On the one hand, the original movie has been referred to as simply “Star Wars” for most of my life, and everyone knew exactly what movie we meant. On the other, when I went to see Rise of Skywalker, we told the ticket-seller at the theater “Two for Star Wars, please”, and they knew exactly which movie we meant, there, too. And the opening crawl for every one of the movies has started with the big screen-filling “STAR WARS” logo, so if that’s proof that it was the name of the first movie, then it was the name of every one of the movies.
Ewoks were, in fact, cool, for their target audience. We all eventually grew out of loving them, but for an eight-year-old, they were great. So they worked as they were supposed to (successfully enough that they were able to make two whole movies just about Ewoks). Jar-Jar was supposed to fill the same niche, but I think that even eight-year-olds found him annoying.
I was going to post last night that I think the Ewoks movies are the two best additions to the Star Wars franchise apart from the OT itself.
But I know that’s just nostalgia. Rewatching one of them as an adult some years back, I have to admit they were made-for-TV grade at best (and I believe that was literally true, that they were made for TV). So perhaps I should say they were “the additions to the Star Wars franchise best suited to their target audience.”
Anecdotally, I think it was actually the opposite. A lot of kids actually really liked Jar Jar and tend to defend him in these conversations these days… which is a bit surreal.
I didn’t see Clone Wars until early 2020 so it certainly didn’t help my appreciation. Of course the Darth JarJar story theory may also play in the opposite direction.
On the subject of tracking through hyperspace, I thought it was established in IV that a tracking device was installed on the Millennium Falcon, and Tarkin was quite concerned about Vaders plan to let them go, and Leia guessed that they let them get away.
Maybe I misunderstood the debate but tracking through hyperspace is established cannon.
Now I only saw VII - IX once each , and have watched all the others multiple times and agree that at least I-III had an overall story arc linking everything together, and yeah there were some execution problems , bad dialog and inconsistencies but enjoyed them.
VII - IX was just a hopeless mess, with many execution problems and the jump skipping shit was just really really awful. If they flushed the last 3 films away I would not care.
FWIW I am 49 so I am of the original release vintage and had nightmares about Dath Vaders face for years.
I actually caught part of Ewok Adventure on TV back in…I guess when it first came out, 1984. This was the first official Star Wars thing I had seen outside of the movies, and it was on TV. Mind was blown, in a good way. Never got to see The Battle for Endor.
So sorry it took them until recently to bring us stuff like The Clone Wars and The Mandalorian. I would have really liked good Star Wars content on TV back in the 80’s and 90’s.
The FX for spaceships was a little pricey for TV back then. A story about characters who didn’t have spaceships was exactly what you wanted for a cheap Star Wars movie.
The important distinction is the tracking device - Tarkin needed physical access to the Millenium Falcon in order to track it.* Without that device, there’s no way to know where a ship is going when it enters hyperspace. This has been an important plot point for a lot of Star Wars stories. When the Rebels evacuate Hoth, its a big deal that the Empire stop them before they can hit hyperspace, because once they jump to lightspeed, the Empire can’t find them anymore. Same with when the Falcon blasts out of Mos Eisley.
*Presumably, the tracking device doesn’t actually track through hyperspace - it just sends out a signal when the ship drops back into regular space.
Yeah I assumed there was a tracking device on the rebels ships somewhere, and didn’t think much more about it. The thing they went to deactivate on the First Order ship was the device that picks up the signal from the tracker. You would need a special receiver/tracker as the signal would be something fancy so it couldn’t be detected in the target vessel and hence the comment about them being on a piece of string, ie something connected at both ends.
As to why not just find the transmitter in the rebel ship I’d guess it would be considered too hard to find, but as they had info on where to find the receiver on the FO ship they could head there , plus for reasons of plot , in its losest possible sense as it would be more exciting to infiltrate the enemy ship.
I presumed, in The Last Jedi, that there was just such a tracker and that one character had to be a First Order spy, probably Rose due to some of the completely insane things she did. That seemed like an interesting twist and several things appeared to confirm it, but nothing so smart occurred.
First, although I’ve been fairly general in referring to “Disney” in order not to personalize anything and because I dont’ want to turn this into an attack, only a very few people at Disney could pull rank on Kathleen Kennedy. Moreover, at first it appeared that her methods were working. I didn’t much care for The Force Awakens, but it definitely satisfied the audience, performed very well in theaters, and achieved a rather absurd amount of undeserved praise from critics. Rogue One, thought it may have been chopped up in post, is still a good movie with some interesting ideas, and takes things in a different direction. That earned Kennedy, and her leadership team, a lot of influence and that tends to stick in the film industry. The problem is that she wasn’t delivering thereafter. Every film had worse performance compared to expectations, but the reasons for the decline couldn’t be fixed after-the-fact.
Should this have ever happened? No. But it did. It happened because the poeple involved didn’t really care for the storytelling: in so far as anyone can determine Abrams, Johnson, and Kennedy didn’t especially care about a quality narrative. Abrams was just delivering fanservice on-demand. Johnson wanted to shake things up because he likes doing that. Kennedy apparently just wanted to stick to a formula like glue.
Now, you say that not caring about the legacy would be a colossal stupidity on the part of Disney.
Well, yes and no.
I see no reason to expect the execs to really care about the trivia of lore. Heck, I certainly don’t care. I’ve rolled my eyes at the fanboys’ love of Timothy Zahn’s trilogy, and the obnoxious minutia they obsess over. I’d much rather have a general good story that just makes sense in the context of Star Wars than something which gets all the details right but is fundamentally un-interesting. However, execs don’t care. They care about profit; they’re paid to care to about profit, and to plan for that. They probably don’t especially care about Star Wars and aren’t interested in crafting a good story from it. It’sd literally not in their job description.
Likewise, the idea that Abrams or Johnson can just “appoint” themselves the Star Wars Czar is merely pointless fantasizing. The only person in a position to be, or decide who can do that, was Kathleen Kennedy. I mean that literally, not in any sense of emotion: she is the one person with the authority to approve a narrative structure, and she had full authority to do it. She doesn’t have to come up with a single idea herself, but she is the person with the power to see that it gets done.
While “someone on this ship is a traitor and planted a tracking beacon” is definitely something they should have considered as their first conclusion, the most likely traitor would have been someone who wasn’t a main character, was never seen on screen, and didn’t even have an action figure. I mean, that was a big ship, with a lot of people on it, most of whom aren’t major characters. Enough so that it should have been SOP to assume that there would inevitably be at least one enemy spy among them, and to reject as unrealistic any plan that depended on being able to hyper away unfollowed.