“things that george lucas is horny for” is arcane knowledge that is so powerful it would destroy the very fabric of reality were it to be revealed
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I think this is exactly right, and
this is why making games is so hard and can be rewarding. Almost nothing is standardized so you’re making up everything as you go along, including production estimates. One of the major pathologies of productions in the scope of tens of millions of dollars, movie and games alike, is that you can’t make something small and good and build from there. What you try to do is so big that you only know if it’s a miserable failure after you’ve spent so much time and money that you can’t afford to drop it.
And it induces that same Lucas-like bias towards the superficial and shiny because at least we know how to turn up the particles to salvage some sort of adrenal response
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Lucas would’ve been great if he just said “I want laser swords and a 1950s diner and you remember my movie american graffiti? Well I want some car culture in the movie too. Oooh and have you seen my latest fascination, sebulba” to a team of competent artists and directors and then let them do what they wanted while also hiring a competent writer and editor to convert his horny sebulba fanfic into a coherent finished work.
I’m of the rare species of person that actually hates the individual design choices in the prequels. They’re so antiseptic.
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The overindulgence in Buck Rodgers / Flash Gordon stuff is still just kind of inherently uninteresting to me, but they’ve grown on me a LOT over the years. I’m not at all a ‘the sequels made me like the prequels in retrospect’ person in any other way, but they did make me appreciate even more how much the prequels look like they take place in a very different era. And I like the way the trilogy gradually introduces more “familiar” elements over the course of the three films.
The only reason I still hope for more Disney spinoff interquels is to see a movie that takes place like, 5 years after episode 3 ends. Solo was kind of a missed opportunity in that regard but I liked that the evil crime boss’s yacht looked kind of like something out of the prequels.
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It just feels like its too far divorced from the “straight from the pages of Valerian and Laureline” aesthetic of the originals. It was only 30 years from the start of one trilogy to the start of another and everything went from shiny smooth apple product to greebled wreckage and that’s just unbelievable to me
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Almost any random frame pulled from any of the prequels is aesthetically repulsive to me. From the Jedi robes to the racist aliens to all of Amidala’s dumb ass hairpieces. The space battles are completely unreadable garbage. Anakin’s fuckin rat tail. It’s all one giant problem.
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no one ever talks about what a shit design darth maul is. It’s trying so hard to be dark and just screams cornball.
It’s like a born again christian’s idea of a scary villain.
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not liking amidala’s hair and costumes just shows your bad taste, how embarrassing for you
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like I do get that dominant aesthetics change over the years but one of the central features of the original trilogy was that whole “lived in future” implied a lost golden age that was… more than 30 years ago.
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yeah that is definitely how i felt until i became kind of obsessive about these movies. part of me wants to do an elaborate review of all of the design cues from the OT that stuff in the prequels pick up on, but it is so subtle that i basically agree that the dissonance is still pretty jarring.
the other thing that i think is interesting though, is that the story the aesthetic dissonance tells is about the exponentially fast expansion and consolidation of the empire. things can change pretty quickly in periods like this!
i think the scenes that are on tatooine illustrate this pretty well, because things look more or less the same, it’s just that the planet is a lot more vibrant and populated in the pt. in the ot it looks pretty barren, and everything interesting looking happens inside of secluded bars rather than in like gigantic pod racing arenas
but also, the difference between the two trilogies is not just that time has passed, but that the focus of the pt is basically on the aristocracy, and the focus of the ot is on like… criminals, rebel insurgents, and fascists.
bespin, especially the version of bespin that appears in the special editions, is really not all that different from what you would see in the prequels (aside from all the bad hair), and that’s one of the only times the characters in the ot ever go to a region that has held on to some kind of normalcy and status under the empire, and theyve been able to do so by lowkey becoming collaborators. it’s like, the whole point of calrissian’s character in that movie
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oh one random sw canon question i have been thinking about lately is like, what happened to all of the ‘separatist’ planets after the galactic civil war ended? is this addressed in current EU stuff at all?
like none of them ever really appear in the prequels, but the clone wars tv show seems a lot more interested in neutral systems and separatist aligned systems.
does the empire just destroy them? do they reconcile with bail organa and the rest and become part of the rebel alliance? (is that what “alliance” has been retconned to mean now?)
it seems like fruitful territory
So you know how I keep saying “Watch rebels”?
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George says droid rights.
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the good outfits are if we number them from left to right
1, 4, 7
The rest are just slightly boring Met Gala shit
Worst outfit is tied between 5 and 8
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amidala is the only person in the prequels with good hair. it symbolizes her power
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3 would like a word with you
outfit 8 is kinda amazing because it has such a specific “made in the 00s” look that it wouldn’t look out of place on like a red carpet with like hillary duff wearing jeans under a skirt or something
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I don’t like 3! It’s just ‘russian princess’ but with big baubles at the base of the dress
I have the same issue with it as I do with 10, it’s just too direct on its visual references and doesn’t do enough to sci fi it up for me
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