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Are you less interested in Star Wars now?


Zathras
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That one actually fits in the old EU, too. In fact, it was what it was supposed to be initially.

All the new Zahn and Luceno books fit as well. They write them around the old continuity to conceivably fit within both timelines if one so desires, which is super cool.

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I'm actually less interested in Star Wars movies now than I ever was. I used to be a movies only guy. (Well, the video games were usually cool and satisfied that part of me that still yearned to be a kid playing with my action figures).

But I'm much more interested in Star Wars TV in recent years. I love TCW and Rebels and also Mando is cool and shows a lot of promise. I feel like a traitor to my former self to believe that TV is a better medium for Star Wars than the big screen, but it is.

Don't get me wrong, I think the movies could be amazing - as a medium that's where the big epic stories and sweeping landscapes and melodramatic moments can be really powerful. But the way Hollywood works now, having to appease so many different interests, seems to work against having any artistic integrity for a blockbuster film like this. They'll just keep failing and I'm not sure you can blame Disney or Lucasfilm or Kathleen Kennedy. It's just the landscape of Hollywood.

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The biggest factor in that is that TV and film are now shot on the same formats and all FX are digital. In the 80s, SW was shot on 35mm film and all the effects were composited on 35mm, and that took a crap ton of time.

 

TV was shot on Super 16mm film, sometimes 35, and video.

 

Given that TV production time is so limited, you simply didn't have time for doing full 35mm composited shots. So TV FX would never look as good as movies.

 

A great comparison is when you had TNG on TV the same time Trek 5 and 6 came out in theaters. On TNG, the actors were shot on 35 film, but ALL of the effects were done with video. Composite stuff (people shooting phasers) was added to the already compressed to video footage for broadcast.

 

Meaning-- for a movie, you shoot on 35, composite at 35, then make an assembly to make a master 35mm print. Shows like TNG were shooting on 35, but then scanning and rez-ing down to broadcast video standard. Meanwhile the space scenes were shot AT that broadcast res purely on video. If you go back and look at it now, it's easy to see the difference. So TNG had that while the films were still doing ILM level effects (well, TUC did, TFF was terrible effects).

 

But now-- everything, TV and film is shot at 4k. TV and Film having different standards an aspect ratios is done. We're all on the same format now.

 

Mando's FX work isn't QUITE at the same level of TROS, but it's not far off. In terms of fidelity and resolution, it's there. In terms of budget to farm out shots to a dozen FX houses with hundreds of paint/comp artists working, not so much. That's the only roadblock with FX now, the more complex the shot, the more hours it takes to create, and the more money it costs.

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Stagecraft is the only way they were able to make this show. Even still, it had an insane budget for TV. No one but Disney would have spent that money.

 

Stagecraft helps you cut location shooting but special effects still have to come into play. If you look at any Star War you have countless types of effects-- miniatures, matte insertions, compositing, 3D asset construction, animation, and rendering, etc. There's a ton of things done to bring SW to life.

 

Stagecraft has basically just replaced greenscreen shooting by having a background screen with enough fidelity and resolution that they save the time compositing the action into different backgrounds. But everything else on that list is still being done the traditional way.

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The money saved on flying even a skeleton crew around the world has to help with that though. As you say, that stuff all had to be done either way and now they save on flights, hotels, per diems, transportation, shipping fees, equipment rentals, etc etc etc. That's gotta add up to...what, hundreds of thousands?

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In the long run, yes, it saves money for sure. I was talking more a out the TIME high quality, complex FX take. Stagecraft replaces green screen and the need for location shooting, not the multitude of FX used to make a massive space battle.

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My kids really dont care as much as they want to care about Star Wars. But my oldest is 7 and were not doing PG-13 movies yet so hes only seen the OT

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My kid was a huge Clone Wars fan. CW to him is what the OT was to me. Funny enough, he doesn't love the prequels. That base has kept him interested enough that we watch SW stuff as it comes out, but he's not watching anything repeatedly.

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I am really not interested in a lot of this Galaxy's Edge stuff. I did go back and read Resistance Reborn, and am working through Master and Apprentice. There's still a ton of timelines to be mined for books, it would be nice if they filled in those blanks. I've actually liked the PT era novels, I've read most of the new ones.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I usually plan a movie marathon around this time of year. Now, "marathon" does not mean the same thing to me in my old age (mid-thirties) as it did a decade ago, where I stayed up all night and watched all six films consecutively. I have neither the time nor the energy for that anymore. Instead, it is one movie per day, timing it so that my viewing of Episode IV falls on May 25. In recent years, I have incorporated most media that falls into my head canon, including Clone Wars (Tartakovsky), Rogue One, the Holiday Special, Ewoks: Caravan of Courage, and Ewoks: Battle For Endor, all interwoven between the six main films in their proper places.

If I wanted to be a completionist, I would include Filoni's The Clone Wars and Rebels, as well as the Droids and Ewoks cartoons, as well as The Mandalorian (yes, it can fit within the EU, right before Heir to the Empire, in fact), but that would take a ridiculously long time and be nearly impossible to time it so that I watch A New Hope on May 25, or close to it. I also exclude The Clone Wars film from the viewing because it is basically a lead-in to the series and makes little sense by itself. This is something I plan to do eventually, though.

However, this year I just didn't feel up to it. I considered maybe doing a marathon of just the six main films without any of the spin-offs, but in the end I couldn't even bring myself to do that. I am getting that familiar feeling of over-watching, which I experienced back when The Phantom Menace was re-released in theaters back in 2011. I remember trying as hard as I could to rekindle the excitement I felt in 1999, but I just could not do that, and even nodded off a few times in my theater seat. (It also didn't help that my buddy bailed on me at the last minute, so I was all by myself.) I got the same feeling this year when considering a movie marathon in any capacity, so I decided to skip it this year. Maybe I'll do it every two years, or even three. After all, Star Wars is much bigger to me than the movies, so it's not like there isn't plenty of other material to satiate my appatite.

In fact, that's exactly what I decided to do. To honor May 25 this year, instead of a movie marathon, I decided to do a game marathon of the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series. Those games are what got me into the EU, after all, so they are hugely significant for me. They're why I'm still a Star Wars fan today, so they are my present indulgence. I stayed up till 2:00 AM last night tinkering with graphical mods for the original Jedi Knight, which I've finally gotten working perfectly and the game looks amazing because of it.

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  • 3 weeks later...

So in the Mando thread, I mentioned I have lost interest in Star Wars, ever since TROS. Now that the ST and Skywalker saga are over, and we are in between seasons of The Mandalorian, of which I am only mildly interested in (I have seen about 2/3s of the episodes and I'm spoiled on the rest), as well as only a fair interest in the final Clone Wars season, and Obi Wan is now back in development hell apparently, I find myself very disinterested in new Star Wars projects. When it was recently announced the Thor Ragnarok guy is doing a Star Wars film, my response wasn't even a "meh." I just don't care.

 

The OT, or more properly, ANH and TESB, will always be in my top favorite movies of all time, but the rest of Episodes 1-6 are just blu ray movies that sit on my shelf, now. I am not going to rehash my distaste for the ST, or debate about why they didn't work for me, just suffice it to say, they just aren't my thing, and I think except for Rogue One, none of the Disney Star Wars films have any kind of rewatch-ability for me, and I don't own any of them on disc, except R1. But beginning with TFA, while the Disney era Star Wars films were all in development, I was always looking forward to the next film. Even TROS, which is probably my least favorite (with TLJ a razor thin close second), I still wanted to see the movie before it was released.

 

But now that TROS has been and gone, I just don't care about Star Wars, really outside of the OT.

 

Does anyone feel similarly about future Star Wars projects, either upcoming/in the works or in development?

I stopped caring while the PT was in theaters, and by care I mean investing any creative/intellectual interest in the films as something to absorb, revisit and analyze on any level for enjoyment. The Kennedy Era has poisoned the franchise well, to the point that its now as bad off as the Star Trek franchise after one "Berman-verse" show after another left it as a pile of creatively-challenged rubble, especially the horrid Voyager and Enterprise. The JJ films, Discovery and Picard only served to walk by that pile, and set it on fire, much like the Star Wars sequels have to done to its own franchise.

 

Current Star Wars is no longer relevant as a creation. Its an overused battery sloppily covered in Star Wars gift wrap, run by people who are as far removed from what Lucas intended / brought to the OT as one can imagine. Its clear they do not really care about carrying on GL's legacy (you know, what made SW a cultural phenomenon), so why would anyone else?

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Well I mean Justus stopped caring 15-20 years ago while the prequels were in theaters. He evidently hasn't like a Star Wars movie in whats quickly becoming 40 years I guess. Which is fine. But I don't think its fair to use his opinion of the recent movies as some sort of bellweather to validate your opinion from 2012.

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I don;t know if thats true. I mean I think this most recent movie left a bad taste in alot of people's mouths. But overall I find most people like the Disney era movies in general. You say you predicted this "general consensus" but in reality its more just what you wanted, at least once they did away with the existing EU. So you just look for opinions that cement that.

 

I don't think youd find the general consensus online at all anyway, thats not representative of how most people feel.

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Now, I said many, many times that I was not rooting for the Disney canon to fail, and in fact hoped everyone enjoyed it, so what you're saying is simply not true. And don't turn this into a debate about what I really thought: I know my thoughts better than you do.

If anything, the franchise actually unraveled faster than I predicted. I gave it ten years.

To be fair, most of us also dont like the stuff that you loved from before 2012.

That is true, but to be equally fair, most of you were not exposed to everything I was exposed to.

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Ill turn this into any kind of debate I want, if you don't want to respond further thats up to you. The way you acted towards the Disney era was simply to say you wanted it to do well and have people like it to seem like you were being fair when in fact you desperately wanted it to fail. That is 100% obvious in how you post. In fact the fact that you gleefully posted some stupid meme here to brag about being "right" in your own mind is proof enough of that.

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I don't know whats in your head, I do know how you post here in the Star Wars forum. And the posts you made here do not in any way seem like the kind of posts someone would make who was genuinely hoping that people would like them. I doubt many here would disagree with that. Maybe you are lying to yourself and don't even realize it? I don;t know.

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