No, Luke, I am your father. And Princess Leia is your sister. Also I built C3PO, and R2D2 was my copilot
i just realized–it’s precisely one coincidence per movie, right? They made Vader his father in episode 5, Leia his sister in episode 6. Then C3PO’s origin is in episode 1, then R2D2 is introduced as Anakin’s copilot in episode 2. We’re just lucky they didn’t add anything in episode 3—well, no, they had it turn out that Yoda survived the extermination of the Jedi in part because he was rescued by a wookie who happened to be Chewbacca right? Nothing involving Darth Vader at least
R2 also started his copilot career in episode 1 afair (when child-Anakin stole one of those Naboo fighters to destroy the trade federation droid control ship)
i am reginald reagan aka RAGIN' RAYGUNS
estimation, atoms, why people are wrong. reggie reagan is my pseudonym. he/him
No, Luke, I am your father. And Princess Leia is your sister. Also I built C3PO, and R2D2 was my copilot
i just realized–it’s precisely one coincidence per movie, right? They made Vader his father in episode 5, Leia his sister in episode 6. Then C3PO’s origin is in episode 1, then R2D2 is introduced as Anakin’s copilot in episode 2. We’re just lucky they didn’t add anything in episode 3—well, no, they had it turn out that Yoda survived the extermination of the Jedi in part because he was rescued by a wookie who happened to be Chewbacca right? Nothing involving Darth Vader at least
i think spaceballs in some cases suffers from the original already being beyond parody. Like, oh, what if Han Solo drove a busted up van through space. My dear, he already does that in the original movie! Except George Lucas made the effort to make a busted up space van design, and you turned it back to a normal van.
The population of Coruscant/Trantor makes no sense. If you put the entire population density as that of Monaco, you can fill the land area with one big city of population 13T. This is huge. Also, this is monaco
For comparison, this is Coruscant, allegedly an ecumenopolis of population 1-2T:
So there are two options. One is that Coruscant is actually, like, almost entirely ocean and “one big city” encompasses a continent about the size of Australia, letting the population density go 10x that of Monaco, or the objectively funnier option, which is that it’s one giant suburban sprawl. The Earth’s land area at the population of the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area (5300/km2) is about 1T people.
These pictures are suburbs of NYC:
A big part of this is flanderization, right?
In Zahn’s original description of Coruscant, it plausibly is, like, the New York Metropolitan Area. We hang out in the central government district, which is super built up, but he describes distinct towers and such. And there do seem to be, like, vacation homes with nice lake views.
But as the property developed, people kept making Coruscant more and more epicly overbuilt. No, the entire city is covered in buildings! No, it has buildings on top of buildings, so in the lower levels you never see the sun! No, it has buildings on top of buildings on top of buildings, for centuries, so the city has five thousand stories and the bottom couple thousand haven’t been inhabited for centuries!
And at every step it gets less plausible and less moored to how actual numbers work. But that’s okay, because numbers never work in SF anyway.
Coruscant reminds me of like, those cool photographs of the sides of apartment buildings, where it seems like it could go up and down forever out of frame. Like it’s a cool movie director decision to never have street level in frame so you can use your imagination (while still portraying traffic, using flying cars). Worldbuildingwise, idk, I’ve nveer found trying to make star wars make sense rewarding
i feel like the thing about star wars is anyone can make a movie about going on adventures in space with rayguns and stuff, and licensing the star wars intellectual property shouldn’t really matter? Like guardians of the galaxy was pretty good. Like George Lucas was a pioneer in special effects and he set the standard and since then others have been able to meet it. There’s nothing particularly special about the star wars branded stuff among the uh artistic descendants of the original star wars
Feel old yet? Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith was released 30 million years ago, when humanity was only a bunch of large hairy frogs made of clay and hopping about in the primordial froth.
(via kineticquire)
Ebert - Attack of the Clones review:
Too much of the rest of the film is given over to a romance between Padme and Anakin in which they’re incapable of uttering anything other than the most basic and weary romantic cliches, while regarding each other as if love was something to be endured rather than cherished. There is not a romantic word they exchange that has not long since been reduced to cliche.
No, wait: Anakin tells Padme at one point: “I don’t like the sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating–not like you. You’re soft and smooth.” I hadn’t heard that before.
star wars has always been silly but with george lucas as director it provided
- special effects ahead of the rest of the industry
- used to portray like space shit. Alien jazz band, space chess, you drive your space car to the space grocery
the first sequel movie, “force awakens”, it didn’t make much sense but like he got it. Some girl lives in a desert, she drives her space car to buy space bread. Perfect.
then the rian johnson one… on a plot level it’s actually pretty good but not like THAT good… and it has a normal ass casino where they roll normal dice, not space dice. And actual books, not space books… @jiskblr points out that even “ancient documents” in star wars are traditionally on some science fiction data storage. (or stone tablets, that doesn’t really fit my point.) Like, the lore is that this is a society that has existed so long alongside sci-fi tech that the origin of droids–of artificial intelligence and robotics!–is lost to history, iirc. Now of course you can ignore that lore, but the reason it’s important is that this is star wars and if there’s gonna be ancient religious documents from a long lost civilization even THAT has to be some space version! It’s star wars we need space shit! It’s not enough that the books are on a planet, everything’s on a planet. Why not have them fight with ordinary swords at that point. And the CGI sucked. So what was the point.
Man, I will never get over how the Star Wars sequels made a huge deal about burning “the sacred texts” when just having burnable texts - paper texts - is itself violating one of the most ~sacred rules of Star Wars canon.
I forget the full list of Things The Expanded Universe May Not Do, but “there has never been paper in the galaxy far, far away” is near the top.
Say you have to help a bunch of ancient Mesopotamians write stories set on early 21st century Earth. It would be helpful to tell them to please lay off the engraved tablets. Usually when they think of including one in their story they’re wrong.
Unless they’re writing about special sacred knowledge passed down through the millennia. Then it’s a good way to set the tone. A little cheap, but not out of place.
It’s not great but it’s fine. It works. It works because that rule was there to break. Lots of problems with those movies but this didn’t bother me.
It wasn’t just “no paper on screen”, though. It was “no one has ever used paper, no one has any memory of paper being a thing you might use to write things on”. They don’t even have things like paper - none of the Vorkosiganverse “plastic flimsy” here, that’s imitation paper and Star Wars doesn’t truck with paperlike things.
When there are ancient archives, they have old-format digital archives if they’re not that ancient, holocrons if they’re fancy Force users, and engraved tablets otherwise. Because if there was ever such a thing as paper writing, it was so far back in the past that it was probably whatever society had most recently collapsed before the rise of the Rakatan Infinite Empire. Which is itself the legendary mythic past long before anything recognizable from society had even started to arise, whose collapse allowed the very first things 0 ABY society recognizes as its history to begin to emerge.




