Author: Jay Shah

Upping the Ante: Creating Drama without Being Over the Top

Posted on February 10, 2015by and

rr-kanankneel

Ben: Rebels has been a show made up of character moments and slow burning plots thus far. Many episodes have avoided doing any action that seemed massive or important in the long run in favor of dropping hints about things outside of their scope and giving us character moments and development. This storytelling strategy has been paying off in recent weeks as a number of those hinted plots have started to tie together in close succession, each one bringing more drama to the characters we have gotten to know without seeming overwrought or premature.

The storytellers have, in essence, been playing poker with the audience. Each week they play a hand, laying small bets, a plot point here, a character moment there, while teasing a much larger pile in their corner of things yet to come. From time to time, they have raised the stakes, pushing more “chips” into the pile, but not going so far as to exhaust their entire stash of hints and ideas, or to push the audience into giving up the game. Teasing a story out is a hard line to walk for any show; say too much and the drama fizzles early, say too little and the audience gets frustrated and bored. Read More

Small Wonders: Drop Your Baggage and Believe

Posted on January 6, 2015by and

rr-ezratemple

Ben: Let’s be clear about something: Star Wars fans can be cynical. The old guard has been around long enough to know better than take marketing hype and pre-release buildup at its word. The Phantom Menace, Revenge of the Sith, The Force Unleashed, The Clone Wars, none of it has ever fully lived up to the standards nostalgia and the original trilogy have given most of us. Even the good stuff, books, comics, video games, whatever they might be, aren’t bulletproof, because they all have to walk the fine line between appealing to nostalgia and striking out into something new. On top of that, the Disney purchase has raised that standard even higher. Nothing done in the post-Lucas era could ever stand up beside the greatness of ESB, could it?

So what happens when a show like Rebels comes along? Rebels had a terribly hard row to hoe right out of the gate, aping elements of the original trilogy while doggedly knitting in elements from the prequels and TCW alike. “It’s too cartoony”, some say, “it’s obviously being made for kids.” “It’s not enough like TCW,” others grumble, “it’s too light and not mature.” Another complaint heard a lot is “It’s beating Star Wars into the ground, all Disney cares about is money.” Read More

The 2015 Star Wars Holiday Special

Posted on January 2, 2015by , , , and Not A Committee

chewiehouse

Approximately eleven months from now, the holiday season will be back in full swing again. Halls will be decked, mangers will be awayed, bells will be caroled, all that good stuff. But one thing will be different: there will be a new Star Wars movie about to come out. Exactly one week before Christmas, in fact. A holiday release is unprecedented for Star Wars “episodes”, but not for the franchise as a whole: until this year, the terms “Star Wars” and “holiday” have only ever been uttered in the same breath in reference to, well, you know what.

But this is a new era—and if ever there were a time to go there, to revisit the idea of a Holiday Special, now would be it. So let’s join Chewbacca’s family once again as they prepare for their Life Day festivities… Read More

Loose Canon – Examining The Reboot, Six Months Later

Posted on December 15, 2014by and

sienarbanner

This past summer, Del Rey released a “sampler” of its first four post-reboot Star Wars novels; those excerpts from A New Dawn, Tarkin, Heir to the Jedi, and Lords of the Sith were our first glimpse at the new canon, or New Expanded Universe if you will. Rebels was still a couple months off, but bits and pieces of promotional material had already revealed that Sienar Fleet Systems and COMPNOR, among other elements of the Legends EU, were nevertheless sticking around. Between those bits and the assorted references in that Del Rey sampler, there was already enough EU showing up that we thought it would be fun to count down to the release of A New Dawn with a special Twitter hashtag, #EUPurgeSurvivors, highlighting a different EU escapee every weekday for a month or so.

We did the same thing in the lead-up to Tarkin, and the plan at first was to keep the practice going with each new release, as the “survivors” continued to accumulate…but then we started actually reading Tarkin. As our respective lists crept into the range of one hundred entries—including literally dozens of EU planets, and in some cases weird situations where the Bilbringi Shipyards, say, were canon but not necessarily the planet Bilbringi itself—it started to appear that maybe a new paradigm was needed. Read More

Menace_480.mov, and Other Trailer Memories

Posted on December 8, 2014by , , , , and

Mike: Apparently I’m unusual.

And not just in the “runs a Star Wars blog” sense, but even amongst Star Wars people—I say this because when I pitched today’s topic to the staff—describe your earliest memory of seeing a Star Wars trailer—the majority either had no relevant memories whatsoever, or in one case, had never actually watched one!

Maybe it’s because my major in college, visual effects, happened to involve making a couple myself, but I’ve always been a huge fan of trailers—and I have numerous strong memories of my favorites, both Star Wars and otherwise. Ironically, while the Special Edition trailers were almost certainly the first ones I technically saw, I don’t remember them at all. It’s funny; I remember the two guys behind me laughing maniacally at Threepio in A New Hope, and I remember getting to Empire a couple minutes late and missing the opening crawl (still the only part of a SW film I haven’t seen on a big screen), but the advertising beforehand? Nothing. Read More