All Things Star Wars

[AdrienIer]

Burned through Tales of the Empire in a couple days. Very strong but does get a little weaker at the end, which prevents me from giving it a 10. Worth a gander. Mostly only relevant for those who have seen the Clone Wars show, a single episode of Mandalorian, and Ahsoka. I mean, it's watchable without that context, but it matters more if you have it.

The fact that

Spoiler :

they're leaving Bariss's story open ended

is interesting. Will she show up again someday on other star wars shows ?

 

[Synobun]

The fact that

Spoiler :

they're leaving Bariss's story open ended

is interesting. Will she show up again someday on other star wars shows ?

Spoiler :

She stops breathing after the fight with Lyn, so I assumed she's dead. That's actually why I lowered my score, since it seemed a waste of her arc.

 

[Patine]

Spoiler :

She stops breathing after the fight with Lyn, so I assumed she's dead. That's actually why I lowered my score, since it seemed a waste of her arc.

Everyone knows, in TV and movies, apparent death is only final until they can be plausibly re-wrritten back into the plot. Exhibit A, your honour - Darth Maul.

 

[Clubber Lang]

To wrap up our exclusive Star Wars Outlaws cover story, we're publishing an 18-minute video interview with Massive Entertainment's Alice Rendell, senior narrative systems designer on Outlaws, and Lead Systems Designer Matthieu Delisle, wherein we learn about the sorts of encounters players can expect to experience while interacting with the game's Reputation and Wanted Systems.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Pretty good video. It closes with what amounts to a 6-minute trailer for Andor.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Pretty good video. It closes with what amounts to a 6-minute trailer for Andor.

I came across that... probably around its release, and wanted to plug it in a reply to Gori's post (so I guess you've forced my hand ). The problem as I see it isn't that all spacelanes are destined toward a Trench Run; it's that the way the franchise is built (and especially within the Mouse's current paradigm of fracking the nostalgia wells), everything keeps getting pushed back toward the flagship theatrical films in the same strategy of multi-level marketing that turned the MCU into a sprawling jigsaw of interdependent continuity. Hence what could have been a boundless romp in the sandbox instead railroads to the Core Canon: Skywalkers, Palpatine, and the showy Hero Quests that we're all browbeaten into accepting as the natural order.

Except for that tiny little problem that The Clone Wars demonstrated that you could deep-dive into the nitty-gritty of the universe to broaden the setting (and its themes) in ways that the PT had wanted to do but fell up short. Star Wars is a huge setting, and even within the time frame of the main films, you can tell a compelling story without having to make it a call-forward to the Death Star II—probably the nearest parallel I can draw is the corpus of World War II media: some are dramas, some are romances, some are outright comedies; some focus on the front line, some are set behind the lines, and some never leave home base. Even the documentaries can't encompass the full scope of it all; nearly ninety years on and we're still finding new ways to tell its stories. Why should Star Wars be any different?

Especially given the sheer mass of untapped lore, even after the Expanded Universe was purged. A couple weeks ago I was revisiting a homebrew roleplaying game I was in several years back, and in contrast to everyone else who treated it straight-faced, I played a Quixotic mercenary company that wove in and out of established canon in the vein of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead—I am not well-versed in the EU and wound up on multiple wiki dives to research specific details, and as much as I dunk on Wookieepedia, I can only admire the passion the universe attracts: researching EU-era Celanon revealed a society split between a Guild-ruled plutocratic capital city and basically the rest of the planet living as peasantry. Maybe about two paragraphs of information, but a whole story lurking beneath.

tl;dr: Andor good, treat Star Wars as a setting instead of a genre.

 

[Gori the Grey]

tl;dr: Andor good, treat Star Wars as a setting instead of a genre.

The thing is that the esteem Andor enjoys proves my point (and esp @tjs282's axiom).

Here's the other thing. "The galaxy" isn't a setting. I know there are star-charts of where all the systems are relative to one another. But only super-fans know those. The settings in Star Wars are defined only in being some kind of geographic feature (for the whole planet): desert-planet, swamp-planet, cloud-planet, ice-planet, city-planet, volcano-planet. And sometimes by relative distance from one to another, as established on an ad hoc basis by dialogue, like Luke's that I mentioned.

Stories set in the WWII timeframe can all work, regardless of how much they directly concern the war because we know (living on it) where on the planet Morocco is relative to the main fighting of the war.

If you want to tell some other story than Death-Star Story (or one directly connected to it) there's no point in being in the Star-Wars universe in the first place. Because everything in that setting was just visual support for that story. (Look at all of these different cultures being impacted by the Empire and its Death Star).

By the way, this is one of the reasons, I think, for why the franchise has been faulted for its handling of (on our Earth) racially-diverse characters. Boyega feels they didn't do anything meaningful with his character. But what is Blackness in this galaxy? It hasn't been defined. Our cultures give the human element that Egon's video calls for, but no Star Wars world's culture is developed enough for that to bear meaningfully on a character's motives and decisions. Sand people ride single file, to hide their numbers. What else do we know about them? We know that factoid because that factoid is meaningful at one moment in the Death-Star story. So, let's say we want to tell a story about a Sandperson. All the story can concern is whether he rides single file or not. The Sandpeople feel like a culture. That was Lucas' genius: to make the set-decoration visually evoke whole distinct cultures. But they're not developed as cultures beyond that superficial visual level.

No one will be more happy than me if they start telling interesting stories in this space. It feels to me too as though they ought to be able to do so. But until they manage to I've got my theory as to why they keep failing to do so. We're expecting something of the galaxy that it isn't built to give us. It gave us the one thing it was built to give us.

Make a new galaxy for your new story.

 

[Patine]

I came across that... probably around its release, and wanted to plug it in a reply to Gori's post (so I guess you've forced my hand ). The problem as I see it isn't that all spacelanes are destined toward a Trench Run; it's that the way the franchise is built (and especially within the Mouse's current paradigm of fracking the nostalgia wells), everything keeps getting pushed back toward the flagship theatrical films in the same strategy of multi-level marketing that turned the MCU into a sprawling jigsaw of interdependent continuity. Hence what could have been a boundless romp in the sandbox instead railroads to the Core Canon: Skywalkers, Palpatine, and the showy Hero Quests that we're all browbeaten into accepting as the natural order.

Except for that tiny little problem that The Clone Wars demonstrated that you could deep-dive into the nitty-gritty of the universe to broaden the setting (and its themes) in ways that the PT had wanted to do but fell up short. Star Wars is a huge setting, and even within the time frame of the main films, you can tell a compelling story without having to make it a call-forward to the Death Star II—probably the nearest parallel I can draw is the corpus of World War II media: some are dramas, some are romances, some are outright comedies; some focus on the front line, some are set behind the lines, and some never leave home base. Even the documentaries can't encompass the full scope of it all; nearly ninety years on and we're still finding new ways to tell its stories. Why should Star Wars be any different?

Especially given the sheer mass of untapped lore, even after the Expanded Universe was purged. A couple weeks ago I was revisiting a homebrew roleplaying game I was in several years back, and in contrast to everyone else who treated it straight-faced, I played a Quixotic mercenary company that wove in and out of established canon in the vein of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead—I am not well-versed in the EU and wound up on multiple wiki dives to research specific details, and as much as I dunk on Wookieepedia, I can only admire the passion the universe attracts: researching EU-era Celanon revealed a society split between a Guild-ruled plutocratic capital city and basically the rest of the planet living as peasantry. Maybe about two paragraphs of information, but a whole story lurking beneath.

tl;dr: Andor good, treat Star Wars as a setting instead of a genre.

The thing is that the esteem Andor enjoys proves my point (and esp @tjs282's axiom).

Here's the other thing. "The galaxy" isn't a setting. I know there are star-charts of where all the systems are relative to one another. But only super-fans know those. The settings in Star Wars are defined only in being some kind of geographic feature (for the whole planet): desert-planet, swamp-planet, cloud-planet, ice-planet, city-planet, volcano-planet. And sometimes by relative distance from one to another, as established on an ad hoc basis by dialogue, like Luke's that I mentioned.

Stories set in the WWII timeframe can all work, regardless of how much they directly concern the war because we know (living on it) where on the planet Morocco is relative to the main fighting of the war.

If you want to tell some other story than Death-Star Story (or one directly connected to it) there's no point in being in the Star-Wars universe in the first place. Because everything in that setting was just visual support for that story. (Look at all of these different cultures being impacted by the Empire and its Death Star).

By the way, this is one of the reasons, I think, for why the franchise has been faulted for its handling of (on our Earth) racially-diverse characters. Boyega feels they didn't do anything meaningful with his character. But what is Blackness in this galaxy? It hasn't been defined. Our cultures give the human element that Egon's video calls for, but no Star Wars world's culture is developed enough for that to bear meaningfully on a character's motives and decisions. Sand people ride single file, to hide their numbers. What else do we know about them? We know that factoid because that factoid is meaningful at one moment in the Death-Star story. So, let's say we want to tell a story about a Sandperson. All the story can concern is whether he rides single file or not. The Sandpeople feel like a culture. That was Lucas' genius: to make the set-decoration visually evoke whole distinct cultures. But they're not developed as cultures beyond that superficial visual level.

No one will be more happy than me if they start telling interesting stories in this space. It feels to me too as though they ought to be able to do so. But until they manage to I've got my theory as to why they keep failing to do so. We're expecting something of the galaxy that it isn't built to give us. It gave us the one thing it was built to give us.

Make a new galaxy for your new story.

I disagree that the limits are the setting itself. I think it's moreso those making storyboard, cannon, and marketting decisions - first Lucas, and now Disney. I believe the old novel, ciomicbook, and Westend Games tabletop RPG franchise, before Lucas pulled the plug on it, and despite the fact that both Lucas and Disney mined many elements from it, also prove this point.

 

[Gori the Grey]

It's the cinematic storytelling that my theory addresses. That's part of what I had in mind in mentioning the reduction of cultures to visual cues that suggest a whole culture but with nothing substantial behind them. Keep in mind, I think Lucas' doing that is a major part of his genius--dirtying down, to give a sense that the objects in the universe are used. But it's also why his galaxy is a trap for future storytellers. Disnefication is part of the problem, of course. And the video makes a good point about "making you feel like a kid again" vs "treating you like a child." But I think it's more than just Disney. This whole world was built for its one story.

In fact, the right way to go would be this. Make a new, StarWars-esque, galaxy, but designed from the outset for ongoing story telling. The biggest thing that would involve is banning any one-time, threat-to-the-whole-galaxy-sized threat. Buncha little Sarumans with no Sauron, so that each little cluster of heroes could have its adventure without exhausting the whole galaxy.

 

[EgonSpengler]

If you want to tell some other story than Death-Star Story (or one directly connected to it) there's no point in being in the Star-Wars universe in the first place.

This is the "IP vs non-IP" struggle going on in H'wood right now. The primary argument in favor of placing a new story inside the world of an existing IP is on the business side, name-recognition, to get funding for a project and draw audiences. On the entertainment podcasts I listen to, there's a lot of handwringing over the lack of original movies and shows, and the relative success of those that do dare to create a new setting.

On the creative side, having an established background on which to lean provides writers (and perhaps also actors and directors) a quick shorthand of references they can expect the audience to know. That's the reason to set a movie or a tv show in something close to the real world. You can orient your audience in your setting, in time and in place, with an "establishing shot", or with clothes, cars, and needle-drops from a time period. That's one reason movies and shows set in historical periods over-emphasize the characteristic elements of those time periods. The 1940s were never so 1940s as they appear in contemporary movies set back then. These days we see a lot of movies and shows set in the 1980s, and I can say that the 1980s were never quite so quintessentially 1980s as Stranger Things is. Using an existing fictional setting for a whole new story with whole new characters lets the creatives lean on the audience's preexisting familiarity. That can include upending those preexisting expectations, such as when Andor made TIE fighters scary.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Eventually, the universe I'm imagining would have all of the advantages of an existing, established world.

So, movie-cluster #1 is set in one particular sector of the galaxy, one system. We establish its territory, its menacing threat, the scrappy batch of heroes who are going to face down that threat.

In the later movies of that cluster, those heroes reach out for help to people in sector 2. That sector feels exotic, culturally and visually, to the world we've been living in during the first set of movies. And little hints are dropped about what's going on in their world.

There have to be some limits on travelling to the various sectors, incidentally. You can't have a hyperdrive whisk you anywhere in the galaxy. It's a long, dangerous trip, maybe an adventure in its own right (Marco Polo, the European colonizers) to get from one sector to another.

Movie-cluster #2 now brings us into sector 2. We get more fully acquainted with its cultures, its visual scheme. It has its own sector-scaled threat, it's own scrappy batch of heroes to face down that threat. These heroes might reach out to the ones in sector 1 on occasion, but again, it's a long-distance, and sector 1 can only be of limited help to sector 2; they have to solve their problems on their own. Late in this cluster, we start getting a glimpse of sector 3. It's own cultures, its own struggles, a hint regarding who its Big Bad will be.

Movie cluster #3 goes and attends to the story that needs to be told in that sector. Occasional cameos of the stars from cluster 2, but on the whole our new batch of scrappy heroes is solving its own new problems.

Rinse, repeat. Enough rinsing and repeating that, by the time you've had eight 9-film clusters set in eight sectors, there's been time for a new threat to develop back in sector 1. Some of the original scrappy heroes are now wizened old sages helping the new generation of scrappy heroes confront the new threat. (so you've got your ST fan service and nostalgia).

Anyway, the point is, the whole total space (all eight sectors of it) is conceived and designed from the start to house ongoing stories, rather than a single climactic, galaxy-defining, galaxy-depleting tale.

 

[Clubber Lang]

Ripley -

‘Star Wars’: Sigourney Weaver in Talks to Join ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu’

​

 

[Clubber Lang]

 

[Clubber Lang]

Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) squares off against Mae (Amandla Stenberg) in this very first clip released from Star Wars: The Acolyte.An investigation into a shocking crime spree pits a respected Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae) against a dangerous warrior from his past (Amandla Stenberg). As more clues emerge, they travel down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems….

 

[Patine]

So, does this series mean Darth Bane, and the Sith Empire, and other lingering origin and background lore for the Sith are decononized, or do they spawn from this, or this is revival of those teachings, or what, I wonder? Disney once claimed they wanted to mine the franchise as much as they could, but I'm not sure how far that goes.

 

[JohannaK]

Hot stuff.

 

[Synobun]

So, does this series mean Darth Bane, and the Sith Empire, and other lingering origin and background lore for the Sith are decononized, or do they spawn from this, or this is revival of those teachings, or what, I wonder? Disney once claimed they wanted to mine the franchise as much as they could, but I'm not sure how far that goes.

I haven't been watching these clips, but Darth Bane et al take place almost a millennia before the Acolyte. The series is a century before Phantom Menace.

 

[Clubber Lang]

Lucas Cannes interview -

https://twitter.com/x/status/1794018944602259706

George Lucas Says There's

'No Original Thinking' in Hollywood, Studios Don't Have 'an Imagination'
"The stories they're telling are just old movies."
'Let's do a sequel, let's do another version of this movie.'

-----

and another

George Lucas Says Ideas in the Original “Sort of Got Lost” in Post-Disney ‘Star Wars’ Films​

Lucas reflected on his life in work in a wide-ranging chat in Cannes, where he received an honorary Palm d'Or.

“I’m a stubborn guy and I didn’t want people to tell me how to make my movies,” is how Star Wars creator George Lucas summed up the secret to his success, speaking to a crowd of fans at a packed Debussy theater in Cannes on Friday afternoon.


The 80-year-old filmmaker was being honored at the 77th Cannes festival with a Palme d’Or for his contribution to cinema, and the crowd, a much younger cohort than is usually seen at these events, whooped and hollered as Lucas walked on the stage. They were rapt as he sat down for a wide-ranging discussion of his life in the movie business.

Lucas said he felt “nostalgic” to be back in Cannes, where he presented his first feature, THX-1138, at the Directors’ Fortnight back in 1971. His THX-1138 co-writer and sound designer Walter Murch was in the audience as Lucas recalled how Warner Bros. didn’t want to send the duo to France for the premiere, forcing them to scrape together the money themselves. They couldn’t even get tickets for the screening and had to sneak in.


But “we weren’t really that interested in making money, we were interested in making movies,” said Lucas, speaking about his early career. He talked about being mentored by Francis Ford Coppola — whose latest epic, Megalopolis, premiered in Cannes this year — on the set of 1968 musical Finian’s Rainbow and later helping Coppola set up indie studio American Zoetrope. He outlined how he fought to get American Graffiti made, for just $750,000, and then how he had to battle the studio, Universal Artists, to get the movie into theaters. Studio execs wanted to dump the film, starring a crowd of then-unknowns, including Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Richard Dreyfus and Harrison Ford, on TV before a series of test screenings in front of screaming crowds — “It was like a rock concert,” Lucas recalls — convinced them to give theatrical a try. Starting in just a few theaters, the film went on to earn $115 million in the U.S.


Lucas’ deal included backend residuals off the net gross of the film, which typically meant no money. “Because they would keep adding stuff to the budget so it never got paid off, net was almost like fool’s gold,” the director said. “But American Graffiti was making money so fast, I actually made a lot of money off it. It was the first time anybody had ever made money on net.”
The film also caught the eye of Allan Ladd Jr., then head of production at Fox, who approached Lucas after a screening and said, the director recalled: “You got any other movies? And I said ‘Well, I’ve got this sort of science fiction fantasy, crazy 1930s-style movie, with dogs driving spaceships.’ And he said ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you want’ … and he hired me and the rest is kind of history.”


Star Wars is the franchise most folks in the audience came to hear Lucas discuss, and the director did not disappoint. He talked about securing licensing and merchandising rights for the first film, something unheard of at the time. “The studios didn’t have licensing departments … it took longer to design a toy than it did to make a movie,” he recalled, and how he got control of the sequel rights, in part because Fox at the time was teetering on bankruptcy. “They didn’t have faith in the movie,” Lucas said. “The studio was going bankrupt anyway, they had a lot of movies already and they were desperate.”


Lucas defended his Star Wars prequel films against the haters, arguing that critics have forgotten that Star Wars was never meant to be a grown-up movie. “It was supposed to be a kid’s movie for 12-year-olds that were going through puberty, who don’t know what they’re doing, and are asking all the big questions: What should I be worried about? What’s important in life?” he said. “And Star Wars has all those things in there. They’re buried in there but you definitely get it, especially if you’re young.”

The negative response to his Star Wars prequels, Lucas argued, came from “critics and fans who had been 10 years old when they saw the first one” and didn’t want to watch a children’s film. The public trashing of Jar Jar Binks — one of the first figures to be canceled on the then-nascent internet — reminded Lucas of the original response to C-3PO. “Everybody said the same thing about 3-PO, that he was irritating and we should get rid of him,” said Lucas. “When I did the third one it was the Ewoks: ‘Those are little teddy bears. This is a kid’s movie, we don’t want to see a kids’ movie. I said: ‘It is a kids’ movie. It’s always been a kids’ movie.'”


Lucas also defended his decision to go back and “clean up” his original trilogy, using new digital technology to make the film look the way he always wanted it to.


“I’m a firm believer that the director, or the writer, or the filmmaker should have a right to have his movie be the way he wants it,” says Lucas. Fans hoping for a 4K restored version of the original 1977 Star Wars shouldn’t hold their breath.


“We did release the original one on laserdisc and everybody got really mad, they said, ‘It looks terrible.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know it did,'” said Lucas. “That is what it looked like.”


Discussing the Star Wars sequels made after he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 (for $4.05 billion), Lucas said the new corporate bosses got a lot wrong.


“I was the one who really knew what Star Wars was … who actually knew this world, because there’s a lot to it. The Force, for example, nobody understood the Force,” he said. “When they started other ones after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in [the original] sort of got lost. But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”

 

[Gori the Grey]

I smiled at this part

Lucas defended his Star Wars prequel films against the haters, arguing that critics have forgotten that Star Wars was never meant to be a grown-up movie. “It was supposed to be a kid’s movie for 12-year-olds that were going through puberty, who don’t know what they’re doing, and are asking all the big questions: What should I be worried about? What’s important in life?” he said. “And Star Wars has all those things in there. They’re buried in there but you definitely get it, especially if you’re young.”

Because I was exactly 12 years old when Star Wars came out.

 

[Plotinus]

Because all kids’ films revolve around protracted negotiations about trade embargoes.