As many of you have noticed, my most recent update (which effectively brings the 1982-83 cycle to a close, though a special interlude post is in development) marks the beginning of the end for this timeline, since only three cycles remain. In fact, for the first time, I've been sketching out the list of updates for
all remaining cycles, rather than just the upcoming cycle. That's one of the reasons the latest More to Come has been slow in... well, coming. That said, I don't foresee completing this timeline until well into 2015, so there's still
plenty of time before we reach the end.
And both are the worst movies of the series.
You're arguing that
Jedi was worse than
Attack of the Clones, or merely that each was the worst installment of their respective trilogies?
Because arguing that
Jedi is worse than
Attack of the Clones? I thought only Darth Vader could be so bold!
Having a group of primitives defeat a more technically advanced and powerful enemy does have something of a resonance with the [verboten]. I wonder how much the Battle of Endor was influenced by the Seventies films of that conflict - which won't have been made ITTL.
Including, of course, Apocalypse Now, directed by his friend and colleague, Francis Ford Coppola. I should point out that a more timely (and somewhat less provocative) inspiration for the Ewoks would be the Afghans (with the Soviets as the Empire), although I don't doubt that Lucas had the opposing forces of the overseas quagmire in mind, given how it cast such a long shadow over his generation.
They actually described Genevieve Bujold as a "Canadian Dis-Connection". Seriously.
I can't decide whether that quote is worthy of praise or scorn
Thande said:
I might be able to achieve that, though not right now as video editing takes a large investment of time.
All the same, thank you
very much for offering!
Thande said:
Now my opinions of the Star Wars films seems to be a bit different to most, I think because I saw them so relatively late in life--the first time I had ever seen any Star Wars (except a vague memory of the opening chase of the original film being on telly in Wales on a holiday in 1987ish before someone changed the channel) was when the original film's Special Edition was released as "Episode IV: A New Hope" (very confusing for me at the time, though I now know that subtitle had been added to previous re-releases too) in 1997. Actually, I tell a lie, I had seen a vague glimpse of the three films when they were previewed at the start of a VHS tape I bought advertising upcoming releases, so that would've been when the trilogy was first released on VHS. Remember when you could actually fast forward through previews? But I digress[FONT="].[/FONT]
[FONT="] Funnily enough, you and I first saw the original trilogy at roughly the same stage in our lives - I first saw them on television in the run-up to the television premiere of
The Phantom Menace in the autumn of 2001. Which means I
also saw the
Special Edition versions first (in fact, I've
never seen the original versions). I'm therefore old enough to remember my perception of each film going into them.[/FONT]
Thande said:
Anyway, because of this I had a different experience. I rate the original Star Wars trilogy as Return of the Jedi - Empire Strikes Back - original (A New Hope) in descending order of awesome. When I first went to see the Special Edition of A New Hope in 1997, I found it very underwhelming. It was partly that I had seen a lot of ripoffs and 'inspired by' things before the original (e.g. "Battle Beyond the Stars", "The Last Starfighter", and the 80s Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers series). So the original looked kind of...generic by comparison. I lost interest in Star Wars until I got a technical manual for research and got into the Expanded Universe, then got Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi out of the video rental place on VHS to watch. Because that technical manual happened to never mention that Vader was Luke's father, that was a genuine surprise to me at the time--in those days when the internet was still flashing green Courier New text on a black background (and was obsessed with the X-Files to the exclusion of all else), I had somehow managed to miss that spoiler[FONT="].[/FONT]
[FONT="] I "knew" very little about
Jedi through pop-cultural osmosis, to the point that I didn't even know how the original trilogy ended! (I did know about Vader being Luke's father, of course, which surely must be one of the top five "spoilers" that
everyone knows - how
you were able to dodge that particular bullet, Thande, is one for the ages.) Based on first impressions, I'd rank the films in the exact opposite order that you did -
Star Wars, then
Empire, then
Jedi. I actually
enjoyed already knowing everything about the first movie - I can't help but be reminded of Umberto Eco's critique of
Casablanca (about how the sheer volume of clichés somehow propel the material into profundity) and feel that it also applies here. The archetypes are strong with this one
[/FONT]
I think Lucas had always intended to make a series, at least one of the earlier scripts refers to a sequel and gives a bit of a teaser.
Of course it's a teaser that bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of the later films, so, especially given how the basic plot of the original was largely unchanged from the start, it's probable that he just wanted to make a sequel, and only started actually planning it after the film was a success.
Yeah, Star Wars is a bit more ambiguous than most at least, but it wasn't filmed as a trilogy from the start (well, it couldn't have been considering they had no idea how well it would do).
I'm inclined to agree with this assessment. Once new input was sought in the making of
Empire (primarily from Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan), the story went off in whole new directions that Lucas had not originally planned. The classic example is the characterization of Darth Vader, who was a wholly separate character from Luke's father in the early drafts. The apparent reference to a "dark father" in his name is purely coincidence. Likewise, Leia wasn't originally planned to be Luke's long-lost sister (explaining those kisses in the earlier films) - the
Economy Cast trope in action.
Thande said:
It is curious how the trilogy has risen up as a format. At least in literature, The Lord of the Rings is probably responsible, and the irony is that The Lord of the Rings isn't meant to be a trilogy - it's one continuous story, subdivided into six "books", and was only published that way because there was a paper shortage after the war. A few years ago I actually saw an edition of LOTR where they split it into seven books (six plus appendices) and claimed it was "as the author intended" (which is a bit debatable but still interesting)[FONT="].[/FONT]
[FONT="] The popularity of the format in film is easy enough to understand, because it's basically the traditional three-act structure stretched out to cover three films. Of course, because so many of these "trilogies" follow the pioneering
Star Wars example of
one mostly self-contained film followed by two closely-integrated sequels (many of which are shot back-to-back), there's very often only enough material for one more movie... which is ultimately stretched out into two. (I consider the "last book in the franchise is adapted into two movies" trend started by
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to be a natural outgrowth of this practice.) As a result, either the middle installment[/FONT]
or the final installment is distinctly weak compared to the other, as well as to the original.
He always wanted to make 9 movies[FONT="]! [/FONT]
[FONT="] I'd always heard the original number was 12, which was then cut down to nine, and finally six.[/FONT] (As you note, in cutting nine down into six, most of that planned sequel trilogy was tacked onto
Jedi.)
Barbarossa Rotbart said:
If I remember correctly Episode IV got its title and number at the time the movie was released a second time (and that happened before Episode V was released or even produced).
Star Wars was given the subtitle
Episode IV: A New Hope upon its third release, in 1981. This was
after the release of
The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, so I can only imagine how confused audiences must have been by the proclamation that it was
Episode V without that frame of reference. (Then again, it was
marketed solely as
The Empire Strikes Back - and it's only been since the 2004 DVD releases that the original trilogy has been marketed by their cumbersome long-form titles (and kudos to Wikipedia for holding out, though shame on IMDb for caving in).
One could feel sorry for Paramount because they didn't really do anything special by Hollywood standards - it could really have been almost any of the studios, so feeling sad for the one it ended up being (even as one acknowledges the need for the sacrifice, and the inevitability that someone would fall) is not so strange.
Paramount were the ones caught with their hands in the cookie jar, but what they did was by no means exceptional. They just happened to try it against the only people who wouldn't back down.
LordInsane said:
Honestly, even knowing that there are sequels and having seen them, Episode IV still feels like a decent self-contained story - taken on its own, the big bad of the story is dead, the 'heavy' was last seen in a situation he is unlikely to survive, an early scene establishes a reason why the Rebel victory at the end might very well cause the Empire to collapse, and the mood at the end is one of jubilant celebration. So... in what way does the end make clear that there will be a sequel?
Hints were that the real big bad was never shown and only mentioned and that the other bigbad survived and escaped (he managed to stabilize his TIE-fighter). Also it was clear that the whole Imperial Navy still exists, only the Emperor's superweapon had been destroyed.
Vader's survival was definitely a sequel hook - he lives to fight another day, which provides motive for Luke to avenge Obi-Wan's death. (To their credit, they do follow up on this in
Empire, even if it gets sidetracked by the paternity bomb.) And, of course, the Empire endures, even though they've suffered a decisive - perhaps even catastrophic - defeat. To be sure, there was more than sufficient closure in case a sequel was never made, which makes the film work very well as a self-contained story. It's
very difficult for a movie to walk that fine line, but
Star Wars pulls it off with aplomb.
Congratulations on writing such an enthralling timeline, definitely one of the best I've read (& the best Pop Culture TL) on AH. It took me a few months to catch up (I prefer to read everyone's comments as well
), but I finally made it here - shame we're nearing the end[FONT="]![/FONT]
[FONT="] Thank you very much for your exceedingly generous praise, AndyF - and welcome aboard! Anyone who [FONT="]has[/FONT] managed to read through over 4,000 posts
eek:[FONT="])[/FONT] has earned my respect. [/FONT]
AndyF said:
For your reader statistics, my year of birth is 1969. My top 5 Star Trek episodes are (in no particular order):
Space Seed
Balance of Terror
Mirror, Mirror
The Doomsday Machine
The Trouble with Tribbles
Special mention to The City on the Edge of Forever, The Enterprise Incident & The Tholian Web[FONT="].[/FONT]
[FONT="] Thank you for sharing, this has all been noted and logged - alongside all the other data points[FONT="] (and those who haven't yet sub[FONT="]m[FONT="]itted are welcome to add their[FONT="] ow[FONT="]n[FONT="]!).[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
AndyF said:
Incidentally, my first memory of any TV is Doctor Who - episode 2 of Colony in Space. Unsurprisingly, DW is my favourite TV programme!
[FONT="]Impressive that you have such a precise memory! If I had to
guess what the first thing I remember watching was, I would say
Wheel of Fortune, but that's purely hypoth[FONT="]e[FONT="]sis[/FONT][/FONT].[/FONT]
AndyF said:
I have to congratulate you on disassembling my childhood [...] You weren't kidding about this not being a utopia!
A very impressive roundup of changes from OTL! You've done half my job for me already
Items from TWR keep on leaking into OTL. The way fan-films are taking off, it wouldn't surprise me if episodes from TWR's Seasons 3-5 started appearing online over the next decade[FONT="].[/FONT]
[FONT="] I would
love to see one of the big fan-film series take on "
The Meeting of the Minds" - I'd be more than happy to flesh out the story and tweak the details so that they agree with OTL canon [/FONT][FONT="]
[/FONT]
Fantastic update on the 'Trial of the Century' - I wonder when the movie version gets made? or is it TV mini-series material instead?
[FONT="] Let's just say I've been mulling over potential cast members in my head, and I like the look of some of them! [/FONT][FONT="]
You're all welcome to suggest who might play the principals as well![/FONT]
Ogrebear said:
The Trial's effects however will be huge and reverb across the industry, if indeed they play ball, legislation or not! I wonder if any studio would consider ditching California for another country with accounting more to their tastes or will multiple countries enact similar laws to the US to pull their home grown studios in line?
Excellent question. In fact, the Financial Accounting Act will probably inspire many other countries to pass similar legislation, in part because of close economic ties, but also because it was inspired in part by
International Financial Reporting Standards, which have been adopted by countries all around the world - though there is one prominent laggard: the United States (surprise, surprise).
Ogrebear said:
Speaking of movies- I was wondering if
Fire and Ice still gets made?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_and_Ice_(1983_film)
I'll be sure to mention if it does... the next time I cover the movies
Maybe they'll decamp north to Canada, like a lot of film production has IOTL.
That's certainly a possibility, especially since not one, but
two of the remaining studios (United Artists-cum-Paramount and MGM) happen to be owned by Canadian interests.
Yvonmukluk said:
With the end of the timeline in sight, I'm especially interested to see the direction Doctor Who goes, since 1986 is a rather infamous year in the calenders of Doctor Who fans as the beginning of the end. (Hopefully there's still a few multi-doctor stories tucked away as
there were in OTL (assuming there's an anniversary special in 1983, there's a whole bunch of different directions it could have gone-see the 'production' section of the wikipedia page for details. I mean the most obvious would be if the Fourth Doctor appeared in the show (assuming he's not the incumbent, naturally). I could see Pertwee reprising his role on TV more willingly, since he obviously left under happier circumstances than he did in our universe But then I suppose that might be beyond the bounds of the TL.)
All I can say is that you're very much helping to justify my decision to give
Doctor Who one more update all to himself!
Yvonmukluk said:
But literally everything about this timeline is great, and I'm interested to see how the whole thing wraps up. Thanks for everything, Brainbin!
Well, thank
you for such lovely compliments!