There'll be no more of this Obi Wan Kenobi gibberish!

[stevethefish]

I didn't care for the prequels, hated the sequels. I enjoyed Mandalorian, with only a few gripes. Boba Fett started boring but got better. It was enjoyable, but still a bit dumb. This new Obi Wan show though... I have zero interest in watching it. The Robot Head channel does a good job picking apart the sloppy writing and bad character motivations in these shows. The latest one was a lot of griping for the sake of griping, and showing a bit of ignorance. The T-47 Airspeeder was meant for moving cargo pods around, thus the tow cable. They're meant to be used as work vehicles, but installing guns on them to turn them into a makeshift airforce on Hoth. Technically they weren't "snowspeeders" since they had to be adapted to the cold. IIRC, they didn't even call them "snowspeeders" but rather simply "speeders," and AT-ATs were called "Imperial Walkers." So I don't care if the show says that they are used for hauling sewage, and griping about this seems to be Robot Head's ignorance of established Star Wars lore. Regardless, he does make a good point on the dumb, mismatched visuals with the snowspeeder firing at that Sith woman at point blank range and how stupid it looks.

I was willing to overlook dumb things in Mandalorian like that stupid joke of the biker scouts and how they coudn't even shoot a soda can right in front of them, or stuff like the viewscreen of a wrecked TIE Fighter with broken glass (transparisteel, anyone?). Overall it was enjoyable. Even ignoring the rotten Disney internal corporate politics like canning Gina Carano for stupid and petty reasons, these shows are going nowhere. At this point, the only thing I will get excited for is when Adywan finally finishes his fan edit of Return of the Jedi. ---Just as long as he doesn't make the B-Wings into mini Death Stars like that cartoon with the helicopter lightsabers and other dumb ideas did.

 

[the Baron]

I didn't like any of the franchise after "Return of the Jedi." And I remember the time when it wasn't certain that any sequels would be produced, let alone all 9 and all the spin-offs. "Star Wars" (screw "Episode 4") is still the best, and it stands alone.

Underlying the sci-fi was the classic hero's tale. The young hero has to go on a quest to defeat evil, save good, aided by a wise older warrior and a collection of friends, and in the end, he wins the beautiful princess. Classic.

And it revolutionized science fiction. Before "Star Wars" was produced, generally, with few exceptions, sci-fi movies depicted clean, sterile 'verses, where everything was Lycra and chrome, nothing broke, nothing needed fixing, and people didn't go to the bathroom. The "Star Wars" universe was real, it was dirty, people worked for a living and often had to make do with things that were dirty, scuffed, stained, and a step away from breaking. The difference was like that between classic Westerns and Sergio Leone's movies.

I saw "Star Wars" ten times that summer. I was only 13, too, and I had to get my parents to drive me to the various theaters. But that's how much of an impression it made.

And yeah, sure, in the opening credits crawl and in the novelization, and in other print, there was mention that this was one story out of a potential trilogy of triologies. But the movie was a gamble, and if it had failed at the box office, George Lucas would be a footnote, remembered perhaps only for is student film, "THX-1138".

Having said that, I agree about "The Mandalorian", but what appeals to me is the backstory that is really a Western in space, similar to "Firefly". The Mandalorian is almost Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, and some of the episodes retell stories like "The Magnificent Seven" (itself a retelling of "Seven Samurai"). As a series, it's well-written, well-directed, and well-acted. I only saw the first season, though. Once Disney canned Gina Carano, I didn't renew.

 

[the Baron]

Oh, and the attack on the Death Star is a retelling of the Battle of Midway from the old "Incredible Victory" perspective. The outnumbered heroes stage a valiant, gallant, self-sacrificing attack on an intersteller Kido Butai. Gold Squadron is Torpedo 8. And it's through pluck, and more than a little luck, that Luke "Dick Best" Skywalker makes that hit that destroys the Empire's flight deck and saves the day.

 

[stevethefish]

Oh, I forgot to mention that apparently now two adults and a child can now fit into the cramped, backseat of a snowspeeder. Brilliant.

Battle of Midway? That does make sense. If I had heard that before, I cannot remember. The end of the movie played out like a mix between 633 Squadron and The Dambusters, with spoken lines nearly plagiarized from the films. ("I count about 20 guns. Some in the field, some in the tower.") I have both the original Midway and the new movie in my collection and rather enjoy both. I appreciated how the new version didn't try to be a remake of the original.

Yeah, Mandalorian is a total Western, right down to its music. Apparently it was a fluke, because Kennedy was do distracted with ruining the sequel movies to pay attention to a decent series being made with no input from her.

For me, I saw Empire when I was 5 in the theater. I got a Boba Fett figure and Snowspeeder for Christmas in 1980 and then my parents took us to see the movie (probably at the dollar theater). That experience really blew me away. I had seen Superman the year before and it put me to sleep, but Empire really held my attention and had a huge impact on me to last the rest of my life.

 

[the Baron]

There's another connection to the US Navy in WWII, in Ralph McQuarrie's "Star Wars Portfolio", the collection of conceptual sketches published after the movie was released. One of the sketches he did was of a rebel pilot running across the hangar floor to his ship:



The caption on the print noted that it was inspired by the photo of a USN pilot running across the flight deck to his plane.

The "Portfolio" was really cool. There was a sketch of the duel between Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader, with a comment that Vader's design was heavily inspired by samurai armor.

Unfortunately, my copy of the portfolio suffered water damage in storage and was completely ruined. I never replaced it.

 

[stevethefish]

Hey, look at that X-Wing in the back! It's the same style that was re-used for the crappy Disney trilogy. The X-Wings looked cool in that movie, but the cockpit interiors were rather plain-looking and unconvincing.

I've never heard of this Portfolio book. Sounds cool. It's hard to find any SW reference books anymore these days that aren't infested with prequel or sequel crap.