No matter how many times....
....the Soviet Encyclopedia is edited, Han shot first.
Disney's plans to shamelessly cash in on tell more and richer stories from the Star Wars universe will result in a solo Han Solo film in 2018. Starwars.com reports that the as-yet-un-named entertainment will be helmed by Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, the duo responsible for The LEGO Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs …
Indeed... Han Shot First! Lucas changed that little detail in subsequent releases of Star Wars, the editions 90% of the watching public own. I have a despecialized edition re-edited by a fan... Sorry but Han was a scoundrel, pirate etc. Gotta love him!
My son just watched it Sunday so it is fresh in my mind.
I was one day watching the edited version with my father and bother and I had to pause and show the scene a couple times so they could see that Greedo had fired a shot.
I am not certain they ended up believing me, the scene is so badly distorted that it is hard to see.
You shall introduce them to the marvels of TaunTaun sleeping bags and they shall be enlightened forthwith.
I seem to remember the first mission of the original Dark Forces game being Kyle Katarn stealing the Death Star plans......
"The first mission (which was also released independently as a demo of the game) involved infiltration of an Imperial base on the planet Danuta, in order to steal the Death Star plans. The Mission to Danuta resulted in Rebel possession of the plans that would later be given to Princess Leia and lead to the destruction of the battle-station."
Any bets that this will change?
Yep, given that Disney has basically de-canonised everything except the 6 films and the new Rebels series, there's now 30 years of brilliant stories and characters that have been chucked out an airlock to drift aimlessly under the "Legends" banner.
No Thrawn, Mara Jade, Dash Rendar, Yuuzhan Vong, Darth Caedus...
*sob*
I'm playing again through the Knights of The Old Republic (KOTOR) game, as it has been rereleased on iOS. It reminds me just why the prequels were so bad and these spinoffs are going to be shit - they are too closely wedded to the characters and events in the Original series.
Both KOTOR (and it's buggy sequel with the deeper plot) were set in the Star Wars universe but at a different time, so the never ending battle between Sith and Jedi was in still in full tilt as it had been for several millenia, the same planets and species were present but the characters and events were very different. This allowed the writer to be so much more free with his plots and the events didn't have to be pigeon-holed into simply setting up the proper trilogy. The characters were free to be themselves not just early versions of people in the trilogy and therefore the depth and humour they displayed was so much better. He didn't have to go around trying to explain everything with psuedo-science, he could just get on with telling story.
Lucas could have set many Star Wars films in the universe, divorced from the era the original films were set and could then have made many, many films each with their own storylines, characters locations and technology, much in the same way that Bond films have become. This would have allowed for better (or worse) films and wouldn't have tained the original series. The desire to set everything with the same characters in the same era just constricts far too much and gradually erodes the respect of teh original films.
Hell, the trailer to The Old Republic was far better than the prequels ever were.
Agree completely.
The trailers for the SWTOR game are some of the best Star Wars material out there - they show it is perfectly possible to lose the original cast and still feel perfectly StarWarsy.
Still, it doesn't really matter. Kids will love the films whatever and don't need a load of middle-aged curmudgeons trying to tell them it was all better in the seventies.
The biggest problem with most of the stuff tagged onto the Star Wars universe is... light sabers and Jedi. Everyone loved Dark Forces, but lamented that there were no light sabers in it. And everyone wanted to say "use the force, Luke" and there was no force either; so they wrote Jedi Knight. But rather than flip to a "golden age" à la Old Republic, they set it just after the films, which meant suddenly injecting all those crazy force powers that then end up being reflected back in the prequel trilogy.
The books and comics not only immediately started introducing Jedis so they could have more light-sabers, but they also all played up this pre-Empire superpowerful Justice-League-of-the-University Jedi Council nonsense, and suddenly the Jedi went from being a few relics of an ancient way of life, mocked and derided by many (see Vader's argument in New Hope and Jabba's dismissive "he's using an old Jedi mind trick" in Return of the Jedi) to being a bunch of walking one-man armies armed with more pyrotechnics than the all the Earth's national holidays put together who were wiped out within the living memory of half the characters in the films.
Kenobi and Vader only made sense as the end of a long slow decline in the traditional ways.
The orequels would have made more sense if Kenobi was just a soldier and was laughed at for carrying a light-saber into battle, and if there were a handful of others like him using the force subtley like in the original films, and Annakin Skywalker was one of them, perhaps even a young soldier that he had trained hiimself.
Apparently (according to a friend of mine who is a total Star Wars geek and who has told me about this in excruciatingly tedious detail) Kessel is surrounded by a cluster of black holes and most ships have to take the "long way round" to avoid them, but the Falcon is such a nippy ship that it could dodge between them and shorten the route (or something like that, my brain may have switched off somewhere along the line...)
Or, of course, this could simply be RetCon because George Lucas didn't know that a parsec is a measure of distance, not time...
That was in a book, not part of the official backstory. The original line was too things -- a mistake and a lie. A mistake in that the script guys didn't know it was a unit of distance, a lie in that the script notes that it was just Solo trying to bluff Kenobi.
If they have the Falcon doing the Kessel run in record time in this film, THAT would be retconning, as it would rewrite the original script.
I can sense a great disturbance in the Force... A Disney executive has just decided that the Kessel Run will be a race... A teenage Han Solo will be piloting the Falcon... for a Hutt crime lord... against a variety of aliens in similar vessels...
I am seeing... an annoying sidekick who constantly frustrates Chewbacca....
My god...
"MEEESA HERE MISTA SOLO, OKIDAY?!"
"Kessel is surrounded by a cluster of black holes and most ships have to take the "long way round"..."
Naaah, it's just that the Kessel run is actually an elaborate "travelling salesman" trial where you need to hit all checkpoints in arbitrary order and the remark was meant to compliment the prowess of the ship's navigation software and its manoeuvrability rather than raw speed...
PS - Disney, this idea is hereby declared public domain and free to use... ;)
In contrast to the generally dreadful prequels – any scene without Natalie Portman was a waste – I can imagine stories with less epic backdrops, such as a younger Han smuggling, working quite well. Lots of scope for risky double-dealing, problems with hardware, love affairs working quite well. Doesn't mean the films will be any good, but they might be.
Here's hoping the flick addresses Solo's two big missing pieces, namely how he managed to emerge from the Mos Eisely Cantina after shooting second
Han shot first. Seriously, how could anyone possibly miss that close?
and his methods for making the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.
Dealt with in one of the novels. I forget the exact details, but it involved a black hole. Oh, wait, sorry, I forgot. The expanded universe no longer exists.