Random Star Wars discussion

Doesn't R2 have a torch?

Han didn't call 3PO Goldenrod for nothing.

Smugglers and pirates and such are going to prefer the untrackable hard currency option, and they seem to outnumber Death Stars a billion to one.

Not going to lie, when watching Episode III in the theater, when Anakin lit up his lightsaber and the kid flinched I started laughing.

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Funny, the novelists and comic writers usually get the unedited screenplays, and put the lost scenes in not knowing what gets cut from the final film; but this stuff isn't even in the adaptations.

Interesting. Most of these would have either unnecessarily slowed the narrative down or telegraphed too much ... and they're exactly the kind of scenes that Lucas would probably have left in the prequel trilogy. So it's a good lesson in effective editing.

All the extra Tatooine shots after the fight at the Sarlaac pit ... fine, but totally unnecessary. The narrative was already going to switch to a slower pace for Dagobah, and that's fine, but this slowdown just wouldn't have added any significance, and arguably would have lessened the impact of the tone shift when Luke arrived at Dagobah.

It's cool to see Luke building another lightsaber, but the whole Jabba's Palace sequence works better when the audience is a little more in the dark about what's going on.

I can see why they'd show the Emperor ordering the moon's destruction if the shield went down — create another "race against the clock" situation as well as an extra point of tension because we know something most of the heroes don't — but it echoes A New Hope too closely, and that whole sequence was already at the right level of excitement and tension.

As far as the ANH scenes go, it's kind of too bad they didn't work — giving Luke a little more backstory would have been nice, setting up the Biggs friendship would have given the final battle more emotional resonance, and Camie would have cut into the whole "every movie has exactly one human woman who isn't Leia" thing. But that's all in retrospect, from the perspective of having been around the movies and the characters for decades. The audience in 1977, seeing Luke for the first time, wouldn't have cared about 10 minutes of "here's some kid watching a space battle through weirdly designed binoculars, here he is getting ribbed by his buddies, here he is having a heart-to-heart with his best friend who we also just met."

(Seriously, look at those macrobinoculars, especially when Camie is using them. The characters all act like they're supposed to be used with two eyes, but the viewfinder is too narrow to actually be used that way, so they all just kind of awkwardly hold the prop out in front of their faces or shift it randomly from eye to eye.)

The ESB ones aren't that bad, and leaving them in wouldn't have hurt the movie that much (although the extended version of the Han/Leia argument at Echo Base makes Han seem like a little too much of a jackass for this point in his character arc). Probably a testament to the significantly better writing on this movie.

As for the prequels, it's mostly just interesting to watch the cuts and go "wow, these movies could have been even more boring."

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That shitbag came very close to being my congressman.

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Too soon!