Star Wars: Original/Prequel Trilogies & General Thread

[dx23]

Disney have flat out said the Dark Horse deal is dead with those comics going to Marvel. Dark Horse is more or less dead via this deal. I wonder where this will leave Hellboy?

Mignola owns Hellboy and the other stuff he has created for them so it wouldn't surprise me to see that character go with Image, IDW or Dynamite.

I feel bad for Dark Horse since they kept the Star Wars franchise alive all those years between the original trilogy and the prequels and have created a whole new universe for all the fans. Marvel has not done anything besides a couple of Pixar and Muppets comics, while before that, Boom had been flourishing with their line of Disney comics featuring Ducktales and Darkwing Duck.

[dx23]

Video of George Lucas talking about the future of Star Wars after the sale and this one with Bob Iger and Lucas talking about the reasons of the sale. Another thing I have read but not confirmed is that in this sale Disney also acquired the rights to Indiana Jones but Paramount still owns the first four films and the distribution rights. So what does that mean for Indy? I really don't know.

Also, for years now Lucas had been talking on expanding his franchise to TV and for some reason no company or studio wanted to produce any of this besides WB/Cartoon Network doing the animated series. This sale will give Lucas what he wanted in terms of continuing the Star Wars universe through TV shows.

[Markson]

Good grief, first Disney purchases Marvel, and now Lucasfilm? Should this continue, my entire childhood will one day be contained and curated under a (metaphorically) single roof.

[Cold Bishop]

Maybe now Lucas can now get around to those small films he's been itching to make.

*long pause*

*bursts out laughing*

[rspaight]

Apparently Fox owns the distribution rights for Star Wars "in perpetuity" and the other five existing films until May 2020.

Of course, they just distribute whatever Lucasfilm gives them to distribute, so there's no reason why Disney/Lucasfilm couldn't now give them Blu-Rays of the original unaltered trilogy to distribute, and everyone makes a big pile of money.

[dx23]

I wonder who gets the rights to The Star Wars Holiday Special or is that film going to the permanent vault with Song of the South?

[Mr Sausage]

If Lucas had that kind of ability to see with a camera, the prequels wouldn't have been the garbage they were.

I think it was his inability to write a decent script with proper dialogue was the biggest contributor here.

I agree with you about the third Harry Potter being the best. But really I don't know what anyone could get out of further Star Wars films even with a talented director helming them. What exactly is left to tell? How interesting, really, are further stories of knights, princesses, and bandits in space? All the interesting characters have either been disposed of or were played by actors too old to reprise their roles, and I think we've all been lightsabered to death by this point.

I expect the next Star Wars film will just be another bloated, CGI-heavy Sci-Fi epic with ponderous dialogue and endless battles. Only with more of a self aware 'holy shit, it's Star Wars you guys!!!!1' mentality.

[matrixschmatrix]

I think there are probably still interesting stories to be told in the wider Star Wars universe, and maybe even interesting stories that stick broadly with the Skywalker family and its legacy- though most of them seem like they would be heavily political, negotiating the shape of the new government that forms in the wake of the Empire's destruction, and they're not the kind of things that fit into broad Joseph Campell strokes the way the original trilogy does. Still, maybe better writers and directors could combine to pull it off.

In all likelihood, it will be colorful nonsense marketed to five year olds that continue until everyone's exhausted of them. But that's what Star Wars has been for a while now, so no big loss there.

[Mr Sausage]

Does Space Politics really sound that interesting to people? Aside from the fact that politics aren't all that exciting, what are the chances that you're going to get a sophisticated and detailed depiction of politics in a context of pulp action/adventure and broad archetypes? Probably not without making it totally different from the prior films, in which case the fact that it's called Star Wars is arbitrary. And even then the movie would probably work better in an actual historical context (which the Star Wars films are haphazardly cribbing from anyway).

People way overstate the influence of Joseph Cambell on the Star Wars films. You don't need to've read him to construct a movie like Star Wars. There's nothing intellectual, analytic, or cleverly reworked in those movies; its materials and narrative aren't contained as its subject. It is literally and sincerely the story of an elder knight, an apprentice knight, a bandit, and the bandit's clever pet sneaking into a fortress to rescue a princess from a dark lord's clutches. A thirteen-year-old could come up with that--and not because it's juvenile or easy, but because everybody has heard a story like that. There is nothing original or knowing or learned about coming up with that kind of story.

[Murdoch]

Does Space Politics really sound that interesting to people? Aside from the fact that politics aren't all that exciting, what are the chances that you're going to get a sophisticated and detailed depiction of politics in a context of pulp action/adventure and broad archetypes?

Given that the politics are one of the most compelling aspects of the noughties' incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, I think that something similar in the Star Wars universe could be equally interesting if whoever is to helm a new version can sidestep the action/fantasy tropes of the past films and expand upon what's actually interesting about Star Wars (at least to me) - this vast universe of species that has been so poorly explored in the prequels. If BSG can make itself into an semi-allegory for the Iraq War, Star Wars has the narrative potential to become something more than space battles and light sabers. I doubt it will though.

[matrixschmatrix]

You certainly don't need to have read Campbell to appreciate Star Wars, but I think the fact that Lucas was consciously cribbing from Campbell did have some effect on the series, particularly things like the cave on Dagobah- but yeah, it's very straightforward archetype stuff, and my point was that there aren't really straightforward hero's journey stories to tell in continuing the story past RotJ. Unless you want to do a Beowulf vs. the dragon thing with Luke, which could be interesting, but would be a definitive end point in a way that I doubt Disney would accept.

In talking about a potentially interesting politically motivated story, I was thinking in particular about the later parts of Lawrence of Arabia, where it transitions from a simple story of fighting ze Germans to a complex one about how messy trying to create a new nation is. I think you could make something like that work in a Star Wars context, but it would certainly be a dramatic departure, and what we've seen of 'Star Wars does politics' in the prequels was such unmitigated crap that I definitely don't have much hope.

[dx23]

Another funny thing going around the net in regards to the sale is that Disney will be able to finally release Muppet Babies. Apparently that show was hold up on DVD due to the fact that the characters had a lot of dream sequences featuring scenes from the Indy and Star Wars movies.

[Brian C]

In talking about a potentially interesting politically motivated story, I was thinking in particular about the later parts of Lawrence of Arabia, where it transitions from a simple story of fighting ze Germans to a complex one about how messy trying to create a new nation is. I think you could make something like that work in a Star Wars context, but it would certainly be a dramatic departure, and what we've seen of 'Star Wars does politics' in the prequels was such unmitigated crap that I definitely don't have much hope.

But now that Lucas is out of the picture, would you say you have A New Hope?

Sorry.

[knives]

In terms of further stories in theory Disney could crib from the expanded universe and make Star Wars films taking place in the universe, but with none of the characters from the previous six films.

[Murdoch]

Another funny thing going around the net in regards to the sale is that Disney will be able to finally release Muppet Babies. Apparently that show was hold up on DVD due to the fact that the characters had a lot of dream sequences featuring scenes from the Indy and Star Wars movies.

That's amazing news, I've been wanting to re-watch this for years, hallmark of my childhood.

[matrixschmatrix]

Will it actually help? Disney didn't get the rights to any of the extant movies, did they?

[knives]

Another funny thing going around the net in regards to the sale is that Disney will be able to finally release Muppet Babies. Apparently that show was hold up on DVD due to the fact that the characters had a lot of dream sequences featuring scenes from the Indy and Star Wars movies.

That's amazing news, I've been wanting to re-watch this for years, hallmark of my childhood.

All of the episodes are on youtube. They don't hold up at all.

[Mr Sausage]

My point was that "cribbing from Cambell" is totally unnecessary. There isn't a single thing in Star Wars that couldn't have been easily thought up without having read a single page of Cambell. And, indeed, people were doing just that well before Cambell came along. Sci-Fi has always been closely married with the genre of Romance. Look at something like Dune, which has palace intrigue between Houses of nobility as they vie for authority, rather like a space age war of the roses. People ride worms, but all you have to do is say they ride wyrms and suddenly you're no longer in space, you're in an earthly fantasy with a minimum of effort.

[matrixschmatrix]

Well true, which was more or less Campbell's whole point- but just as Dune is also inflected by being a self-conscious Mohammed story, there are aspects of Star Wars that Lucas put in specifically because Campbell said they were part of the mythic character arc. Obviously though, that's hard to disentangle, because Campbell was trying to describe elements that are common to all stories.

[knives]

I don't have an egg in this basket, but you could argue that what Lucas was doing is similar to what the French playwrights were doing with Aristotle.

[Murdoch]

They don't hold up at all.

My childhood self refuses to accept this.

[knives]

You know it to be true (sorry for that)

[Mr Sausage]

Well true, which was more or less Campbell's whole point- but just as Dune is also inflected by being a self-conscious Mohammed story, there are aspects of Star Wars that Lucas put in specifically because Campbell said they were part of the mythic character arc. Obviously though, that's hard to disentangle, because Campbell was trying to describe elements that are common to all stories.

He used Cambell as a convenient summary of things he'd already seen or read many times before in other places. A lot of people talk as tho' the use of Cambell contributed an intellectual element the story. It didn't any more than if Lucas had picked up an anthology of myths and cobbled together his tale, which is pretty much how he used Cambell. I was being serious when I said a 13 year old could put together this kind of story in rather the same naive way. It's a common inheritance, not the result of serious insight on behalf of Lucas. There is nothing in its archetypal plot to distinguish it from all the other pulp sci-fi tales using Romance narratives (and which precede Cambell's work.) I don't know why Cambell's name gets raised as if he actually contributed anything meaningful to the movie.

[hearthesilence]

From Steven Hart on Salon.com:

Beneath all the pseudo-mythic Joseph Campbell hogwash, the roots of George Lucas' empire lie not in "The Odyssey" but in classic and pulp 20th century sci-fi.

[matrixschmatrix]

Well that's broadly true, but it's also a false dichotomy- the sci fi and adventure serials also have the legacy of mythology influencing their storylines, as do westerns and noirs and pretty much every genre stuff ever. I don't really disagree with Sausage that Star Wars is very much a generic adventure template such as one would probably come up with if one were trying to make any kind of big epic story, I just think some of the specifics derive from Lucas reading Campbell. No more so than are derived from him watching The Hidden Fortress though, surely.