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I'd rather see Phantom Menace re-shot, with a less annoying Anakain and Gungans.

I'd rather see the prequel trilogy with the events of Phantom Menace completely cut out, seeing as there was all of a few minutes of story there that actually advanced overarching plot of the prequel story line

Really there needs to be a new film dealing directly with the events of the Clone Wars, or maybe with the immediate aftermath of Order 66. Those would be interesting

My ideal would be TPM ceases to exist, with any information deemed utterly vital dealt with via exposition (or flashback if really necessary.)

Then AOTC becomes EP1, and the events of ROTS can now cover two movies, with either original material or some of the arcs from The Clone Wars series used to explore Anakin's fall in more detail and make it less "oops, now he's evil" that essentially truncating his fall the way the existing movies do causes.

But, in the scope of the discussion in this thread, I don't think any of the prequels can be saved by any amount of effects rejigging, it would take a ground up remake to elevate them to a decent level.

there are several versions of the prequels out there that are watchable
I prefer to ignore part 1 and 2 and watch a less "cheese" version of 3 (Labyrinth of Evil) as a flashback after 5.

If somehow Phantom Menace could be annihilated from history, there could be no convincing argument not to turn the same miracle technique on the other two prequels.

As for Disney making an Even Specialer Edition of the Original Trilogy, assuming for the sake of argument that it could legally be done, I think the smarter strategy would be to make new SW that are "better" than the originals and leave the originals to age, and gradually be superseded, as products of their time.

I think the assumption that the OT will always be the benchmark of the franchise is something Disney ought to explode. The best should be yet to come, rather than far and always farther in the past.

This nostalgia wave will not last forever.

 Manchu wrote:
This nostalgia wave will not last forever.

And when it ends the Star Wars IP will end with it. The story of Star Wars is finished. The hero's journey thing, Luke's story from farm boy to bringing down the empire? Finished. The story of Vader's fall and redemption? Finished. There is nothing left to say that adds anything to the story at the heart of the Star Wars IP. All that is left is one of two possible forms of milking the cash cow:

1) Endless sequels and prequels and side stories and so on, feeding the endless hunger of the most rabid fans. They (we?) want to see every detail of the Star Wars world expanded, every random background character's story told. But that's a hunger based entirely in nostalgia. If nobody cares about the OT then nobody is going to care about a Han Solo movie. Rogue One is a dismal failure if there aren't hordes of fans lining up to see how that one sentence in the opening crawl really happened.

2) Making a new story like TFA. Yeah, this can succeed, but if a movie is good enough on its own merits to succeed without the accumulated love for the OT then why chain it to the baggage of the Star Wars IP? If the OT is forgotten then you might as well make a scifi adventure movie in your own new IP. In fact, if nostalgia fatigue has set in, such a movie would probably be more successful than yet another milking of the Star Wars cash cow.

Either way the IP survives because of the OT. Without it you have, at most, Star Wars in name only. And at that point just put the IP out of its misery and move on.

Star Trek TNG is a nice example of a series that reinvigorated an IP. I guess you could argue that Star Wars has heretofore been about a single family, whereas Star Trek was more about ideas than specific characters. So it would be up to Disney to figure out if the ideas behind the characters of Star Wars are distinct enough to forge ahead without primarily leaning on direct references to the Original Trilogy.

 Manchu wrote:
Star Trek TNG is a nice example of a series that reinvigorated an IP. I guess you could argue that Star Wars has heretofore been about a single family, whereas Star Trek was more about ideas than specific characters. So it would be up to Disney to figure out if the ideas behind the characters of Star Wars are distinct enough to forge ahead without primarily leaning on direct references to the Original Trilogy.

Space dogfights and eastern philosophy?

I'm sure someone could figure a way to combine, say, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and the Battle of Miday in a worn and cynical universe domesticated by man.

 Manchu wrote:
Star Trek TNG is a nice example of a series that reinvigorated an IP. I guess you could argue that Star Wars has heretofore been about a single family, whereas Star Trek was more about ideas than specific characters. So it would be up to Disney to figure out if the ideas behind the characters of Star Wars are distinct enough to forge ahead without primarily leaning on direct references to the Original Trilogy.

TNG was an exception, even in the Star Trek IP, and required a full reboot of the story and characters. It wasn't at all necessary, and could easily have been pointless cash cow milking, but somehow it managed to work and be a legitimate show even without the existence of TOS. Later attempts at repeating the success of TNG ranged from decent to utter trash that seriously raised the question of whether they'd finally managed to milk the cash cow too much and kill off the IP. The odds are not in Disney's favor here.

Success is in itself exceptional. I think in the case of SW, however, you have some massive advantages in terms of brand awareness and the huge amount of money Disney is willing to invest. Working against Disney is its inherent conservatism, the reasons that TFA and R1 are burdened so heavily by references to the OT. Whatever any of us think about those movies, however, they have made a lot of money. Perhaps Disney is gaining some confidence to branch out. However: part of the inherent conservatism I mentioned is the notion of producers rather than directors helming these movies, which could be the biggest problem of all. As bad as the prequels were, they didn't feel as stuffy as TFA and R1. (Instead, they are just miserably awkward.)

I don't know if R1 can really be called stuffy considering it did have the movie's Disney Prince shiv his ally in the back.

Yeah, I think someone forgot to take that out after reshoots considering that, as an idea, it is abandoned. Like the Cthulhoid monster Forrest Whittaker uses on the pilot guy, rendering him catatonic ... until he's not anymore. ("I got better." - dirty peasant)

I think, given the whole purpose of the story it's telling, it's a little unfair to call R1 "burdened by references to the OT."

One could, perhaps, argue that Disney's conservatism lead to the story being told in the first place, over something more far reaching or ambitious, but to criticize it for doing what it set out to do isn't really fair.

Nah, it didn't need to be as absolutely on-the-nose as it was. Never needed to see the Death Star at all, much less Tarkin or Leia. Arguably, Vader is okay to throw in as from ANH it looks like retrieving the stolen plans was his special duty BUT you really needn't even include him because it is a movie about stealing the plans.

But then, and I'm speaking as someone who wasn't particularly blown away by R1 so I'm not likely to start flag waving for it too hard, I think that small role that Vader has completely re-frames the character. From ANH onwards he's obviously supposed to be the big bad, but he doesn't really earn it. That brutal corridor fight massacre at the end of R1 really resonates forward for me and then justifies the menace Vader obviously carries in the OT, but never really actually earns.

I agree with Leia, I think that was indulgent and superfluous, and the fact that the CGI overlay didn't disguise that the physical actress' face was the wrong shape for Carrie Fisher's really jarred for me.

But then, we always knew the outcome, have done since 1977, so the existence of the film in its entirety can be called unnecessary, but telling the stories of both the Imperial and Rebel characters seems logical to me, Tarkin especially.

I would have liked to see a far grittier film. By grit, I don't mean gore or cynicism. I mean, like dirt - a sense of being in the heat and mud, sweating with fear and excitement. I imagined R1 as a movie about a commando unit crawling through a stinking jungle with a truly dangerous Empire opposing them. Real people facing real danger. I think that was probably the pitch but it gave executives heart burn and was slowly whittled down to an excuse to drag out the references to ANH. There is some of that left in the R1 we got. Director Krennic, for example, is strikingly amoral - very interesting!

Like you, I don't want to go too far down the road of rehashing everything wrong and right with R1 here. I do think it is very fair, however, to criticize the end product as prioritizing references over creativity. And in the context of this thread, my hope is that Disney will feel like they have cleared the hurdle of netting their "SW cred," that they can believably make SW movies without George Lucas being involved, so far as the public is concerned, and therefore they can go a bit further afield.

Considering the next two releases are The Empire Rebooted and Adventures of Young Han, I guess that is a doubtful hope.

Their SW cried very much depends on the next film. If it's half as pathetic as TFA, SW might as well be dead.

That's hard to credit, looking at the money and the interest in SW right now. Or do you mean, in the long term?

If all the Last Jedi is is a reboot of Empire, I still can't see myself emerging from the cinema anything less than grinning.

I'm with you on the grit through, both figurative and literal. But then I'm generally the one calling for more grit in most of the Marvel stuff too.

Young Han is the first of the new movies I'm concerned about, and not really excited by, but it does represent the broadest opportunity to really do something new so far, outside of the fact he meets Chewie and, old EU admittedly, there's a thing with Dengar, there's very few hard points in his backstory they need to navigate. So you never know, but the change of personnel probably indicates that you're likely correct.

I'm having trouble imagining a fresh take on a Young Han film. Maybe they could make it like a 50s greasers theme? Seems pretty doubtful. OTOH, I can think of so many ways it will just be a sequence of references to stuff in the OT and ... please don't skin me alive for saying this ... references to the PT. Yes, I do think this is the real rationale behind a Young Han movie, as far as the IP managers are concerned: it is a bridge between the well-loved OT and the mostly-reviled PT. It's going to be a soft pitch to people (born in the 90s) who remember the PT with more (any?) fondness.

 Manchu wrote:
That's hard to credit, looking at the money and the interest in SW right now. Or do you mean, in the long term?

Long term. I mean it would be creatively dead, a gangrenous franchise that might pump out cash right now but come crashing down hard when the momentum wears out.

Then again, Transformers and Pirates prove people will pay to see any old crap.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Then again, Transformers and Pirates prove people will pay to see any old crap.

Not really. For all their flaws, what Transformers and Pirates have in spades is big stunts and amusing dialogue. For a lot of us, that's enough... but without either of those things, the attraction would wane fairly quickly.

So what they really prove is that people will pay to see movies that lack depth. There are still standards, they're just not the same standards that you're apparently looking for.

My ideal new Star Wars movies would have nothing to do with Han, the Skywalkers or any of them. The setting works for all kinds of mythic storytelling, while the characters already had their big arcs.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 insaniak wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Then again, Transformers and Pirates prove people will pay to see any old crap.

Not really. For all their flaws, what Transformers and Pirates have in spades is big stunts and amusing dialogue. For a lot of us, that's enough... but without either of those things, the attraction would wane fairly quickly.

So what they really prove is that people will pay to see movies that lack depth. There are still standards, they're just not the same standards that you're apparently looking for.

I can appreciate stunts and action. Whatever I saw in TF1 and 2 was too shakey and obscured to be called good action.

Fair enough, Bob, about creative death. Transformers 5 earned the lowest returns yet for that franchise. Fool me four times, shame on you - and so forth.

If you're going to consider franchises that continue to succeed despite utter creative bankruptcy, I cannot let this tangent continue without raising Fast and Furious.

It continues to generate bank, despite the death and resurrection of characters, the actual death of key cast members and an utter lack of new ideas. The first film gets a pass as a decent homage to Point Break with added cars, but the fact that 2 Fast 2 Furious wasn't the death knell resulting in the whole concept being taken out back and double tapped is astonishing, that it made it to a fourth film when the third film had absolutely no continuity with the previous 2 whatsoever is beyond staggering.

Yet they still get made, and I still find myself watching the fething things. If creative vitality was any sort of criteria for an ongoing success, they wouldn't have grossed $5bn

Are the stunts creative? I haven't seen any of the films, but aren't they up to drag racing submarines now?

In my mind, I was more picturing older franchises that had lost the faith of the audience, like Die Hard, Aliens/Predator, Pierce Brosnan's Bond, X-Men (before the soft reboot), terminator, and the like. Once the movies hit a certain nadir of quality, they seem unable to recover, first artistically and then financially.

However, a lot of modern franchises seem to work by different rules, where they expand on the most glossy signature elements while jettisoning any material that might have created resonance/emotional drag in self-conscious pandering to cynical customers who come back eager for the same comfortable exploitation, almost a Hypernormalization of audience expectations.

Fast and Furious is different because they made the 3rd film being independent from the first two and than they decide to make 2 more to link the 3rd to the first and another one to give the series an "ending"

for SW it would like making 1-3 first, than 7-9 and than 4-6 to link the story

SW also had the bad luck to got JJ'ed, as he don't know how to make new stuff but just copy&paste and give it a new touch.

 Manchu wrote:
Success is in itself exceptional. I think in the case of SW, however, you have some massive advantages in terms of brand awareness and the huge amount of money Disney is willing to invest. Working against Disney is its inherent conservatism, the reasons that TFA and R1 are burdened so heavily by references to the OT. Whatever any of us think about those movies, however, they have made a lot of money. Perhaps Disney is gaining some confidence to branch out. However: part of the inherent conservatism I mentioned is the notion of producers rather than directors helming these movies, which could be the biggest problem of all. As bad as the prequels were, they didn't feel as stuffy as TFA and R1. (Instead, they are just miserably awkward.)

But my point is that the brand awareness that the Star Wars IP has right now is overwhelmingly based on the OT. The rest of the movies don't stand on their own at all, they range from unwatchable to entertaining but forgettable. And they certainly don't build the kind of brand-defining foundation that can keep a franchise alive for decades. Take away the OT nostalgia factor and I don't see Star Wars being anything more than generic throwaway action movies, the kind of thing that gets massive advertising and toy sales for a short time before being completely forgotten when the next two-hour toy commercial arrives.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
However, a lot of modern franchises seem to work by different rules, where they expand on the most glossy signature elements while jettisoning any material that might have created resonance/emotional drag in self-conscious pandering to cynical customers who come back eager for the same comfortable exploitation, almost a Hypernormalization of audience expectations.

I think the difference there is in the expectations. These cash-cow-milking franchises are making tons of money, sure, but people go into those movies expecting an entertaining spectacle with no long-term impact. You pay your $15, watch a couple hours of CGI spectacle, and a year from now you probably don't remember much about the movie. But with franchises that have been more than just a CGI demo reel the expectations are much higher. If you see a new Die Hard or Star Wars or whatever movie you're expecting something like the originals, movies that were good enough to stay with you and even define parts of your life. So when that expectation is betrayed in favor of milking the cash cow it feels a lot worse than when you get exactly what you were expecting.

Fast and the Furious thrives because they reinvented it with the 4th film and then invested into giving it legs with the fifth. The original concept and its cash in sequel weren't ever going to go anywhere, but the movies that come out now basically just make use of the cast to tell absurd, car focused Bond films. A lot of effort goes into making them some of the better dumb movies out there.

Star Wars definitely rests on the foundation of the OT, but the brand's strength has been in the EU (in whatever form that takes) for a long time. In particular, I'd argue its as strong of a videogame franchise as anything else, though its been far too long since it got a worthy game.

At the moment, I think the weakness in TFA is just that until the new trilogy is complete, people aren't free to really play around in the EU for that era. The prequels are a dumpster fire, but once they finished wrecking the place, the era became almost something worth caring about once people started expanding on it and the TFA era is way, way more capable of generating worthwhile content than the prequels could.

posted in the rpg board but kinda relevant/of interest to some folks here maybe...

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2017/8/16/dont-underestimate-the-force/




.. 30 years eh ?