Nooooooooooooooo!
Posted on 27 October 2011
Here is an article about a documentary I think I appear in, called The People vs. George Lucas
At least, I was filmed for it, and I don’t know if my footage made the final cut, since I haven’t had the pleasure yet of seeing it. The man being interviewed here Alexandre O Phillip, interviewed me during a spare moment of my Worldcon visit to Montreal.
The just-released Blu-ray edition of ‘Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi’ adds an awkward “noooo!” to Darth Vader’s dialogue during the climactic battle between Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the Emperor (Ian McDiarmid). It’s one of several tiny tweaks found in the Blu-ray editions that have fans hopping mad.
My comment:
Man, I loved those films. Man, I hate Lucas. He IS the Dark Side. We all miss you Leigh Brackett !
Note to readers: I am NOT rewriting NULL-A CONTINUUM to add a completely gratuitous tweaks of yelling Noooooo!! to the scene where Gilbert Gosseyn finds out that his false memories cover his true identity, discovering that he is actually his own son produced by an awkward time-travel sex-switching accident.
The scene, if you recall, takes place when Gilbert, wounded, is clinging by one hand to the nadir hull of the floating cloud city of Venus, addressing Lavoisier, now revealed to be Gilbert Gosseyn version Two!
Gilbert Gosseyn One (weeping): I’ll never serve you!
Gilbert Gosseyn Two (sternly): “Search your FEELINGS, Gilbert! Use the Null-A Cortical-Thalamic Pause! I am your FATHER! And, well, I am you also! Sort of!
Gilbert Gosseyn One (anguished): Nooo! That can’t be true!
Gilbert Gosseyn Two (triumphantly): You know it to be true! We can rule the Greatest Empire together as FATHER AND, um, VERSION!”
Gilbert Gosseyn One (aside): Version Three! Why didn’t you tell me! Why—
Gilbert Gosseyn Three (voice from offstage): because I erased your memory when I created you, remember?
Gilbert Gosseyn One (muttering): Jerk.
Gilbert Gosseyn Two (embarrassed): And I am your mother also. You see, being trapped in a time loop gets kind of lonely, and there was all that genetic restructuring equipment there, and no one was looking but Enro, darn that Peeping Tom, and so I just created a small Moebius paradox, and, uh— you see, my middle name is Patrick, and my mother’s maiden name was Hardie, so naturally I—”
Gilbert Gosseyn One: As a man with a Null-A trained double brain, let me just say EWWW! You committed incest! With yourself!
Gilbert Gosseyn Two (defensively): It is not that different from masturbation, if you think about it. It is very nearly close to a sexual practice that is almost perfectly normal. Anyway, rule the Greatest Empire together, as Clone and Other Clone! Join me! And we can end this ruinous conflict!
Gilbert Gosseyn One: I’ll never join you!
(He then drops down the spine of the Cloud City of Venus, knowing that if this body dies his memories will be transferred to a prepared duplicate. But, before his hits bottom, there is a moment of distorter discontinuity, and he is standing next to Gilbert Gosseyn Two, who has used his 20 decimal point similarity technique to teleport his falling body safely to the platform next to him.)
Leej the Predictress: Boy, I saw that one coming.
(Added Tweak) Gilbert Gosseyn One: Nooooooooooooooo!!!
Fanboy: Wait. If Gilbert Gosseyn can teleport to any memorized location, why was he hanging by one hand from the bottom of a Cloud City thingie? Couldn’t he just memorize a spot and bampf to it, or, better yet, memorize and energy socket and pour a zillion volts into evil version Two? The whole scene makes no sense.
Author: Nooooooooooooooo!!!
Ha! I had, sometime ago, a little ditty about Vader confessing to being Luke’s father and mother. I see it works just as well with other stories!
But a little more seriously. I thought I was being put on the first time I saw the “improvement” for the Blu-Ray release. I had to check many sources to make sure it was even real. It is so obviously, ridiculously, mess-your-pants laughably bad, scene destroying, put that man in a straight-jacket, terrible change I could imagine.
He could have, and I am serious, not done worse with the following.
Palpatine: Now, young Skywalker, you will die. (commences with final lightning attack)
Vader: (Groaning while getting up rips loud Dark Side fart)
Palpatine: (pausing to look over at Vader irritably, and wrinkling his nose) Ah! What did you eat for lunch? No matter! (goes back to killing Luke)
Although the drawback here is now you don’t know if Vader kills the Emperor to save his son or if it was because the Emperor called him out for tooting a stinky one. They are both evil, they could kill each other over any slight.
One really has to wonder what ails Lucas. How is it conceivable he thought this was a good change? At least with the prequels (may they burn in hell) he had no standard film to exactly compare it to (except for the original trilogy). But here the original was perfect. Is it a perfectionist going off the deep end? Resentment at the fans? Senility?
You sure you wouldn’t want to perhaps rerelease the Golden Age trilogy to have Phaethon surrounded by some cute alien kids during his exile? They could accidently step in poo-doo or something. I know you really, deep down, wanted to do it the first time. But you were on a deadline, right? Not enough money for paper for the extra scenes? You are waiting for the technology to catch up with your vision, right?
Blah! I could rage all night! I was 6 years old when the first Star Wars came out. I think it ruled at least 4 years of my life. It even helped determine what I wanted to do as an adult. Stop it George! Stop! Stop! Stop!
STAR WARS was closest to the perfect pulp-era space opera Flash Gordon-done-right movie imaginable.
Everything was as completely generic and stereotyped as it could be — such as an evil galactic empire called “The Galactic Empire”, a space Princess, a farm boy, a lovable rogue, and so on — but the set design, the look and feel of the universe, the little touches of material added — such as psionic samurai knights with light-up swords, the comedy relief robots — gave the generic Space Opera adventure world a vivid originality just where it needed originality.
The second film, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, is the one where, thanks to the one scene where we discover Luke’s parentage, the Space Opera takes on the stature of real Opera, and goes from being good to being great. (But, just between you and me, obviously that plot twist was added by Kasdan or Brackett, since it is not foreshadowed in the first film, and indeed makes Obi-Wan out to be a liar.)
The STAR WARS trilogy by itself, transformed science fiction from a small ghetto genre read by a few geeks like me to a mainstream that everyone knows, even if they are not fans, the same way everyone knows Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, even if they don’t read detective novels and spy thrillers.
STAR WARS brought STAR TREK back to the big screen, and then to the the little screen once again. BABYLON FIVE would not have been made without STAR TREK, and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA would not have been made had it not been for the earlier BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, which only made it to the small screen because of the success of STAR WARS.
To pick one example out of countless, my particular favorite cartoon, FLASH GORDON was made as about the only non-crud work that Filmation ever did (although they deserve kudos for TARZAN as well), and they did a version more true to the original than any other version, live action or animated, but they were clearly following Lucas in look and feel.
Big-budget special effects movies became their own category of movie — before STAR WARS no one went to a movie to see the special effects: SFX were something more or less in the background, except, perhaps, for a scene here and there in a movie like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS or FORBIDDEN PLANET.
And the prequels just sucked lemons. They were not just bad, they were terrible beyond terrible. If you want to know why, see http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/
Despite the vile jokes about murdering women, this man has the clearest insight into what went wrong with the prequels as anyone I’ve heard. I wish he would put out an airplane version of his reviews so that people like me could watch them.
I’ve seen the Plinkett reviews, the man knows his material.
According to The Secret History of Star Wars, it seems the parentage plot twist was entirely conceived by Lucas (in a hotel in a Mexican beach no less); if it was later further developed by Leigh Brackett I don’t remember at the moment.
http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/
http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/motion-captured/posts/film-nerd-2-0-revenge-of-the-sith-devastates-the-kids-as-anakin-falls-from-grace
This review made me rethink my assessment of the prequels.
A lady was curious enough after reading my fanboy ravings about Poul Andersom to try reading FLANDRY: DEFENDER OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE. She told me it was a better book than she had expected. She even thought it would be a good idea to try making films or animations of some of Anderson’s stories (suggesting A CIRCUS OF HELLS, for instance). I too would have liked some bold film maker to try his hand at filming one of Anderson’s stories, despite my fear it would be botched up.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks