the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

UGH I HATE THAT JABBA SCENE. like i'm a grown-up now and i don't CARE about all the rest, i don't CARE that greedo shoots first, i don't CARE about the dinosaur butts, i don't CARE that there's little bullshit animals scampering around every establishing shot farting, i don't care about any of it EXCEPT THE JABBA SCENE god i hate it so so so so so so much. so much.

tbh that first picture is really funny. looks like jabba is tripping his balls off

he's watching the scene on the monitor.

ugh this is precisely why this is so sad - Lucas has actually ruined your memory

? i meant offscreen as in a scene not shown

They need to make Alec guiness step in dinosaur poop. In 3d.

Think of the possibilities.

what's infuriating about the jabba scene is that despite what george lucas says because he has some kind of seriously sick thing where every time he changes anything he has to act like that was his "original intention", like he had every second of every scene of every star wars movie all written out in his giant genius-head in 1976, that scene was shot with a human actor not so they could replace him with jabba (how would they have done this) but because that was jabba, because they didn't know what jabba looked like yet, and hadn't yet had the wonderful idea of making him into this obscene punch-cartoon parody of a swollen-to-immobility space capitalist, and thank god they cut the scene because A) it's a literally pointless scene anyway that slows the movie down for absolutely no reason and B) if they hadn't jabba would be a guy in a furry vest instead of an icon. an icon george lucas doesn't even understand the first thing about because he thinks it's acceptable to have him scooting around the set like he's in fucking Worms.

Those are pretty awful DVD transfers though. I have a strong suspicion that Lucas deliberately made sure that the DVD transfers of the non-special editions were half-assed.

The transfer isn't Blu-ray, but these have at least been re-encoded by someone for widescreen tv. They are quite a bit better than the old laserdiscs which were the previously final "untouched" version. It's highly watchable and I very strongly recommend it!!!

the special editions came out when i was 11 or 12, and they were the first time i saw all of the movies. previously i'd seen at least one of the star wars, but i cant remember which one. i thought all the special content was awesome, but that was both at the age and time when CGI imagery was at its most novel to me. since the movies were still amazing, i went for years not really thinking the SEs were any kind of major transgression. i hadnt seen any of them again until this last christmas, when i was at my friend's house and he had them on in the background on his plasma. i caught the end of Star Wars and was pleased to see that it still held up really well even after the prequels, and i appreciated the practical effects in a way I couldn't before. had to skip Empire, but when we sat down for the opening of ROTJ my eyes bulged in... amazement? at the tarted up CGI musical number that'd been inserted into the jabba's palace sequence. how did i forget this? why would you replace a kickin rad rubber puppet disco song with this shit? that was the moment when i 'got' all the bitching about greedo shooting first.

i guess the maddening thing about lucas is he could so easily use his powers for good. he has the resources to give us cleaned up, gorgeous transfers of the original trilogy, where every frame isn't crowded with computer generated farting banthas. he financed the prequels himself! he had nobody to answer to! he could've made literally anything he wanted. imagine if you gave jodorowsky 400 million and told him to make ~the space opera of his dreams~. the original space battle in ROTJ is (very likely) the most complicated trad effects sequence ever shot, and you can tell lucas hates it because episode 3 is filled with the kind of long, showy takes that couldn't have been done with models. there's nothing boundary-pushing about all that processing power onscreen, and it's deflating in a way because it illustrates the limits of his ambitions - just like there's nothing to be gained from overexplaining a tantalizing backstory, the VFX of the original trilogy (and lucas' own mythologizing around the time of the SEs) makes you think 'oh, there's so much he wanted to show us but just couldn't!' - but it turned out that the original movies thrived on those limitations, and him going back and splashing white-out on everything amounts less to ~movie magic~ and more to pulling the curtain back on the wizard of oz.

he financed the prequels himself! he had nobody to answer to! he could've made literally anything he wanted.

^^ this is sort of the problem, isnt it? i mean for me one of the big tragedies/disappointments was the realization that george lucas is boring, lazy and untalented

& it makes you go back to the original trilogy wondering if youd just been fooled the whole time

yeah thats what im getting at - what he wanted was boring and awful

it's like poetry, it rhymes

How much of Indiana Jones was him and how much was Spielberg?

it's like poetry, it rhymes

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X__nksxQxys

What I want is an entire disc of Empire stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyaAJ2JMjcM

Thing about Lucas having total control is that history has shown that the best stuff came from when he had no say at all. He was off working on Raiders when they did ESB, for example, or the bit(possibly mentioned upthread) where Harrison Ford told Mark Hamill just to say what he thought worked rather than what Lucas had typed.

how did i forget this? why would you replace a kickin rad rubber puppet disco song with this shit?

^This. The replacement of the original song with that GODAWFUL CGI cartoon thing, plus the replacement of the original "Yub Nub" celebration song, were the straws that broke the camel's back for me with the special editions when they came out. Greedo shooting first, whatevs. BUT DON'T YOU MESS WITH MY BELOVED EWOKS!

You know, if all Lucas had done was clean up the prints, maybe polish up some of the dodgier old effects (smoothing out matte lines, etc.) it would have been fine!

In retrospect we were all pretty well warned about where Episode 1 was headed.

^^ this is sort of the problem, isnt it? i mean for me one of the big tragedies/disappointments was the realization that george lucas is boring, lazy and untalented

― max, Friday, January 28, 2011 8:09 AM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

& it makes you go back to the original trilogy wondering if youd just been fooled the whole time

― max, Friday, January 28, 2011 8:10 AM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark

Thing about Lucas having total control is that history has shown that the best stuff came from when he had no say at all. He was off working on Raiders when they did ESB, for example, or the bit(possibly mentioned upthread) where Harrison Ford told Mark Hamill just to say what he thought worked rather than what Lucas had typed.

― Crazed Mister Handy (kingfish), Friday, January 28, 2011 8:24 AM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, the thing about movies is that they are first & foremost collaborative. the director is obviously important but there are a million other reasons why movies turn out to be terrible or awesome. often it's the combination of people involved, not just the director's "vision".

"i can't deny the guy is a grade-a definition visionary (YOU try simply imagining a universe as unique and in-depth as the star wars one)"

The thing is, the Star Wars "universe" isn't particularly unique or special for a space opera. Most of it is basically a hodgepodge of 30's serials, Star Trek (in the opening scene Vader even says "set phasers to stun"), Herbert's Dune, and a bunch of other shit that was around.

The main way in which Star Wars broke ground was formally--the relentless, kinetic pace (can you think of any other 70's flick that moves as FAST?) the zippy editing, and of course the effects/production design.

i remember seeing some doc from years ago where one of the production designers was explaining that the reason so much of the space gear in star wars felt real was that they had just raided normal household items - like plastic garbage can lids, or the wheel that you'd wrap a garden hose around - reconfigured them and painted them. so most of the visual stuff wasn't just "invented" ex nihilo. when it's all CGI, though, it is. you lose that serendipity, and that connection to the world of normal functional things

yeah, the lived-in-future thing was a big contribution to movie Sci-Fi and Ridley Scott took it even further with Alien/Blade Runner (a lot of the same people were involved IIRC)

It's when Lucas has too much of a hand in the script *and* the direction that things truly go kablooey. Raiders, for example, had Philip Kaufman and Lawrence Kasdan writing, with Spielberg directing. Empire had Kasdan again and Kershner. Forget who directed Jedi, but Kasdan was involved in the writing of that, too. But really those prequels were all Lucas/Lucas joints.

(Looking at past credits, the husband/wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz seem to be early enablers. Looks like those losers more or less threw in the towel after the Howard the Duck debacle.)

Some good analysis on this thread recently, well done everyone. OTM that the production design is a big part of what makes the originals special; pretty much every costume, set and vehicle was instantly and effortlessly iconic. That married to fairly simple, solid stories easily explains the OT's massive enduring appeal.

I saw the late-90s re-release of Star Wars in the theater. When Jabba's eyes bulged out after Solo stepped on his tail, one guy groaned "Aw, the fuck was that?" It made my night and pretty much set my don't-give-a-shit attitude about Lucas adding more tap dance numbers and pazuzu statues or whatever.

I mean, my memory is always going to be Greedo shooting first. The only difference between what Lucas has done and Vader-playing-the-harmonica on YouTube is $400 million. I can watch the new versions without erasing in my head what I saw the first time.

Shame about the kids who haven't seen the originals, but they've got Lord of the Rings instead anyway.

I mean, my memory is always going to be Greedo shooting first. The only difference between what Lucas has done and Vader-playing-the-harmonica on YouTube is $400 million. I can watch the new versions without erasing in my head what I saw the first time.

Um

Ha, I meant Solo. Dammit.

Planning on voting for Osama next time.

my memory is Greedo shooting first, albeit with a very faint blaster beam, and even back in '97 I was wondering why people were complaining about it. Dunno what's wrong with my head tbh.

depending on how dorky you are, this can be a really fascinating read, especially since most of what i'd read previously about the making of all these movies, going all the way back to the first one, had basically been propaganda. george lucas is a weird, weird guy.

i'm repeating myself at this point (we all are) but i think for the prequels, lucas didn't or for some reason just couldn't understand the story he himself was telling.

the original trilogy of movies are mythic adventure stories. you can be kind of disconnected from real people with real concerns and still tell an exciting story in that mode (in any case, lucas was still "tethered" by other people who had some control over what happened in those productions)

the prequel trilogy is about politics and love, ie human desire on a mass and individual level. the objective of the prequels is to tell how the stark good-vs-evil conflict of the original movies is the result of an earlier world of competing desires. and it's p clear that lucas doesn't have much understanding of that kind of thing at all, least of all the desires of audiences, who he feels will be awed by frame after frame that is at once totally static and crammed to the gills with useless details.

It never really even occurred to me whether Greedo or Han shot first, as it was obv they were never going to kill of Han moments after introducing him. With essential characters the statistics never apply... they always get out by sheer will or magic coincidence/last moment saving, but nonetheless survive. But I guess it really is more of a triviality that nerds like to obsess over just out of nerd-joi, less than any actual theories that had greedo shot first that star wars would have been radically changed as a story.

What if JFK had shot first.

xp -- i think the idea is that having greedo shoot first neuters the content of the scene--that han is a slightly dark character, a rogue, who distracts someone and then casually shoots him dead. greedo shooting makes explicit that han is acting in self-defense. it's ridiculous for two reasons: one, it undermines han's arc in the movie, which is from self-serving rogue to revolutionary soldier; two, it makes "self-defense" absurdly literal, since even in the original version greedo is clearly about to shoot han in the face and it's not like han is gunning someone down in cold blood; three, it makes absolutely no sense that a professional bounty hunter would miss a totally static target from two feet away.

it's ridiculous for two reasons, and a special bonus reason if you act now.

a triviality that nerds like to obsess over just out of nerd-joi, less than any actual theories that had greedo shot first that star wars would have been radically changed as a story.

― The previous message has been brought to you by (kelpolaris), Friday, January 28, 2011 1:35 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i think the complaint is that in 1977 lucas was ok with the idea of one of his heroes being sort of dangerous and adult and morally questionable. but, given the chance to do it over again, he made sure there was no chance the most childish good-guy sensibility isn't threatened at all. it's about lucas withdrawal from an adult world of thinking persons.

xp :)

"YOU try simply imagining a universe as unique and in-depth as the star wars one"
this is easy, especially given star wars' mashup origins.
kurosawa movie + scifi trappings + new age mysticism
so:
Rashomon + robots & lasers + astrology:

Gemini Jaxon is accused in robocourt of murdering and roboraping Pisces Piscariot, and their memories have been subpoenaed for evidence,
but a mysterious syzygy scrambles the data producing a multi-layered and contradictory testimony. The Libra Liberation Front disrupts the trial
using lasers, resuces Gemini Jaxon and they are off to have adventures as seven magnificent cyber samurai.

imagining is easy. selling it is hard. lucas is a good salesman. even for the prequels, I mean we all ended up watching them.

well, Rashomon isnt exactly the Kurosawa movie that comes to mind! maybe The Hidden Fortress.

oh i see what you were doing, ha!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJXU7EVXs2A

It never really even occurred to me whether Greedo or Han shot first, as it was obv they were never going to kill of Han moments after introducing him. With essential characters the statistics never apply... they always get out by sheer will or magic coincidence/last moment saving, but nonetheless survive. But I guess it really is more of a triviality that nerds like to obsess over just out of nerd-joi, less than any actual theories that had greedo shot first that star wars would have been radically changed as a story.

― The previous message has been brought to you by (kelpolaris), Friday, 28 January 2011 19:35 (1 hour ago)

it's not just that it horribly alters and largely ruins the Han character, it's that the scene now looks awkward as fuck. As does Han stepping over Jabba's tail and all the other bullshit that's in the "special editions."

oh my
http://www.nme.com/filmandtv/news/george-lucas-has-50-hours-of-star-wars-tv-series/217089

someone stop him - its the wookie xmas special gone mad

"waiting for the technology to catch up"

4-D reverse time implants.

Eco-friendly solar powered digital hi-def turd polisher

"waiting for the technology to bring the world an even more annoying JAR JAR character. You're welcome world"