Category: Opinion

Frankenstein Continuity – Could Legends Have Been Salvaged?

Posted on December 17, 2014by Obiwomble's Outlook

“Igor! Is it done?”
“It is, master.”
“Look, it lives! My creation LIVES!”

Several months on from the Great Reboot, a set of questions linger over Star Wars fandom: Could the continuity have been made to work? Could there have been an excision point whereby a lesser part would be jettisoned to save the greater? Could the reboot have been avoided? The answers to these depend very much on how flexible you think filmmakers are willing to be and what kind of continuity SW should be.

I cannot say I was of the view it could never be done, but over time, I have become more skeptical and do not think it could be done and work for SW. The same moves would work for other franchises – Marvel/DC superheroes certainly, Transformers would likely pull it off, Doctor Who would find it laughably easy, but none of those are SW. So a further question is: What about SW stops these solutions taking effect? I will examine three excision points, points where a merge could be considered. The questions for each are those outlined above. Read More

New Depth for Star Wars Villains

Posted on December 12, 2014by Halcyon Days

2806788-Force-Choke-Vader

Ask any child who has seen Star Wars who their favorite character is and I’d give even odds that they say Darth Vader. I’ve never understood it but this was definitely the case with my niece and nephew. I have also trooped with someone dressed as Darth Vader and it is incredible to see how much the faces of these children light up when the see him standing there. No one else exists when Vader is around. Now ask those same children who their favorite Disney animated character is and I’d bet they pick a good guy. Why is that? What is it about the villain that is Darth Vader that has captivated audiences for over thirty years? What is it about Star Wars in general that has people clamoring over the villains? They don’t have better toys as both sides have lightsabers and awesome spaceships, not to mention the use of the force.

Realistically, I’m not here to answer that question and this opinion piece isn’t here to specifically address it or even focus on Darth Vader. This concept is something that has being bouncing around my head ever since my niece responded “Darth Vader” when I asked who her favorite character was in Star Wars over a year ago. I hadn’t quite figured out how to properly write up a piece concerning this topic until now. That is, until I read Tarkin. I didn’t quite realize what I was missing from the Expanded Universe until about halfway through Tarkin when a throw-a-way line caught my attention more than the entire book had so far. It was a lightbulb moment for sure. The EU had been missing depth in its villains. Even little lines about “flamboyant hats” and “frequenting the opera” give us a tiny insight into a character that otherwise we’d know nothing about. There is the depth to the Star Wars books that has been missing since the NJO. Read More

Why George Lucas is Not a Star Wars Fan

Posted on December 10, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

deck

Did you ever have a big project you were working on? Something that just sort of occurred to you one day, but without any serious desire for self-expression—reorganizing your record/comic book/movie collection, redecorating your living room, landscaping your backyard, things like that. My aunt decided to add a room to her house a few years back, and while it looks awesome now, it ended up being a logistical nightmare, and she spent more than a year with a gaping hole in the side of her house. Lots of people who have done major home renovations probably have similar stories, and I’d bet that as proud as they were of the final results, their predominant feeling by that point was more along the lines of “thank god that’s over with!”

The thing you need to understand is, filmmaking is not an art to George Lucas—it has no sacred creative spark, it demands no reverence. It’s a project. Read More

Mutatis Mutandis – Tarkin’s Empire, Familiar But Improved

Posted on December 5, 2014by

The Latin phrase mutatis mutandis loosely means “with only the necessary changes made” and that basically sums up the approach given to James Luceno’s characterization of the Galactic Empire in his novel, Tarkin. We won’t be reviewing the book per se – our editor has already done that – and we won’t be talking about the handling of Legends Expanded Universe material in this book (though mutatis mutandis also well describes it, especially given Luceno’s penchant for using EU) because ETE will be discussing the current EU/NEU state of play at a later date. Instead, we’ll take a look at the Galactic Empire and what Tarkin means for the Empire, especially next to portrayals in Edge of the Galaxy and A New Dawn.

So what’s the Empire like, in Tarkin? Truthfully, it’s the same as it always was. There are some changes to the ruling structure that we’ll get into, but the changes are essentially in name only and don’t materially change anything from the old EU structure of the Empire. There is some hinting that the anti-female and anti-alien policies are gone, but they’re not stated outright and it’s only really there by reading between the lines. What has changed is that the inconsistencies between the trilogies have been papered over – in the olden days we might have called them retcons, but the truth is that these changes are actually fairly minimal. Tarkin, like A New Dawn, presents an Empire that seems very consistent with the Legends EU in all but a few respects. This is a good thing – the Empire was generally very well characterized in the EU, at least structurally and philosophically. There were a few areas here and there that needed working, and the NEU has by and large taken care of those. The larger issues with the Empire had to do with the strength of villains as antagonists, which was sometimes flagging in the “Warlord of the Week” period of the EU: but whatever the weaknesses of the primary story in Tarkin, the man’s a good villain. But we’ll get to Tarkin the man a little later.

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State of the Sequel Galaxy: The Force is Finally Awake

Posted on December 3, 2014by

TFAlogo

(A brief note on Eleven-ThirtyEight’s spoiler policy—we don’t really have one. Editorially, I hope to keep the site in line with the philosophy I detailed in this post a while back; in short, “I am your father” is a spoiler, but “battle on snow planet” is not. Officially-released information, like Friday’s teaser, is absolutely not a spoiler. If one of us chooses to go into especially revealing material we will endeavor to warn you first, but by and large I’m leaving this to the writers’ discretion. If you’re the type to cringe at a movie still or a piece of concept art or a blurry spy photo, you may want to tread lightly in these parts for the time being. – Mike Cooper, EIC)

Well, it’s happened. We have a teaser for The Force Awakens, and now that I’ve finally stopped running around the internet hyperventilating, I can sit down and put together some coherent thoughts. Let’s talk about the state of the galaxy thirty years in the future and the design of the…

Spoilers to follow.

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