to me, solo, by email or posting a response here.  As far as a list of canon
novels, I'm working on it, so keep on meditating for the Return of the Jedi.

50 responses total.

solo - Please don't create a new item every time you want to respond
to somthing someone else has said.  Instead of doing "enter" at
the respond or pass prompt, try "respond" instead.

And make sure you type the WHOLE intro to an item :{

Boy, are you so bored you can write everywhere but message 54,
Thrawn?

Yes.

ok this is a real st00pid item...whos the fooking idiot who entered this one!

So what do you'all think about the reissued Star War movie (movies?) coming
out?  I've just seen the ads this last week...

I just saw Star Wars this morning. I was impressed. After seeing it for years
on TV screens I'd forgotten how different it is on the 'big screen'. The
changes to the special effects and the added or new scens were all well worht
seeing.

_Star Wars_ is of historical importance. This is the movie that made
interest in space transportation socially acceptable, even Cool, and no
longer so geeky. It was the breakthrough in popular entertainment.

But it's already been done, and it's 20 years old already. Time to go on to
something new, or at least finish up the other 6 movies. There is plenty of
excellent SF literature out there, every bit as exciting as the _Wars_
movies were when they came out, and it's much more intelligently written.

I *might* go see _Star Wars_, when it gets to the cheap theatres.

I saw it at the bargain first show of the weekend.  I liked the replaced
scenes, and it was really cool to see it on the big screen again.  a lot of
people had their young children there.

Well, I saw "Star Wars" a few weeks ago,  but I loved it!  Why does it
have to be time to go on to something new?  Can't we take a moment
out of our time to remember the past?  Does everything have to be about
forgetting what happened and just moving forward?

As far as I have heard, the first one will be released in 1999, and then
two and three sometime after that.  I haven't heard whether or not he will
be making seven, eight, and nine.

"Remembering the past" is well doable with one of the millions of copies of
the original floating around, for trivial cost compared to new release theatre
price.

I've said it before, I'll probably say it again. Yes you can go and get
numerous video tape copies of these movies. Unless you have a huge screen tv
and an incredible sound system you don't get the same experience, IMO. This
may not be for everyone, I understand. For many people thiugh it is well worth
it to pay a few dollars and re-experience it on the big screen. Also, these
new versions are not out on video yet.

I liked seeing it on the big screen.  I was too young the first time
it came out to remember it.  The big screen makes a world of
difference in viewing.  I'm glad they re-released them!  I thought
the new editions they made were great! (I'm probably repeating
myself, but I really don't care.)  I've loved Star Wars for a long
time, and I think it's great that little kids get a chance to see
it on the big screen.  I was in Meijer the other day and overheard
a little boy talking to his mom about eeing it on the bigscreen and
how great he thought it was. (I admit that I was looking for a
Princess Leia action figure... couldn't find it... <grrr> )
(er that's seeing it, not eeing it...)

        Okay, now tht must of us have seen the re-release, What do 
you like?  What did you notice?  Did you like the changes?  Did
it Matter.

        As I got to watching Empire & Jedi I got into watching
Yoda carefully.  I can dare say Yoda did better face acting 
than Mark Hammil did.  More expression on his face for the emotion
to be conveyed.

        Did anyone but me notice that the Mean Green Mother
From Outer Space's mother was that thing in the pit near the
beginning of Jedi?

Audry?  Was it really Audry?  Did it sing?

        I thought I heard it say "Feed Me".

Personally I liked the additions made to Jabba's palace.  If you've
read the books then it appears that some of the things they
mentioned in the books appeared in Jedi...
(Although my sister and I were trying to find Mara Jade and
found it very hard.)

I'm reviving this old Star Wars item because recently, for no good reason,
I've gotten fascinated with Star Wars.  Largely I just noticed that the Lego
Star Wars models are cool, and now that I'm a grown up I can afford to buy
all the toys I want.  But also the movies themselves are interesting under
their varnish of cheap commercialism.

Episode I is an interesting case in point.  Before it was made, I'd been
wondering how Lucas was going to handle the first trilogy.  After all, the
hero has to be Anakin Skywalker, and we already know that he's going to become
a traitor to all his friends and ideals, and turn into a murderous monster.
Hardly the kind of uplifting story of dewy-eyed heros bravely beating back
the forces of evil that made the original Star Wars movie such a popular
success.  The question in my mind is, how is Lucas going to tell such a dark
nasty story while maintaining the popularity that is necessary to finance the
project and win it the attention it needs to stand out from the the crowd?

So on first viewing, I was disappointed in Episode I.  Nothing much happens.
The good guys win and have a big celebration in the end, just like the first
movie.  Lucas had dodged the problem of convincingly showing a hero turn evil
without losing his popular audience by postponing the whole issue.  There's
no sign yet of the decent into evil that will turn Anakin into Vader and the
Republic in to the Empire.

But on second viewing, I belatedly noticed that the good guys didn't win. 
They think they did, and most casual viewers of the film would think so, but
in fact, the forces of evil take a whomping.  Probably all real fans (not me)
noticed that the Senator from Naboo, who get elected to be the new leader of
the Republic as a result of the Naboo/Trade Federation war has the same name
as the future Emperor.  It's obvious that he manipulated the Trade Federation
into attacking his home planet so that he could embarrass the current leaders
and create enough sympathy for him to win him control of the Republic.  The
scheme came off perfectly, and the fact that the Naboo won the war only fed
into his plans.  All the bravery of the heros really only ends up advancing
the plans of the future emperor.

In other words, Lucas found a way to have it both ways.  He depicted the
Emperor's rise to power, while making it look to the casual viewer as if
they were watching an ordinary, victory-of-the-good-guys kind of movie.
Rather a clever bit of cinematic sneakiness.  Make big box office money
with a movie parents happily bring their kids to, that depicts evil conquering
good.

Can Lucas play this double game with the next two movies?  It's hard to see
how.  You can't exactly turn Anakin into Vader without people noticing.  But
can you cast it as noble self-sacrifice?

This seems improbable.  But recall the scene where Yoda tells Luke that if
he goes to rescue Han & Leia than he is taking a step down the path to the
dark side.  Evidentally you can go a long ways toward the dark side by acting
heroically.  (Obviously Anakin's mom has been set up as the victim who needs
rescuing or avenging and draws him closer to the dark side.)

Curiously, there seems to be more information around about what happens in
the last trilogy than in the rest of first trilogy.  (If you don't want to
hear official Lucasfilm spoilers for films that probably won't be out for a
decade, stop here.)  Leia marries Han and becomes the leader of the New
Republic, built from the ashes of the Empire.  Luke marries someone (R2D2 is
his best man) and starts a Jedi school.  The Emperor, however, is not dead
and gets himself resurrected in a cloned body.  He draws Luke to him, and
Luke pledges himself to serve the Emperor, embracing the Dark Side of the
force in hopes that by pretending to server the Emperor he can find an
opportunity to destroy him.  He finds, however, that he has underestimated
the power of the Dark Side, and that once in its clutches he can't escape
and he begins to serve it in truth.  Eventually Leia manages to break him
loose, much as Luke got Anakin out, just in time to save Luke's kids from
continuing the cycle.

So not only does Lucas want to make a popular film about a hero decending into
evil, he wants to do it twice.  The plot summary above pretty clearly shows
that most of the decent into evil will involve good motives, so he'll be able
to depict most of the trip as an act of rousing heroism, with the good guy
appearing to win all sorts of battles while quietly losing his soul.

So the heros, in guise of good deads are actually doing evil, and the movies
in guise of family entertainmnet are actually rather nasty.

So the Star Wars films are interestingly attractive and repulsive.  Even the
comic relief characters (Ewoks, Jar Jar) whom everyone thinks are put in to
improve marketability to kids are actually rather repulsive upon nearer
inspection (the Ewoks are vicious when they aren't being cute, and Jar Jar
is a moronic step-and-fetch-it sterotype).  Everything likable is dispicable
and everything dispicable is likable.

Well, not everything.  Leia and R2D2 seem to be perfect beings.  Han Solo was
supposed to be a good/bad guy in the original movie, but Lucas seems to have
later shifted him to the small pile of purely good guys - note that when he
remade the original Star Wars, the only actual telling change was that Han
Solo no longer shoots first when he kills the bounty hunter in the Cantina,
changing an act of pre-emptive murder into self-defense.

Interesting.  I may have to go back and watch Episode I again.  I really 
didn't like it the first time I saw it, for all the reasons you cited.  
But you make it sound both thoughtful and exciting.

Watch it on that "I can afford to buy all the toys I want" stuff.  Arlo 
is going to learn to read some day, and the very day he does, he will 
home in on that comment and cite it endlessly to you.  ("But Dad!  I 
think we ought to have a *blue* twisty slide *too*!  You said you could 
afford any toys you want.")  Even just sticking to Legos, some of those 
sets cost a couple of hundred bucks, and there's *no end* to them.

        Of course Leia (body by Fisher) is perfect!

The last I'd heard, Lucas had decided not to make the third trilogy 
after all.  Possibly I'm mistaken: I don't pay much attention to these 
things.  "Phantom Menace" was quite possibly the most boring movie I've 
ever sat all the way through, and I'm disinclined to go through an 
experience like that again.  Numbers 2 and 3 will be a real hard sell 
to me.

However, I think the analysis in resp:18 is on target.  The seeds of 
the devastation we see at the start of "New Hope" are indeed sown in 
P.M.  And, given the events that Luke went through in its sequels, and 
what Yoda said about it, it would be flatly impossible for Lucas to 
make a third trilogy in which Luke does not turn to the Dark Side.  
Unless he cheats.

So yeah, I'd give Lucas credit for a darker, more nuanced imagination 
than simply a "good guys win, film's over" attitude.  Except that his 
Dark Side's repeated revivals somehow remind me more of the pop-ups of 
a plastic bouncing clown.

To my knowldge, Lucas never intended to do the third trillogy, which is why
they sold, or rather, loaned the rights to the authors for the books and for
the roll playing games, among other things.  Everything still has to go
through Lucas, to his specs, but he never planned on film.

Not being an actual fan, I'd only heard that the Lucas wasn't going to
make the third trilogy recently.  Frankly, given the potential income of
those films, I'd say guess that if he doesn't make those films, someone
else will.  In fact, I'd be surprised if there weren't more films done
after that.  It's too profitable a franchise.

Actually, I can't claim Episode I is a good film.  Basically, my argument
above says that it plays a useful and interesting part in the 9-film
story arc.  I also think it's interesting that while it's role in the
story arc is to show "the begining of the end" for the Empire, with
key victories for the villians and vital blunders for the good guys,
the film itself seems like an upbeat victory for the heros.  I think
this was done purely for marketability reasons, but it's enough of an
interesting little trick that it adds some abstract interest to the film.

But standing on it's own, it's rather a lame film.  A cliched plot,
and not one single character that anyone could manage to care about (OK,
I'll allow Padmi/Amadala partial credit).  The non-cliched story arc and
the engaging characters are all carefully hidden under a bushel basket.
You need to be a fan to know they are there, and you need to be a
moderately dim 12-year-old or a computer graphics buff to get a thrill
out of what is out in plain site.  In this case, the fans who disect the
film are the only ones having any legitimate fun.  There is no "magic"
to lose by putting it on the disecting table.

Personally, I think the first two films were terrific.  The original film
was a great "recapture the wonder" kind of thing.  The second film was
dark and dramatic, and supplied one of the most famous lines in cinema
history.  "I am your father" isn't famous because it's a catchy phrase
on it's own right, but because of the emotional charge that the movie
put behind it.  It lacked an ending, but we knew a sequel was coming,
so we forgave it that.

The third film has only a couple good scenes.  I like the scene where
Leia wakens Han. The weird alien person turning out to be Leia, Hans
distress and disorientation, the emotion between them all work.  And the
final confrontation between Luke and Vader is OK too.  But aside from
these little wrap ups of loose ends from "The Empire Strikes Back",
there isn't much here.  Well, I guess I kind of like the general idea
of a high-tech/low-tech battle and the speeder bikes were cool.

But I still find the series as a whole fascinating.

Wonder if the advances of IRL cloning will lend any fascination to whichever
movie deals with "The Clone Wars"...

Probably not.  I saw a reference on the offical SW web site that says that
the Emperor's dark side power tends to cause his body to decay at an
accelerated rate.  To avoid this, he moves his conscioiusness from clone body
to clone body.  That's how he survives being killed by Vader.  His body is
destroyed, so his mind lives disembodied in the force for a while until he
is able to re-inhabit one of his stored clone.

This doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with "the clone wars" whatever they
are, but they do hint at an attitude toward cloning that has little or nothing
to do with IRL cloning.

This is a thing that really annoyed me in the recent Schwartzenegger film,
sixth day.  It starts with some references to the cloning of the sheep dolly
and the completion of the human genome map, and states that this film is going
to deal with the near future, and things that are on the verge of being
possible.

In the movie, a nefarious company has secretly invented a process where (1)
they grow "blanks" - human bodies without consciousness from which all
individual genetic traits have been removed (whatever *that* means).  Then
(2) they can take a blood sample from a person, and, in seconds, superimpose
the genetic traits from the blood sample onto the blank body, causing it to
turn into a duplicate of the donor's body.  Then (3) they can record the
entire contents of a person's brain in a second just by having them look
into a machine.  This recording can be stored on disk, and downloaded, again
in seconds, into the blank body.

The astute observer will notice that none of these three processes are cloning
(well creating a second "blank" body once you have created one would probably
be cloning, but that's the easiest part of it).  None of these things are
likely to be possible in the near future.  Quite probably none of them will
ever be possible.  Saying that the Dolly project gets us close to this is like
saying being able to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together means you
are going to have portable pocket fusion reactors next week.

I dislike the fact that the media is popularizing such nonsense as "cloning".
Cloning really is close, in fact, I wouldn't be amazed to hear that some rich
millionare or millionaress has already had him or herself cloned.  And I
wouldn't be bothered either.  So you can have a baby that is genetically a
twin to you.  No big deal.  It's still a separate person, just as ordinary
twins are.  Why wrap all this sensationalism around "cloning"?

So anyway, the mere fact that they are having wars about cloning suggests that
there is more than mere cloning going on.  Maybe instant duplication of living
people, as in Sixth Day or in the Emperor's reincarnation process.  Maybe mass
production of genetically engineered clones.  Neither of these have anything
much to do with real life cloning, so it'd be astonishing if real life cloning
had any impact on the film.  Clone movies are about other clone movies, not
about real life.

I'm not sure about the clone wars, but I do know that they'll deal with the
Slave population on Tatooene <sp?>, so if not 2, then 3 of the re-quals.  I
don't think I have heard a detailed description of the "clone wars" from any
die hard lucas fan (and I've known a couple) and I think Lucas wants to keep
it that way.  perhaps it doesn't even involve genetic clones as we think of
them?

resp:22 - are the novels set after "Return of the Jedi" part of a 
consistent storyline?  If so, what happens to Luke?  Does he indeed 
fall into the Dark Side?

Actually, yes they are.  If I remember correctly, He does not, he actually
finds more Jedi, trains, and starts a Jedi school.  Han and Leah have twins,
names both start with J and I don't remember them at this time, a boy and a
girl, and some relative of Chewy is ALSO in the Jedi school.

And yeah, the Emperor comes back in another cloned body, there were BIG
debates about if he could do that, but apparently he could.  

Well if the emporer could, what about Anakin, Kenobi, Yoda, etc.?

        Probably could, but he may be happy to be Kenobi the freindly ghost.

The Emperor comes back?  After that gory finish?  Plastic bouncing 
clowns, like I said.

Surely, if this is possible, then Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, 
master of the Dark Side of the Force, should have known how pointless 
his disposal of the Emperor would be before he performed it.

But then, I don't buy half the stuff in "Phantom Menace" either.

Well, the Emperor apparantly doesn't bounce back any too easily.  He's out
of commision for a long time.  Even if Vader knew this was possible (not
obvious that he would), he might consider buying Lucas a couple decades to
mature before the Emperor could have another whack at him a fair deal.

I don't think Vader was a master of the Dark Side of the Force.  I think he
was a slave of the Dark Side of the Force.

Anakin, Kenobi, and Yoda don't have clone bodies.  But it does seem clear that
at least some Jedi are able to maintain some sort of spectral existance after
death.  Mostly it seems to be the more contemplative types who do so.  Kenobi
and Yoda both die voluntarily with their bodies vanishing after death.  Anakin
makes a spectral appearance, but I'm guessing he needed help from Kenobi and
Yoda to do that.  "If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you
can imagine," or something like that says Kenobi before he lets Vader kill
him.  There is no evidence in the movie that his power extends to more than
giving Luke posthumorous advice, but presumably there is more to it.  Yoda
and Kenobi had each been sitting around alone for a few decades doing nothing
while the Empire takes over the universe.  Presumably they weren't really
doing nothing, but were in some way preparing to go into ghost mode and do
some really impressive stuff.  All the other Jedi, good and bad, leave
corpses.  Hard to tell if the Emperor did.  Apparantly not.

If I understand correctly, there is something in the way they're bound to the
force, the midiclorian count, and the total power of the jedi if they
dissapear after they die.  They're tied into the force so tight that their
body ends up being absorbed by the force, hence the astral projections.  Vader
woudln't have known about the clones, because being the only one of the Sith
to survive the original parting of the "good" jedi and the "bad" jedi, the
Emperor decided that the less the subordinant knows, the less likly they are
to rebel against you.

For those who don't know the parting, here it goes:  One Jedi found the power
of the darkside and when he was told that he couldn't use the dark powers by
the jedi council, he wanted to know why, if there is balance in everything,
then there should be balance in themselves as well.  They forbid it, and he
ended up leacing to practice the dark arts, and many jedi followed him.  They
learned the dark force powers, and the time came when he was old and had about
50 followers and he died.  Well, all of the apprentices began fighting over
who was to rule.  All but one.  The Sith ended up killing each other, all but
the one, and the "good" jedi thought that it was over.  Evil kills itself.
But the one had watched and learned and he knew what the error was.  Never
show your pupil everything, and never have more than one.  That way YOU are
in control, and they're dispensible.  So, this one, eventually became
Palpitane and the Emperor, and he trained Maul, and then Vader, and some in
the middle, but that's that point of the Sith.  The cloning is something that
he had a LOT of time to come up with.  And it takes decades to get "into" the
other body.  It's not something that happens instantaneously.

The only reason, to backtrack, that we saw the projections of Anakin, kenobi,
and Yoda, is because they're the only ones that had a connection to Luke. 
But others do fade into the force.  

        I also got the impression that at the end of Return of the Jedi
that Anakin, Kenobi and Yoda where ready for the next place in the
force after watching over Luke (and Leia).  Something they could not
do for a long time.

resp:32 - Vader can be a master and a slave of the Dark Side at the 
same time.  "Master: a person very skilled in some work, profession, 
science, etc."

In other words, he's a middle manager.  ;)

35:  There is one Master, one Apprentice.  Vader was not the master.

Jeez Louise.  I said "master" with a small m, not with a large M.  All 
I meant was that Vader is knowledgable about the Force.  Good grief.  
This is the kind of obnoxious hairsplitting that gives science-fiction 
fans a bad name.

In any case, he said to Obi-Wan, "Now I am the Master."  Maybe he was 
mistaken.

he only meant that because Obi-Wan was his master in the good side of the
force, he trained him, and in some thoughts, the only way to truly become a
master is the death of the one who taught you, otherwise you are forever a
student to them.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss