Uncle Pennybags. If in fact, Abrams or Johnson truly felt they were at sea without a map, they should have been ringing alarm bells. Or, if they had even a hint of moxie, they should have filled the void and appointed themselves as the SW Feige. Disney, Iger, Kennedy, Abrams and Johnson all collectively committed malpractice together.
The biggest problem was with the IP. Mara Jade was created by Timothy Zahn. Disney was not going to cut him in on any of those royalties and licensing fees. We’ve seen some EU characters and stories included in drips and drabs but most of the big things (Maul for example) was created by Lucas first. The entire relationship between Lucasfilm and the EU has never really been tested in court AFAIK because Lucas was largely supportive of it, but Disney wasn’t about to gamble making the next Luke Skywalker a character they didn’t own unambiguously.
Meh, I think this is much ado about nothing. Certainly the OT wasn’t a bastion of diversity but they DID make Lando a major character and a protagonist. There’s actually not a lot of important characters in the OT. It’s really just Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Lando and the droids. Those are really the only humanoids that any casual fan will remember. 25% of the human cast is black…which for the 80s feels pretty okay. All the Imperials are white (or masked), but I’d say it would have been more problematic if they happened to be diverse. Note all the bad guys are human too, but again they only really name check 3 villains, Vader, Tarkin and the Emperor. Maybe I’m forgetting people or I’m cherry picking but I think the criticism has always been somewhat overblown. If you’re pointing out that the extras aren’t diverse, that’s probably more accurate, but them having Lando as one of the very few main characters never seems to get acknowledged.