I just assumed Luke and Johnny Cash have the same tailor.
It wasn’t meant to be any kind of all-encompassing explanation. Just a thought. I vividly remember how I felt after I saw The Phantom Menace for the first time in the theater after the long wait. I had mixed feelings, but I liked it enough for what it was. There was a massive backlash though, so to try to understand that I reflected on my own feelings and realized it was partly just that I wasn’t a kid anymore, and that 8 year old me would have had a different reaction.
As I said this is not a comment on whether any criticism is valid, just that I think it’s a mistake to totally ignore the “we all loved these movies as children uncritically, and now we are adults with a vastly different perspective” factor in these discussions.
I wasn’t trying to “win” any sort of debate, just add a relevant thought.
Only the episode of Disney Gallery that addressed the Luke episode from last year’s The Mandalorian appearance. It’s S02E02 on Disney+. I am assuming they used the same process, it sure sounds like they did.
Well, that’s certainly a definitive cite. Though it does appear that for the Mandalorian finale, they did use Hamill quite a bit, for facial capture and live action motion capture as well. Maybe none of what he did showed up directly on screen, but it was the basis for a lot of the CGI.
You’re not totally wrong, but I don’t think it’s the whole explanation. There’s a lot of media that I absolutely loved as a kid that doesn’t do anything for me as an adult. Getting home after school to watch the GI Joe cartoon was a major part of my childhood. I thought Transformers were the coolest thing, ever. As an adult, I don’t have any emotional investment in these IPs at all, not even the versions I grew up with.
Star Wars is different. I can watch the original film, and I’m almost as fully invested as I was when I was six. Very, very few other things I loved as a kid can do that.
Plus, it’s worth remembering that the original film wasn’t considered a kids film - it was a nostalgia piece for adults who grew up with Buck Rogers serials. It got cover stories in major magazines like Time, and was up for a Best Picture Oscar. Very serious men in tweed jackets talked earnestly about it on PBS, and brought terms like “monomyth” and the works of Joseph Campbell into the mainstream.
To me it was a lot weirder that Grogu was wearing the same potato sack he had all through the Mandalorian, specially if he was expected to do jedi fu.
Well my first line in the post you responded to was “It wasn’t meant to be any kind of all-encompassing explanation.”
The droids were for the kids though. The toys, the immense amount of toys. Things in the movies that were probably specifically designed so that toys could be made of them? C3P0s cereal? The arcade games? Remember that all movie criticism of those days was adults in newspapers or as you say on PBS. There was no RottenTomatoes, so that’s all we’ll see from the media at the time. There was not much news media meant to be geared towards kids back then.
The droids were for kids? I don’t really see a strong argument for that. Famously, they were inspired by the comic relief characters in Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress. As a kid at the time, I remember mostly being annoyed by C3PO, although R2 was, obviously, cool.
Other than that, I’m mostly talking about the first film, and how that was received. Most of the really crazy marketing stuff didn’t come about until the third film - that’s when you got stuff like C3PO cereal, and stuff being changed in the film based on projected toy sales. There were toy sales before that, absolutely, but nobody expected them to be as huge as they were, which is how Lucas was able to get the toy rights from the studio so easily.
Okay, but that’s not really relevant to my point. There wasn’t “kids news media,” but there was just generic “kids media,” and it didn’t generate earnest debates on PBS about cultural anthropology. Nobody was talking about universal narrative themes in Sid and Marty Kroft shows. Star Wars was widely perceived as something adults would be interested in, not as primarily kiddie fare.
Well as a kid in the early 80s, myself, my brother and all of the people my age loved Star Wars. I cannot remember a single adult that cared at all about those movies. My parents certainly didn’t. I don’t think they’ve ever seen them honestly.
I was a kid at the time, so I’m sure that affects my perception, but this idea that Star Wars was meant only for adults seems pretty strange. I have never heard that suggested before this conversation. I’m not saying that they were only for kids or primarily for kids, but to suggest that it was some sort of surprise to Lucas and the studio that kids seemed to like it seems hard to believe. I mean wasn’t Lucas’s deal to control all merchandising in lieu of a higher paycheck due to how much he felt he could get from selling toys?
Again all of this came from me just trying to add a thought to the conversation. None of this is about The Book of Boba Fett anymore, so we can drop this tangent. Nobody has to “win” as far as I’m concerned.
I think its interesting cause I also don’t remember my parents caring about Star Wars {77}…but if you look at the lines of people to see it, it seems to be mostly teenagers and young adults*. Siskel and Ebert raved of course, but i seem to recall that was for the groundbreaking SFX.
*Which is kinda weird because as stated, Lucas was trying to evoke old serials, thrown in with a lot of clever classic movie shots and such.
Next week, Boba reveals he spent the last two episodes making friends with Han Solo and CGI-Solo also joins them in their fight.
That’s the part that annoyed me. “You want him to jump? How about getting him an outfit that doesn’t bind his legs up?!?”
I mean, we know intellectually that he probably has legs, but have we ever seen them?
I never said they it was only for adults, I said it wasn’t a “kiddie movie.” The perception of the original film at the time was that it was something that took a childish subject matter (“pulp” science fiction, or even just science fiction in general) and handled it with an adult sensibility. The film was widely popular with adults, and was reviewed and discussed as a film adults would be interested in seeing. It’s perception as something that’s primarily geared towards children came later, as the films became more franchise oriented.
It’s cool. I’m not trying to “win,” either, I’m just having a conversation on a topic that interests me. If I’m boring you, feel free to stop replying, but maybe the topic’s interesting to someone else.
The young adults in those crowds would have been children at the tail end of the serial era. And a lot of serials ended up being re-edited into TV shows for decades later. The original 1939 Flash Gordon had been re-shown as a TV show as recently as 1965.
FTR, Roger Ebert absolutely raved about Star Wars when it premiered, and not just about the special effects. Here’s the opening paragraph of his review:
I never said it was a “kiddie movie”, but you said:
I was simply making a point that my personal perspective on the original trilogy was affected by the fact that I was a kid then, and that my personal perspective on the subsequent trilogies was unavoidably affected by not being a kid anymore. I still enjoyed all of the prequels and sequels, but I did not expect them to make me feel the way I felt watching the OT as a kid. That was the entirety of my original post to this thread.
I also didn’t say you were boring, I just didn’t want this thread to be derailed by a tangent that started from me just trying to share a bit of personal perspective, that’s all.
FTR, the series has derailed itself. Or as someone on Twitter said, “I guess we arn’t doing the Book of Boba Fett anymore and just doing “The Star Wars””
Well it’s like I shared earlier, it was from the very beginning described as “The Mandalorian part 2.5”, so the show didn’t change from its course, this was the course. You may not like that, but I’m pretty sure this was what they intended from the jump.
The sequel trilogy started falling apart story-wise pretty quickly, but that doesn’t really affect any future plans, so I don’t see why Disney should say “oh those didn’t happen.” Why bother?
Want to use Rey as a character? Go ahead, who cares that there were huge plot holes in “Rise of Skywalker”? You can still use the character. Don’t want to? Then don’t, but that doesn’t require doing anything to the sequels.
The notion of “canon” continuity is important to some fans. To Disney it’s not.
Given that - the pacing is still strange. Flashbacks that so far haven’t really have any payoff. A fairly sudden switch off of that character’s development to return to D’jin, but stuffed inside that is Grogu with Luke line which has its own Grogu flashback stuffed inside it. And a Vanth aside on the way out. All of which is more engaging than the Fett storyline had been to date.
Yeah I won’t argue about how well it has been executed, but there seems to be a contingent of SW fans that think they suddenly changed streams mid filming due to complaints or something, but that’s not what happened.
Yeah, there’s basically zero chance that they’ll “redo” the sequel trilogy, but they’ve still got all those “Legends” books and comics in print, and people are still buying them. It’s always a big deal when they pull something from them and bring it back into continuity. How long until they just start putting out new Legends content? I’m betting an animated version of Timothy Zahn’s Heirs of Empire series would be a big hit on Disney+. I’d sure as fuck watch it.