If we’re going to get an animated Star Wars film, why on earth are we getting the Clone Wars, which has already had live-action movies and an animated series and potentially a live-action series in the future about it – instead of, and this is just off the top of my head, an adaptation of the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn, AKA “the only good Star Wars novels ever?”
I mean, seriously – you get together a thousand nerds, and say “would you rather have animated Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala and nameless Jedi #6, or animated Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker” and you know you’re going to get 999 people voting for “never tell me the odds!” and one person complaining that we can’t get a CGI adaptation of Dune or something.
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Shatterpoint was a damn good novel (but then i’m a huge mace windu fan)
but yeah, i would love to see the continuing adventures of the old school crew. esp if it was based on the Heir to the Empire trilogy
(the first star wars novels i ever read) 🙂
Fantasy Casting: Jennifer Garner as Mara Jade. I may be biased, because I’d cast Jennifer Garner in anything. Preferably in her underwear.
Further question – as a fellow livejournal to Word Press refugee – how on Earth do I hyperlink?
We got enough Dune to last. Bring on the Zahn! 🙂
Dave: Same as ever: [a href=”(the url)”](text of hyperlink)[/a]. With pointy brackets replacing square, naturally.
I was actually asking this yesterday when the CW trailer came on before The Incredible Hulk. Why retread the same ground as a series you’re not going to match the quality of (The Clone Wars Animated Series by G. Tartakovsky), and keep inundating us with characters that none of the fans ever really got attached to in the first place?
With CGI, you have the ability to continue, or at least tell more stories set in the original trilogy, and can still use the original voice actors, without worrying about them being age appropriate for the roles.
It’s just got to be a case of GL not accepting that other people can write his baby better than he can, so if anything’s going to be completely officially made into a film, it’s going to have his hands all over it.
Wait, this isn’t the Animated Series? I thought they were just re-releasing that to make some extra cash. WTF?
oh, and MGK, I think this project is an animated series, supposed to air on CN, not a feature film release.
It’s in theatres Steve. I call that a feature film release.
Hm, guess I missed that. Ah well, not planning on seeing it either way.
Eh. If Lucas is going to be involved in any way creatively, I’d rather he stick with the “new trilogy” stuff. That seems to be where his heart is now, and it leaves open the post-original trilogy for his heirs to exploit when he shuffles off the mortal coil (not to be morbid or anything, but his kids and grandkids and great-grandkids are going to be mining the Star Wars vein for cash for, oh, approximately the next forever. Maybe the next two forevers.)
And in interviews it really sounds like he thinks that the original story is “finished” as far as he’s concerned. That’s why the old rumors of “prequel and a sequel” trilogies never went beyond the “prequel” side – he seems to consider this “Anakin’s Story” and once Anakin died at the end of RotJ, the story was complete.
Personally, if they were going to do a CGI series (not movie – series), I’d like to see one set in the Knights of the Old Republic era – that’s a pretty cool setting that could do well if it got a bit more exposure.
I can’t believe only Sam Jackson and Anthony Daniels are doing their character’s voices. What about Frank Oz? Or Ian McDiarmid? Am I to believe that Hayden Christianson really has better things to do?
Answer: If they made a cartoon about the cast of the original trilogy, those 999 fans who’d say they want it would find it wanting. They’d whine that Harrison Ford isn’t voicing Solo, they’d whine that a given character does something they never had a chance to do would have done in the movies, and they’d whine that it’s not as good as the original movies.
Like it or not, the Clone Wars era is much safer for Lucasfilm to play with at this point because it doesn’t have 31 years of nostalgia and expectations hanging over it. The target audience for this new movie is people who would take whichever era they got. The only market segment that this project ignores that a Luke/Han/Leia project would tap into is the one that gave up on Star Wars nine years ago.
too many people would bitch about the voice acting since the only one you have any real hope of getting is Mark Hamill.
Not me, but you know fanboys. Anything other than what they’ve already dreamed in their heads is total crap.
the movie is the first 3 or 4 episodes of the new animated tv series strung together
I always liked the one novel wherein the Jedi Kids get a pet Tie Fighter pilot.
They learned an important lesson about responsibility that day.
Don’t forget, in this series Anakin gets a catgirl padawan.
No, really.
Now mainstream America can learn to hate furries too!
With awareness comes understanding…
@ Jim Smith: I’m gonna come right out and say it: I liked Perry King’s Han Solo better than Ford’s.
Honestly I think the only thing left to do is the death of Luke Skywalker, his passing the torch/saber to Ben Skywalker, as discussed like 20 years ago. Some sort of movie bookending the hero’s journey deal.
‘Cause even when I was 12 and I read the Thrawn books, I knew it wouldn’t have appeal outside of the people who cared what Ponda Baba’s day job was. It was too navel-gazingly self-absorbed, glibly stamp-collecting in ways even the Prequel Trilogy hasn’t indulged.
I agree that Shatterpoint was neat, and I, Jedi was pretty slick. But I think that the best stuff we’ve seen has been people exploring entirely new ground, new characters almost completely unrelated to the movie folk – Legacy (pacing problems aside), Knights of the Old Republic. If Lucas is still fixated on Ewan MacGregor’s lifeless interpretation of Young Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he wants to fund the movie, I’d rather see him make what he cares about.
To sum up: the Star Wars fandom is like, the whiniest, most vitriolic fanbase there is. The reason we don’t know about all of the death threats George Lucas got is because he pays someone to read those letters, and that person just shreds them and gets paid cool green to do so.
While I liked the Zahn novels when I read them ages ago, it still followed the old trope, “Empire gets weapon, Good Guys blow it up.” Still, it’d be better than a Clone Wars CGI Lucas-fest. Personally, I’d like to see a “Tad and Bink” series, but that’s just me.
That said, how does everyone think Anakin’s “apprentice” is going to bow out so she doesn’t appear in Episode III? My money is on suicide after realizing her master is a dork.
As a definite Star Wars fan, I have to protest that there are plenty of other good Star Wars books! Zahn’s other novels, Aaron Allston’s run on X-wing, Stackpole’s “I, Jedi”, the Medstar Duology… and there are several decent ones. It just so happens that they’re outnumbered by the novels which suck ferociously. Lots of those lately, but they’re nothing new. Whatever Lucasarts does to pick authors, it’s very hit or miss.
I do think it would be awesome if they figured out that enough was enough on the Clone Wars! Oh, I think that Jedi are cool and so are the clone troopers when they’re not just mindless cannon fodder, but seriously, no matter how cool or interesting a character is, by the conclusion you just know that they’re either dead or arbitrarily retiring to some backwater, never to stick a finger into important events again. The best they can hope for is a small role in the most recent comics, like Able, though he’s a nod to the wars rather than a character used in them. The clone who survived in a jungle for twenty years and then joined the Rebellion when they found him.
I’ve heard that that live-action series is supposed to cover that twenty-year interim between the prequel trilogy and the originals, which is nice, I guess. It’s mostly untapped. But the same caveat for the Clone Wars exists here, too.
I think if you asked that particular “would you rather” to kids, and those who were kids when Phantom Menace rolled out, you might get a different answer. Goddamn padawans.
Few things:
1.) This is basically a 2 hour pilot to the Clone Wars animated series due out in the fall.
2.) It was easier to do the Clone Wars first, as a testing ground. They already had the concept, voice actors (mostly the same as the micro-series though Sam Jackson is doing Mace, which is sweet.), etc. mapped out. I’m willing to bet that if the Clone Wars does well we’ll see other animated stuff in the future. (I, too, would love to see the Thrawn Trilogy. The X-Wing series would be great as well.)
3.) The Live Action series is set between Ep.III and IV.
What’s the time frame on the live action series?
Last I heard next fall sometime was the target, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it pushed into 2011. I’m assuming that’s what you meant by “time frame” because otherwise all we know is “Between III and IV.”
I didn’t read ‘Shatterpoint’, but I think that Karen Traviss has been able to pull something useful out of the second trilogy with a really interesting series on the Clone Troopers. It’s actually her writing that has me somewhat hopeful about this movie as the trailers have shown some personality from the troopers.
Her books, (‘Hard Contact’, ‘Triple Zero’, and ‘True Colors’), have taken a pretty good ethical look at the Clone Army and the Separatist War. At the highest level, she asks how the Jedi can justify leading a slave army; but she also does a great job managing the tactical and logistical issues of having an army of near-identical clones. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that her writing has a lot of dry humor and that the clone commandos kick a hell of a lot of ass.
The shortcoming is that she gets lost in the Mandolorian lore that she’s developed, including building the language and history of the culture. She also humanizes Boba Fett too much, but that character has been f’ed since Jango came into the picture (Daniel Keys Moran gave him the best story & origin).
Alright, I just geeked out enough for the week. Sorry for the rant, but I had to justify some good non-Zahn writing and the only good thing I’ve found pre-Episode IV.
MGK, I’d recommend “Shadows of the Empire” by Steve Perry (different guy than the singer from Journey of course). There’s also the Zahn novel “Survivor’s Quest” that I thought was very good, whereas I consider his followup to the “Heir to the Empire” trilogy to be disappointing. There are also Aaron Allston’s novels about Wraith Squadron: good stuff.
What you’ve stated here about the characters from the prequel trilogy versus the original trilogy sums up my feelings exactly. I have liked the Expanded Universe novels and characters because they were just better. In the prequels we ended up learning that Obi-Wan was a prick in his youth, Anakin was emo and whiny, and that the Jedi thought falling in love was the path to the dark side. The Expanded Universe wasn’t like that.
Unfortunately it seems that it’s becoming that way now; in the most recent novels we have certain Jedi worrying about “attachments”, we had Luke write off a fallen Jedi as an enemy and slice her up with his lightsaber instead of trying to redeem her as he did with his father and with Kyp Durron and with Kam Solusar and tried to do with Brakiss (similar to how Obi-Wan just left Anakin to burn to death instead of attempting to save him, an act of omission that caused me to lose all respect for the character), and we have the love interest of a Jedi end up getting killed possibly–and this is just me speculating–because somebody felt that Jedi shouldn’t have love interests.
Erik:
Traviss is talented, yes, but she said in the round robin interview included with “Fury” that she didn’t think Jedi should be allowed to have families because they were living superweapons and would probably put what was in the interest of their loved ones over what was in the interest of the galaxy. Forget the logic behind it for a second and consider: she, and Lucas, are saying that a group of people shouldn’t be allowed to have a family. That is terrible. I’m going to e-mail her about that. She was also the person who believed that you-know-who should kill somebody he loved, with the result you’re aware of. So she was kind of the Bob Salvatore of the “Legacy of the Force” series, except whereas Salvatore was only doing what he was told to by writing a story in which a beloved character died, with Traviss it was her idea and she says as much.
Rob:
It wasn’t just Traviss that thought that, and let’s not take away from Denning, who has become one of the worst writers for the EU since Kevin J. Anderson. What started off as a great idea for LotF got completely turned around and butt-raped past the second book and much of the problems with that series all fall to Denning and the crappy editor that let all this crap get past in the first place. (The series idea was Denning’s originally.) Seriously, what the hell were they thinking? They had one of the most well developed characters in the EU, who could have made the concept work in ways where this could have been the best series to date, and instead of going through with it in the direction it started towards, he gets turned into an Emo Anakin Jr. who acts evil just for the hell it and apparently loses half of his I.Q. once he went to the dark side because instead of being a huge threat he comes off as a complete moron who get’s his ass handed to him by EVERYONE the entire series….but I’m not bitter. :-p I’m not even going to talk about Denning’s ending- which I couldn’t even bring myself to read. I had to read a plot synopsis just to confirm my initial assessment that it would be one of the most retarded endings possible. (Daala? Really?)
Unfortunately, when it comes to SW novels there’s more bad than good. In the bantam era you had Zahn’s books, the X-Wing series, and I, Jedi with the rest being “Eh, it was okay” to “Good lord that’s stupid!” The NJO was a good concept badly executed and went on at least three books too long. Though it did give us one of the best SW books ever with Traitor.
For those who want to read good prequel-era books: Shatterpoint, Traviss’ Clone books, The Yoda book- which actually ended up being decent, Labyrinth of Evil, and the novelization of Revenge of the Sith- which is actually one of the better SW books period. If the movie had done what the novel did then Revenge would have been on par with ESB. Stover is the best SW writer to date. Dark Lord is pretty good too, though it’s set just after Ep.III. I’ve heard there were a couple of others that weren’t bad, some of which I own because I could pick them up cheap but haven’t read yet.
Also, the comics kick all kinds of ass. Legacy and Knights of the Old Republic especially, for the series still running. Republic and Empire were amazing as well.
Yeah, I’m a complete fan nerd. I own every book, read most of them more than twice. But Legacy of the Force pretty much killed the EU (other than the comics) for me. The only novels I plan on picking up now are Stover’s new one in Oct. the Coruscant Night’s books that start this week, and possibly the Force Unleashed. If they know what’s good for them after the stupid Falcon book they’ll take a break from the current generation of characters and write in a different time frame with new ones. Give the fans a break, let them miss the movie characters, then come back fresh a few years from now once the taste of this last series has been washed out of peoples mouths a bit. Just my two…well five, cents.
I think it’s an effort to make Anakin Skywalker “cool” instead of the lying, hypocritical, pratt he was in the movies. There wasn’t a single event in Episode 2 or 3 that made me feel anything besides annoyance or anger for him. I cheered when Obi-Wan cut him up and I really wasn’t that sad for Padme, since she did not bother researching precisely why Jedi were not allowed to get married, “let love blind her.”
Ugh. I’m reminded why I haven’t been looking forward to this.
Randy:
Yeah, the guy who to avoid spoilering I’ll also call Emo-Anakin-Jr. (or EAJ) first began showing signs of villainousness during Denning’s “Dark Nest” books. Plus, IIRC from the round robin interview I mentioned before, I believe Denning said he had the basic idea for the series in the first place and that he was the one to pitch it without all of the specifics and details that would later be added. Like you said, EAJ was one of the best characters produced by the EU, and once he ended up murdering one of the other great characters produced by the EU then there was no going back for him, I guess.
I haven’t yet got to the end of the series. I’m sure not gonna buy the hardcover. I did know it involved Daala (who, like pretty much every Kevin Anderson villain aside from Exar Kun, has always been laughably easy to beat) somehow, and a few other things.
Anyway, you’re right. There is no logical reason for EAJ to have developed this way. He was a good guy who one day got it into his head that he wanted control over the whole galaxy and was willing to do anything to get it. And his reason was, what, Corellia wanted to leave the Galactic Alliance? It wasn’t as though Corellia was threatening the rest of the galaxy by doing so.
To sum up, in this series they ruined one character beyond repair and used him to kill off another character that people really cared about. So for you to say they “killed the EU”…yeah, that sounds about right to me. And, as you can see, I too am a complete SW fan nerd.
If you don’t mind, I’ll e-mail you so we can commiserate about this.
Hank:
When Anakin was first mentioned by Obi-Wan, in the very first Star Wars movie, he DID sound cool. Based on what Kenobi said, he sounded like this great hero whom everybody admired and respected. So to see him portrayed as we was in the prequels was a big disappointment.
But how was he “hypocritical”? The way I see it, he stuck with the Jedi for years after being freed from slavery, except instead of getting the power to change things for the better and be a hero like he’d always dreamed of…he was now the JEDI’s slave. He wasn’t allowed to shit without permission, he wasn’t allowed to check up on his mother when he knew she was in trouble, he wasn’t allowed to date, etc. What kind of life is that?
The only guy who ever treated him well was Palpatine, so it isn’t the least bit surprising to me that he finally switched sides. After that he pretty much lost his mind and did things that made no sense at all (like Force-choking the person whose life he’d been trying to save), but before that he wasn’t that bad. Annoying sometimes, yes. Evil, no.
And not even evil people deserve what Obi-Wan did to him. The good guys are supposed to be better than that. I made this comparison before on comixfan.com and I’ll make it again here: Captain America tried to save Baron Zemo’s life on like four occasions back when Zemo was a pure villain, even though they were enemies. That is what a good guy is supposed to do. He is NOT supposed to just sit back and watch his enemy writhe in agony as his flesh burns, as Obi-Wan did.
“To sum up: the Star Wars fandom is like, the whiniest, most vitriolic fanbase there is.”
I beg to differ. I have defintely seen whinier and more vitriolic fanbases.
Rob,
Sure, drop me a line anytime. Always fun to geek out.
“I beg to differ. I have defintely seen whinier and more vitriolic fanbases.”
Indeed. *cough*comicsfans*cough* :-p
Hey, I’m a huge comic geek too, so I include myself in that. 😉
I liked the one where Han Solo was a prince and C3PO wrote odes to him.
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