To everyone who hates the Star Wars prequels, how would YOU have done it better?

Cafe Society
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My treatment violates the rules somewhat (though I do allow Jar-Jar to exist, if only to get killed off as a faceless extra :D), but I’ll throw it out here for you guys to read (and perhaps mock).

I also decided to go the whole hog and tip a few sacred cows while I was at it.

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This thread has been really fun. In fact, I’m rewatching episode V now (best of the bunch).

Tell me, how the HELL does episode V Yoda compare AT ALL to episodes II and III Yoda? He’d been training the Jedi for 800 years, yet he aged like hell over just 20 or so?

George Lucas brought a lot to the art of the cinematic, but has increasingly become a hack (don’t get me started on Indian Jones 4!)

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Thematically, ESB Muppet Yoda is quite clearly modeled after the Zen Master who never fights. He’s an absolute expert at it, but he’s the kind of guy, who if someone is foolish enough to attack him, wipes the floor with his opponent using a single move. For him to be leaping around like some kind of toddler loaded up on all the crack, Jolt Cola, and Pixie Sticks you can cram into someone who weighs less than 100 pounds, as he does in one of the prequels is, well, stoopid.

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“What do you mean we cloned the only guy in the galaxy who won’t shoot a droid and can’t shoot straight?”

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And is unable to duck, so he’s always banging his head on something.

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Arguably, after the edits, the original trilogy didn’t have that, either.

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I haven’t read the rest of the thread yet, so sorry if this is repeating:

  • Tone down the funny alien voices.
  • Make the low-level villains (battle droids, etc.) more threatening and less comical
  • Get rid of the whole midiclorian thing. The Force doesn’t have a scientific explanation.
  • Make Anakin older, and closer in age to Padme
  • Make Anakin an actual “pilot”, not a “podracer”
  • Ditch the virgin birth thing. His father can be some nameless guy who died when
  • Anakin was one, just not the “OMG he was conceived by the Holy Spirit!!1!!” thing
  • Less backwards talk for Yoda. Yoda does not always talk backwards! Especially when he’s being serious. (Non-backwards Yoda lines, from memory: “He is too old, too old to begin the training.” “You must unlearn what you have learned.” “That is why you fail.” “You will be.” “You will destroy all for which they have fought and suffered.” “There is another Skywalker.”) Prequel Yoda was like a parody of the original trillogy Yoda.
  • No pod race. The amount of time spent on an action sequence should be in proportion to how much it does to advance the plot.
  • Rewrite the god-awful sappy dialog between Anakin and Padme
  • Don’t call him Annie
  • Make Anakin less cute in Ep. 1.
  • Anakin should have a chip on his shoulder about what a crummy childhood he had (he was a slave for god’s sake!) and this should contribute directly to his fall
  • Focus on a couple main villains, not the revolving door of bad guys (Maul, Greivous, Dooku, etc.)
  • For humor, rely more on things like banter between characters (like Han and Leia had), not things that pull us out of the story like fart jokes or lengthy slapstick sequences (C-3PO with the wrong head).
  • No need to work Boba Fett into it. He’s a minor character who was better left mysterious. It’s bad enough that Extended Universe is so obsessed with him.
  • Chewy didn’t need to be in it either. The Galaxy is big, damn it, not all the major characters from the original trillogy need to have run into each other years before.
  • C-3PO being built by Anakin also seems needlessly coincidental.
  • Hiding Luke on Anakin’s home planet is stupid. Really, you think he wouldn’t check whether you gave the boy to his own uncle (or step-uncle or whatever Owen ended up being)? It’s like the whole plan was based on the idea “They’ll never expect us to do something this stupid!” Since Luke is already established to be from Tatooine, Anakin gets to be from somewhere else.
  • Make Anakin’s fall less abrupt. I know they had a few forshadowing events like killing Dooku and killing the Sand People who killed his mother, but Anakin still went from “Good guy most of the time” to “Perfectly content to kill numerous children” in no time flat.
  • Actually, there shouldn’t be kid Jedis at all. The Jedi taking force-sensitive kids to raise them is fine, teaching them Jedi philosophy and even a few uses of their powers is fine. Making them into minature Jedi warriors even though they’re eight years old or whatever, that’s just lame.
  • Yoda should fight almost exclusively with his mind and the Force. Not with his crazy little-green-man kung-fu moves.

I’m sure there’s a lot more I’m forgetting . . .

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NoOoOoOoOo! Don’t get rid of the incest! Instead, add an “Ace-Ventura-Realizes-Einhorn-is-a-man” type of crying game scene.

That’d be so much more fun :smiley:

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Palpatine probably needed a spy to help him get more information on the Senate and other planets. What if it turned out the spy was Jar Jar? His career path as shown in the Lucas films would have been perfect for it.

This way when the Jedi find out in Ep. 3, we can have a nice, bloody, crowd-pleasing Jar Jar dismemberment.

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One big one that I don’t think has been mentioned too much: Don’t rely on extra-movie plot!

I love the Extended Universe. I love the novels, the cartoons, Wookieepedia, I love digging through all that stuff. Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars is among the coolest cartoons I’ve ever seen. But don’t write the damn movies assuming people will have seen that! Sure, if you watch it, you know Grievous is this huge badass who killed a ton of Jedi and was only stopped because Windu injured his organic heart/lungs (I forget which). But if you don’t, then all you see in ROTS is this random weaselly droid with a bad case of asthma, and you wonder what the ass is going on.

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Episode I, act I, scene I; We pan down from space above Tatooine to the Sarlaac pit, where Jar Jar, for crimes unmentioned, is cast down to digest over the course of the prequel trilogy.

There by satisfying us and keeping true to the letter of the OP :smiley:

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Amidala has a lot of lookalike handmaidens/bodyguards/aides-de-camp in the first movie.

At the end of Episode 1, one of them is shown flirting with Bail Organa.

In Episode 2, Amidala’s guards have all scattered, some to high offices on Naboo, some to the civil service of the Republic, and one is married to Bail Organa and playing housewife and mother.

She returns for a minor role in Episode 3, in which she gets killed. She is buried in Amidala’s coffin, while Amidala takes her place on Alderaan.
…

There are many Sith-lords. They try to conceal their existence, but they pop up all over the galaxy. The Republic views the Jedi as a tool to use to keep order in their realm. The Jedi view the Republic as a tool to use in their war against the Sith.
…

If Lucas insists on the damn CGI, then let him have the droid army, in a supporting role. But most of the fighting is done by Mandalorean mercenaries, led by Jango Fett. At the end of Episode 1, when the bodies are being disposed of, we learn that many of them are clones. The Republic promptly commissions its own clone army.
…

Anakin is an adult in the first movie. He is the pilot of Amidala’s spaceship. When Qui-Gon and Obi-wan come aboard, they sense that his piloting skill is partly due to latent skill with the Force. They recruit him to the Jedi. Yoda and Mace sense his potential for darkness, but they figure that, “If we don’t recruit him, the Sith-lords will.” He starts out as a charming rogue, and gradually slides downhill over the course of the three movies.

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Really good stuff there, Miller, but I think the kids need to be reworked. The Emperor isn’t supposed to know about them, hence the whole line in the original trilogy.

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Yeah, the Emperor can’t be bothered, calls her “Padaway or Panda Bear or whatever the hell her name was.”

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Since Jar-Jar talks like Butterfly McQueen anyway, at the end of Ep III, he delivers Luke and Leia but accidentally kills Amidala in the process. He then admits, ‘I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no Jedis.’ Obi-Wan immediately whips out his light saber and cuts of Jar-Jar’s head in disgust.

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Jar-Jar can still be comic relief, so long as the comedy involves a hilarious death scene. F’rinstance:

Vader corners Jar-Jar on a bridge over one of those bottomless pits that Lucas likes so much.
“Annie! Whysa you tryda kill me?” he asks.
“Don’t call me Annie!” Anikin whines, as he hasn’t made the jump to badass just yet.
Jar-Jar is shaken by the shout and with a sufficient amount of comedy stumbling falls off the bridge, uttering either “How wude” or the Wilhelm scream, whichever tests better with preview audiences.
But the pit isn’t bottomless after all. It ends in a reactor core or a blast furnace. Whichever is funnier.

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Thank you Tim314 for mentioning my absolute biggest annoyance with Star Wars I-III (and the new Clone Wars movie)

Yoda does not do the backwards talk for every single thing he says. Yes he did it, but good god almighty the new movies have him do it EVERY SINGLE LINE.

After a while you see Yoda and you just croon over what he’s gonna say

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How about this as an end for Jar Jar:

In Ep III, the duel between Mace and Palpatine goes as usual, until Mace has Palpy cornered. Then, in walks Jar Jar. Mace says “Jar Jar, thank goodness! The chancellor is not only a traitor, but a sith lord, and must be executed!” Jar Jar steps forward in an uncharacteristically steady manner, and begins speaking in a deep, scratchy voice without any of his typical speech impediments. He chides his young apprentice, Palpatine, for being so clumsy. His plan to gain control over the entire senate and galaxy using Palpatine as a puppet was so close to fruition. He would have secretly run things as emperor while Palpatine, always in want of attention, would be in the limelight. And of course, Palpatine making all these sudden power grabs would make him a very suspicious figure, and Jar Jar could not risk such suspicions falling on himself. Jar Jar sneers at Palpatine, asking him if he really thought he was unaware of his training of Anakin. But no matter, once Anakin found out the truth, he would become Jar Jar’s own puppet.

Mace, standing there in utter disbelief, has no time to react as Jar Jar’s force lightning blows him away into oblivion. Jar Jar then steps toward Palpatine, red saber in hand, and prepares to discipline him. Suddenly, a blue saber shoots through his chest! He falls forward, out the window into the city. Anakin has arrived just in time to save Palpatine. The rest of the movie goes on as normal.

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Jar Jar Binks doesn’t speak like a pick-a-ninny, no mitochlorians or whatever, use real actors and let them act. That would probably fix most of it. Hell, just don’t let Lucas direct them.

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You’re welcome, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who was bugged by this.