Morning Ed: Rogue One {2016.01.24.T}
Adam Ozimek looks at how a grubby corporation saved Star Wars from a stubborn artist who was ruining his own story.
Sarah Bond looks at the history of weapons engineers.
A critical obituary of Leia Organa.
I’d never heard of this kind of insurance, but it sure makes a lot of sense. I understand that – contrary to rumors – they’re not immediately planning to digitize Carrie Fisher going forward, but I kind of hope they do.
The ethical dilemma of resurrecting Tarkin in Rogue One is pretty much null to me, especially given that they got the blessings of his estate. The CG for Tarkin almost works – I might not have noticed except that I knew to notice – though I think it might look more conspicuous in ten years.
For First Things, Marc Barnes looks at the theological bearings of Rogue One, and its abandonment.
Bryan Alexander looks at the retro of Rogue One.
Vox took a lot of crap for saying that Star Wars was the first movie of the franchise about war, but even as people were laughing I think everyone did kind of know it was true.
The Star Wars universe keeps going back and forth on how monastic the Jedi are. The prequels suggest that the Jedi are supposed to be celibate but the franchise seems to go lightly on that at times. Mainly because sex sells better.Report
No young jedi could resist nailing Padme….Hell, even Yoda wanted some of that.Report
They kept having to bring in Timothy Zahn to fix the EU.
“Um, some of our authors have made Luke Skywalker into what’s basically a walking God and also he’s dating some 3000 year old spirit that used to live in a computer but now lives in the brain dead corpse of a hot girl he knew. Can you fix this?”
“Jeez, AGAIN?”
Michael Stackpole had to wade in with an entire book that was “WTF just happened. That dude blew up multiple stars and killed billions of people and we’re all ‘Oh hey, Dark Side is pretty bad but he’s cool now bro’? Screw that!”
Seriously, the EU was a mess.Report
This is what happens when you don’t even try to maintain a modicum of control over a franchise, and just let any old fan fic writer publish with those characters.Report
On the other hand, Star Trek theoretically had more control over their novels, and they famously ended up with both a fairly graphic K/S slash fic and Shatner’s extended self-authored mid-life crisis.
On the gripping hand, they also got Diane Duane’s Rihannsu and John M. Ford!s Klingons…Report
Barbary Hambly also wrote what I think is the only piece of official cross-over fanfiction for Star Trek.
“I, Ishmael” crossed over with multiple shows from the 70s, including Maverick. 🙂Report
Except that, supposedly, Lucas did maintain iron clad control.
Except he apparently didn’t — or rather, what control he had boiled down to “Certain characters must not die or change in certain ways” and ignored the ways things got massively inflated and altered around them.
On the other hand, it brought us Commander Ketcch, of Wraith Squadron. Which meant Wedge Antilles had to fly combat while wearing an Ewok suit. “Yub, yub, Commander!”.Report
I do have to say that Karen Traviss wrote a very interesting multi-book apologia for the Dark Side. She didn’t know she was doing it, of course, but you start out with some poor soldier boy and by the end he’s setting out to betray his adoptive father and the entire rest of his family to Darth Freakin’ Vader.Report
For some reason my mind keeps wanting to read the EU as European Union rather than Expanded Universe. I’m imagining a science fiction author hired by the EU to work out the mess caused by Brexit.Report
They’re gonna need a really good speculative fiction writer.
Charles Stross has been cursing the mere existence of “near future” fiction because, last I checked, has had to totally rewrite one book and scrap another due to the rapidly changing political landscape.
And that was before Trump.Report
People who can’t be bothered to make decent predictions ought to stick with “here’s my idea and let me show it to you.”
Of course, you can always look at John Titor, who was actually publishing real predictions from that time.
50% chance of Trump not lasting his 4 years in office. And that from someone who’s likely to know enough of what lies under the rug on Trump’s head.Report
And still people were surprised by Brexit.Report
Star Wars: Funny, I remember all these inconsistencies and frankly, didn’t care when I was watching the movie.Report
Brexit: Supreme Court says Parliament must give Article 50 go-ahead
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-38720320Report
Please review the links, a lot of them go to the reverence article.Report
Fixed!Report
The critical Obit of Leia was real solid writing. It could have been yanked out of a fictional NYT page.
Though I was exposed to its products from an early age, I’ve never loved or hated Disney myself with any strength. That said I don’t think it’d debatable that they’ve done some seriously incredible work with a lot of the creative properties they acquires whether it be Lucasworld, Pixar* or Marvel. I don’t know how much of that was merely providing the core teams with the freedom to make it work or direct hands on management but I don’t begrudge them the massive geysers of money they’ve been getting for it.
*Though in my mind Pixar began to wane shortly before the Disney acquisition.Report
Yes, I loved that piece too.Report
@north
We are roughly the same age and I think Disney was just making bad movies during the 1980s. I don’t really recall any until I was too into being a boy to go for the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, or Alladin and by the time Lion King came out, I was starting to get into stuff that made me more into artsy things.*
I find it perplexing that for people slightly younger (say born around 1983-1984) and later, Disney has become this huge thing for on-line progressivism. And I admit that my non-caring about pop culture side makes me think petitions to make Leila a Disney Princess are a waste of time. Yet it seems very important to lots of people.
*Here is a revealing story. When I was in elementary school, there was a guest speaker. My guess is that she wrote kids books but I don’t recall. She said that when she was in 4th grade, she read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I asked my parents for a copy and they gave me one. I failed to read it but I think this shows where I wanted to go. There were also times in elementary school when we were given “Read what you want” assignments and my choices were vetoed. I hated that. I really resented it.
So perhaps I have always been contra my generation and wanting to be adult while they choose the warm glow of childhood nostalgia.Report
Are you calling Bambi bad?Report
Bambi isn’t bad, Bambi is Zionist tale for Jewish children.Report
Lee,
The way you wrote that made me chuckle.
And then I started reading the article… Thank you very much for linking it, it’s a fascinating read.Report
I’m far from a Disney expert but I have friends who are obsessives so I pick up on some of this by osmosis. The 80’s were a pretty bleak run for Disney in terms of feature films. The Fox and The Hound was schmaltz, I loved Black Cauldron because Lloyd Alexander is Jesus and can do no wrong but I admit I was probably the only one and the movie sure didn’t hold a candle to the books. The Great Mouse detective was.. ish… and Oliver and Company was double ish…then you come to Little Mermaid which was a huge hit and basically was book ending the 80’s and often gets more lumped into the 2nd Golden age of Disney which runs from Beauty and the Beast to Tarzan in the 90’s which were generally all critical darlings, smash hits and made fountains of money. Then along with Bush Minor we get Emperors New Groove which was funny as heck but kind of deranged then the aughts slumped into another more mixed quality slump.
But yeah let’s be real.. you’re not, by inclination, the person to go to for opining on mass popular tent pole movies. That’s more a good thing than a bad.Report
The Disney company seems to have been really unsettled by the death of Walt Disney and it took them a better part of the 1970s and 1980s to get back into the swing of things. The full feature animation department seemed especially unsettled until the Little Mermaid came out.Report
Walt knew what he wanted, even though he couldn’t create it himself, and he would settle for nothing less. He could be a real jerk to his employees if they weren’t giving him what he wanted. In the early days, Disney wasn’t very profitable, because he wouldn’t release a film until he was satisfied with it, and the time and cost overruns resulting from that could be brutal. When Walt passed away, the bean-counters took over, and the product descended into mediocrity.
In other words, Walt had a lot in common with Steve Jobs. Not that Apple’s in trouble since Jobs died, but look at what happened to them when Scully was CEO.Report
I remember that speaker but I think we were in middle school and not elementary school.Report
Re: Insurance. A lot of corporations also have similar policies for the deaths of key executives or employees.Report
I like the Retro article. Good find.Report
I like the descriptions of Rogue One as “Star Wars fanfic: The Movie”. Because it really does feel like one; the kind of fanfic that shores up all the weaknesses in the original’s storytelling, closing plot holes, giving characters more screen time so that their narrative stature matches how the original portrayed them, having fanservice (X-Wings versus AT-ATs! Rebel Commandoes! Darth Vader goin’ ham!)
And that’s not to say this is a bad thing. It’s just that it’s so easy, for someone who’s been watching and experiencing fandom for years, to see what this is.Report
In short, way better than 50 shades of grey.Report
A bad writer doing fanfic while plagiarizing the hell out of a bad universe (Twilight)? Oral surgery is more enjoyable than 50 Shades, and you need less drugs too.Report
And someone (don’t ask me who) got reamed for saying “no, we won’t publish that.”Report
Forbes article:
“It’s not just that Disney’s movies are better, it’s that they are more respectful of the actual story than its creator.”
I think what’s interesting about this is that it’s true, but not in the way that the writer thinks. The people who wrote Rogue One and TFA were not, actually, respectful of the Star Wars story that George Lucas wanted to tell. They were respectful of the Star Wars story that they wanted to tell, the one that was first told not just by Lucas but by Ralph McQuarrie and John Williams and Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan and everyone else involved in making the films.Report
The Bryan Alexander article kind of misses the point of Rogue One. Of course it’s retro! IT IS SPECIFICALLY REFERENCING THE WORLD ESTABLISHED IN EPISODE IV.Report
My take on it was that he was discussing why people were happy to suspend their disbelief that such technology wasn’t at play. It was more than Lucas was not a futurist.Report
I don’t think you need much of “take” to explain why fans who built an entire mythology around the implied backstory of one movie would be excited to see something that was directly pulling stuff from that movie. If he wanted to get deeper into the take on why people reacted to it, he’d have to go back to the source material (A New Hope).
In other words, no shit they don’t have cell phones, Star Wars doesn’t have cell phones. If anything I was a little disappointed that they didn’t hook up tractor-trailer brake lines to anybody.Report
Cellphones are plotkillers. That’s why Gortimer Gibbons doesn’t use them.Report
It’s true, and my left brain can understand that
But my right brain gets infuriated when I see TV shows in which everything would be solved if character A called (or texted) character B. I cant suspend disbelief enough to accept that someone would be so stupid not to grab his/her phone right then.Report
J_A,
Gortimer Gibbons is deliberately set in a timeperiod of the late 1990’s (where one person in town has a laptop). It’s deliberate nostalgia.
What i hate are comic misunderstandings where people are trying to do nice things for each other but if they’d just Talk To Each Other they’d figure out that their nice things are conflicting. It’s a common soapplot, and I just turn it off.Report
Of course, it ignores that large organizations are going to have old technologies, especially for storage and archiving, that is retro for legacy purposes. Our nuclear weapons still run on floppies. IBM does brisk business in tape backups for some of the largest and most sophisticated organizations in the world. If Earth becomes the center of a galactic empire, we’ll still use tap because the galactic CIO won’t want to pay Accenture a king’s ransom to move everything from tape over to holographic storage and do a wholesale overhaul of processes to fit the new technology because it still works.
tl;dr: A giant government bureaucracy still using obsolete archival storage technology was the most believable part of Rogue 1.Report
I can buy this.Report
Trump signs order to move Keystone, Dakota pipelines forward.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-pipeline-idUSKBN15820N
It’s good to see some progress.Report
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You support Keystone, @will-truman ? That surprises me a bit. I’m not all that wound up about it either way, just vaguely unenthusiastic about ruining homes and habitat for the sake of fossil fuels.Report
Shipping things by train or tank car ruins the environment worse than any pipeline could manage.
Although if you’re figuring that you’ll stealth-ban oil by making it Really Really Hard And Expensive to use oil, I could see where you’re coming from. Making recreational drugs (and, also, abortions) Really Really Hard And Expensive hasn’t seemed to do for them yet, but hey, maybe it’ll work this time!Report
Emboldened by Trump, Israel Approves a Wave of West Bank Settlement ExpansionReport
There’s a shock.Report
About that trench…Report
Adam Ozimek looks at how a grubby corporation saved Star Wars from a stubborn artist who was ruining his own story.
WTF?
Oh, I see, he’s calling George Lucas an artist. So, once again
WTF?Report