Tag: What Star Wars Can Learn From

What Star Wars Can Learn From Star Wars: Visions

Posted on October 15, 2021by Sidelong Glance

Since Disney+ launched, one of its biggest selling points has been exclusive Star Wars media released directly to the platform. Starting with The Mandalorian, Star Wars launched its parent companies into the streaming era, and after its wild, runaway success, a green light went up for a number of Star Wars projects that otherwise might never have been given that go-ahead. One of those projects, and perhaps the most unusual and niche of them all, is Star Wars: Visions. A limited series of standalone episodes, each produced by one of seven different Japanese animation studios and telling an all-new story, a project like Visions would not have been possible previously, except maybe as a direct-to-home-video release, but thanks to streaming it was released to a platform that is already the home of major streaming flagship shows like the aforementioned Mandalorian or The Clone Wars.

What this article is going to broach are the elements that Visions brought to the table that would be welcome and wise to take further to the wider universe of Star Wars media at large. There are many different ideas, theories and other factors that could be considered here, but one that we will not get into is how Visions’ existence as media that is foundationally Japanese affects its place within the winding cultural miasma that Star Wars has always been, and how Star Wars can continue to draw from this well in ways that aren’t appropriative. Emma Candon, author of the Visions tie-in novel Ronin, dug into this idea far more thoroughly and with more insight than we would be able to here, so please check out her Twitter thread in the link below for more thoughts on this topic.

Setting that where it is, here are some more ways that Star Wars as a media franchise can learn from what the creators of Visions have produced.

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What Jedi: Fallen Order Could Have Learned From The Rise of Skywalker

Posted on January 10, 2020by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

Early on in The Rise of Skywalker, Rey does something I’ve wanted to see in a Star Wars film for ages. For at least the seventh time in nine episodes, our heroes are confronted not by a villain, but by a wild animal. We’re not privy to its exact emotional state, but context suggests it’s protecting its territory, or traumatized, or just plain hungry. It’s also, to one degree or another, scary-looking: this isn’t just an animal, we’re expected to understand, it’s a monster.

And in six of the nine episodes, the heroes fight the monster, either killing it or distracting it or driving it off. This type of scene is just one of those things Star Wars does—like Threepio telling you the odds or someone having a bad feeling about this, a monster fight is how the screenplay lets you know this is a Star Wars movie. Old adventure serials loved that shit: the dianoga and the wampa and the rancor were George Lucas emulating the spirit of a guy in a lizard costume wrestling with Flash Gordon, and while few would call those scenes the films’ best material, they’ve never demanded any deeper consideration than that. [1]Not that that stops us.

But then, in this episode, the hero has a different idea. She passes her already-ignited lightsaber to Finn, walks slowly to the big snake-worm-thing, and uses the Force to heal a wound in its side. Not just the Force, but the Force of her own life—instead of killing an injured creature, the quick and easy path, she gives a little of herself to it, and in so doing saves all involved.

This is who Rey is, who she’s always been. To my mind it’s why she can get angry in a fight, more visibly angry than Luke ever got, and never let it consume her. Empathy isn’t something she has to stop and center herself to achieve, or have rubbed in her face by her father’s robot arm, it’s her baseline. Like so much in Rise, I go back and forth on whether the filmmakers intended this reading or just stumbled onto it while setting up some things that happen later in the movie, but hell if it doesn’t work. And what made it especially satisfying for me personally was its timely, if coincidental, refutation of Jedi: Fallen Order.

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What Star Wars Fandom Can Learn from Isaac Asimov’s Robot Canon

Posted on September 4, 2019by

I am a woman conflicted.

I was relentlessly eager for Claudia Gray’s Master & Apprentice, but once it was released, my enjoyment of the work was overshadowed by my childhood love for Jude Watson’s Jedi Apprentice series.  

I feasted on the rumors and then the announcement of an Obi-Wan Kenobi series, but at the same time, I’m not ready to say goodbye to John Jackson Miller’s Kenobi.

I want to set Del Rey up on a blind date with author Ann Leckie to bring the Young Satine Kryze novel we deserve into being, but I dream of this while clutching the Schrödinger’s canon of A Star Wars Comic‘s Satine issue to my chest.

I am not unique in these anxieties. Even if it’s not these particular characters and these particular stories, everyone has pieces of Star Wars that they want to see the light of canon. Perhaps it’s something that people want to see make the jump from Legends or theories that they want confirmed. Engaging with stories is always personal, and while critiquing the work we consume is important, there’s also a space where we must be willing to let go and accept the contradictions between our expectations and the stories created by other, equally invested people.

A good practice ground for engaging in these contradictions is the robot stories of Isaac Asimov.

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What Star Wars Resistance Has Learned From Robotech — and What Might Be Left to Learn

Posted on May 1, 2019by

During the Star Wars Resistance Season Two Sneak Peek panel at Celebration Chicago, the show’s lead director, Justin Ridge, mentioned that they had drawn influence for the show from anime (or ahnimay as he pronounced it), which is something that had been mentioned before and we’ve discussed in our coverage previously. However, when he did, he namechecked one show specifically: Robotech. I would imagine that there are not many people reading this who know or remember what Robotech is or how it at all relates to Resistance, but don’t worry. Let me begin with a quick synopsis of Robotech and then we’ll discuss the ways that the show influenced Resistance, a show almost forty years its junior. There are some similarities between it and Resistance, as well as a number of differences both subtle and obvious that keep Resistance from being a one-to-one translation or adaptation. And we will also see how Robotech might help inform us of what’s still to come with Resistance’s second season and beyond.

First, a history lesson and some context are important. In the mid-eighties, American media companies were starting to hit their stride in localizing media produced in Japan for Western audiences. One of those companies, Harmony Gold, wanted to license a space opera-style show to help capitalize on the success of franchises like Star Wars, but there wasn’t a single Japanese show meeting their criteria that had the number of episodes they needed to be able to license it for syndication in the United States (which is sixty-five for the curious). So, Harmony Gold decided their next-best option was to license three shows, edit them together into a single Frankenstein’s monster show, then distribute it collectively. This collected show is known as Robotech. Read More

Disassembly Reveals Useful Pathways: What Star Wars Can Learn From The Expanse

Posted on July 6, 2018by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

expanse-cast

Last week saw the conclusion of the third season of the acclaimed science fiction television series The Expanse. Adapted from the novels by James S.A. Corey (of SWEARHAT fame!), The Expanse follows the crew of the stolen warship Rocinante as they’re pushed and pulled between the far-future solar system’s major political powers and an encroaching and poorly-understood alien presence.

I’m a late convert to the show myself, having streamed the first two seasons on Amazon just in time for the third’s debut this past spring on SyFy—where it would soon be canceled, the bastards. Luckily, Amazon chose to pick up Rocinante‘s reins and continue the series, meaning that in a year or so the show will return to where my journey with it first began. And there’s plenty more to come, if the source material is any indication: the series is slated to conclude with the release of the ninth novel next year, so if the show sticks to a one-book-per-season pace (though that’s varied a bit already), that means six more seasons!

Nine seasons of television are a hell of a time commitment, and for me at least, nine novels even more so—but at the moment I have every intention of sticking around, and once the show is over I plan to spend six months or so reading the novels. What makes The Expanse so compelling, and what qualifies it for precious column inches here on a Star Wars blog? Let’s discuss. Read More