Tracy Lord beat me to it, Dex, but to say it more clearly, the Bastille is in France. Not that one needs much of a reason to storm France* 
Wedge Antilles fanaticism is much cooler than Boba Fett fanaticism. At least Wedge survives. And he has more lines. Which would you rather be known for - surviving every major Rebellion engagement and destroying Death Star II, or being eaten by a mutant earthworm? 'Nuff said.
*Obligatory French joke quota met for this thread
I’m sorry, but you’re just wrong. That show was all about the hypno-toad.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWAAAAAAAAAAAA
I’m sure I don’t need to speak for Dex, but don’t either of you suppose that they had Italian opera in Paris (we have it here, n’est pas?), and that les Parisiennes would be inflamed by a poor performance of La Traviata and then toss their produce and storm the Bastille?
Complex the mind of the Cafe Society Mod is, my young padawans.
Maybe, but the French opera goers stormed the Bastile after watching Les Misserables.
I know when I was 8 watching the original Star Wars, I understood it completely, it was deffinately a film children could understand. Though of course the Luke kissing Princess Leia was yucky romantic ick at that age.
I also enjoyed RotJ more than ESB first time through and certainly hardly notced Boba Fete except for his cool jet pack.
I’m not allowed to met a mixaphor any more?
[sub]I KNOW where the Bastille was, I was at the site, and I know where La Scala is, I was there too. This is what one calls a “joke” when one has had a crummy day.[/sub]
Og, this is so damn funny I was uncontrollable for several minutes. I’m very glad I wasn’t eating or drinking something!
A friend of mine thought for years they were singing about lug nuts.
Seriously.
Pfffft. Teach you to do that again!
Agreed, Cisco. The compactor scene with the Dianoga is the only part of ANH that I routinely fast forward through. Likewise the whole “This ground may be not entirely stable” sequence inside the space-slug in TESB.
With ROTJ, I wish I could ride the remote for just 2 or 5 minutes. Instead, I find myself fast-forwarding through 2/3 of the movie. Anything involving the Emperor, Vader, or spaceships I watch. But the whole opening Jabba’s Palace stuff gets the remote control treatment, as does anything involving Ewoks.
Some of it might be pacing, at least the Jabba part. Next time you watch ROTJ, note how long we are in Jabba’s palace without cutting away to action elsewhere in the Galaxy. It’s over 30 minutes straight. This editing is contrary to anything in any of the 5 other films.
Actually, when you think about it, nothing in ROTJ except for the Emperor’s attempted seduction of Luke even matters from a story-telling point of view. At this point in the saga, we are aware that Yoda and Obi-Wan don’t want Luke to destroy Vader, they just want Luke to “confront” him. They are both aware that Luke doesn’t have a prayer of actually besting Vader or the Emperor in Force combat. They know damn well that if the prophesy is to be fulfilled, it is going to be by Luke playing to Vader’s inherent goodness through the emotional trick of family connection. Luke just needs to stand firm on rejecting the dark side, and Vader will take care of the rest. All the stuff about blowing up the DSII is pretty much irrelevent to the epic story. So is rescuing Han for that matter.
As an aside, I found myself, upon my 4th viewing of Revenge of the Sith, wishing I had a remote control handy. I would have fast forwarded through every scene in the middle of the movie that didn’t involve Palpatine–namely, every expository 2-shot or council chamber scene. That’s maybe, dunno, 20 minutes? By that criterion (self-selected scene deletions), I must sadly conclude that ROTS is only my 3rd favorite SW movie. Oh well, ROTS wins big over all the others in the emotional impact department. None of the others leave me with a viscerally different feeling than when I started watching the movie. ROTS leaves me lying in bed hours later trying to reconcile what I’ve just been through emotionally, reliving the horror of seeing someone throw his life away. YMMV.
You fast-forward past Liea in a brass bikini??? IMO those scenes rescue the entire series from banality. The little hop she takes as she spins into Luke’s arms just before they swing away…
I’ll be in mah bunk.
Thanks for the great post, Larry Mudd. That difference for young teenagers is likely the source. Very insightful.
Boba Fett is famous for one big reason: he was a special action figure, the first unique to the unreleased ESB, that you had to collect box tops or something to get. He also got a cool write-up in the novelizations. But in the movies, he does nothing but stand around and isn’t even called by name in ESB. Kind of ironic considering the Ewoks are damned as merchandising run amok. And Boba Fett’s action figure was lousy; he was baby blue and his jet pack didn’t work.
I can never remember the Yub-yub song. But I’m sure it’s better than the Zamfir ad that currently ends ROTJ.
I disagree with the idea that Obi Wan and Yoda thought Vader could be redeemed. Obi-Wan is pretty insistent that any such redemption is totally impossible, even after he was dead, and the second-to-last time he meets Vader, Obi-Wan cuts off three of his limbs and leaves him to burn to death on a lava planet. Yoda chimes in with the “Once down the Dark Path you start, forever will it dominate your destiny” stuff. I think they had both written off the prophecy entirely, and were both hoping (if not exactly expecting) Luke would lop Vader and the Emperor into itty bitty pieces. If they’d known how it was going to go down in the end, I suspect they would have advised Luke to stay the hell off the DSII entirely and let the fleet kill the Sith bastards. Luke was needed to keep the legacy of the Jedi alive. It just happened that doing so necessitated killing Vader and the Emperor.
I loathe the Yub-yub song with a great and mighty passion, and much prefer the new ending tune, even though it doesn’t fit very well with the dancing Ewoks.
Replacing “Lapti Nek” with “Jedi Rocks”- now that was just unconscionable.
Any idea of redemption was never stated by me. I stated that banking on Vader whacking the Emperor was the spectral Jedi’s last hope.
Yoda got his ass handed to him by the Emperor in Episode III, and knew damn well that a whiny punk from Tatooine, gold plated Midichlorians or not, was not gonna fare any better.
When Yoda was 860, having taught Jedi Younglings for 800 years, he found himself in the position of being the most capable ass-kicker in the Galaxy (Mace, Ki-Adi, Plo Koon, Qui-Gon, etc. having been wasted). He went nail-to-nail against Sideous with a light saber. It proved to be a tie that was going nowhere.
Sideous then switched to throwing things around, namely 2 ton Senate pods, and Yoda got pwned. Yoda was down 20 ticket seats below general admission after the first volley.
The emperor then lobbed FOUR senate pods at Yoda, whilst cackling maniacally, and the best Yoda could muster in response was to pick up one pod, spin it like a pizza, and send it back in less than 30 minutes.
Then lightning ensued, which Yoda admirably deflected back at Sideous. But he looked like my grandmother after making the daily trip to the mailbox–old and busted, and worn out by the fatigue of the effort.
Once Yoda dropped his light saber (and what Jedi drops his light saber anyway, isn’t that Jedi Code #42065?), he knew he had to run away like a little green pussy and wait for an edge.
No, neither Yoda nor Obi-wan ever expected Luke to take out management throught Force combat. Family heart string tugging, that’s the ticket, that’s the edge. Train the boy to never give in to the Dark Side and to stand proudly before the devil.
“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”
That’s the ticket.
Make the Chosen One fulfill his destiny.
I’ve been trying to think of how to say this, and then you went and said it better and more succinctly than I could have!
Just adding two thoughts of my own: First, many people seem to assume that the people who can come back with the cool glowing ghost bodies are people who in life were unusually morally good, therefore Anakin Skywalker doesn’t belong there. Problem is, that assumption is based on two other examples, Obi-Wan and Yoda. If we assume that everyone in the Star Wars universe gets an afterlife, and that it’s not moral goodness, but sensitivity to the Force, that allows people to become visible after death, it makes much more sense to have Anakin there. And I think that’s a reasonable assumption, because apparently it takes Force sensitivity to see or hear them - throughout most of the trilogy the only one who is able to is Luke, until Leia becomes aware of her own powers.
Second, the fact that Anakin appears to have been redeemed in the blink of an eye on the mortal time scale doesn’t mean that whatever beings control the Force haven’t been punishing him for the equivalent of years or even centuries on their side… the supernatural is messy like that (This, too, is an idea I picked up in my Catholic schoolgirl days, for the record.)
They way I understand it, there are no ‘beings that control the Force’. The Force seems to be ‘energy’ made up of all living things. The energy can be channeled by some, but it isn’t sentient.