Star Wars The Clone Wars Season Five News and Discussion

[JD]

Christopher wrote:

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Why are you treating this like a competition? It's not like I hijacked your conversation. I'm the one who initially brought up the point that "Jedi Knight" seemed to be used less in modern SW productions. I'm just wondering a) if that really is the case and b) why, in real life, the change in usage might have happened. Maybe you got the answer to what you were talking about, and that's fine for you, but it would be nice if I could get some responses to my fairly simple questions too.

No it's not just you. I have a feeling it might just be because it's quicker and easier to just say Jedi instead of Jedi Knight. This is coming from nowhere but me, but I'm thinking perhaps Jedi Knight could be seen as more formal. And I don't think they really used the term Jedi Knight much in the OT after ANH. Didn't Luke say he was a Jedi, like his father before him, not a Jedi Knight?

[CorporalCaptain]

JD wrote:

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Didn't Luke say he was a Jedi, like his father before him, not a Jedi Knight?

Yes, he did.

Also, the film was called Return of the Jedi, not Return of the Jedi Knights.

[Christopher]

CorporalCaptain wrote:

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No, Christopher, I'm not treating this like a competition. I was simply clarifying what context those remarks were made in, because it's unfair to say that someone's reply is in error when it's not.

Huh?? I didn't say the reply was in error, I just said it wasn't addressing the particular question I was asking. The conversation seemed to branch out in a different direction from what I was asking about. I was only trying to clarify what I was asking in the first place.

And no one's hijacked anyone's conversation. If you think that that's happening, that's just bizarre.

What I meant was that your reply sounded like you were criticizing me for trying to divert the conversation away from what you were talking about -- which was strange, because I was the one who started the conversation.

Yes, I've noticed that Knights are mentioned less, but I haven't data-mined TCW transcripts to count occurrences, and I'm not going to. Besides, how do you measure many vs. few relative to the OT, when there are only 6+ hours of OT vs. I don't know how many hours of PT/TCW.

But as I basically suggested in my immediately previous post, there would naturally be [in some sense] sparse mentioning of Knights in TCW relative to the OT, since almost none of the main Jedi characters in TCW have the rank of Knight, but in ANH apparently all Jedi were considered Knights.

Has it been established that Knight is a distinct, limited rank among the Jedi? If so, who actually has that rank and who doesn't? I've just heard/noticed it being used so little these days that I wouldn't know if that's the case or not. I'm sure a lot of this stuff is well-known to dedicated SW fans, but I'm just a casual viewer asking some entry-level questions and there's a lot I don't know.

[CorporalCaptain]

Oh, good grief.

[Christopher]

Look, we're talking past each other. Misunderstandings are easy online, and I think we've both misheard each other. It's not important enough to be worth all this. I regret the misunderstanding. Let's move on.

[Set Harth]

I've always felt that "Jedi Knights" as a general reference should refer to both Knights and Masters. Maybe even the padawans too in a sense. But as a rank Knight is the place we find Anakin at the beginning of ROTS, or Obi-Wan at the end of TPM, when each is neither a padawan nor a Master.

[CorporalCaptain]

The crawls at the beginning of each of the three PT films refer to "Jedi Knights." Certainly in the case of TPM and ROTS, they are referring to a Master. In the case of TMP, it's a Master and a Padawn, at that. Weird.

[Christopher]

Okay, so the films do use "knights." Maybe it's just the Clone Wars show that tends to use "Jedi" as a noun rather than an adjective?

[CorporalCaptain]

Well, no, not exactly, either. As JD pointed upthread, Luke declared himself "a Jedi" to the Emperor, and the film was called Return of the Jedi. On the other hand, earlier in the film, Luke introduced himself to Jabba as a "Jedi Knight."

In ANH, Ben said,

"A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed and murdered your father. Now the Jedi are all but extinct. Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force."

So, even the films of the OT use Jedi as a noun too, sometimes, so it's not strictly a binary thing. Maybe that's what's caused some of the misunderstanding.

[Christopher]

^I never said it was binary. Of course I know "Jedi" was used as a noun before -- like you say, it's right there in the title. I just had the impression that the "Jedi Knight" formation specifically was being used far more rarely than it used to be. I don't have any hard evidence to back that up -- it's just that while watching last week's episode, I heard characters saying "a Jedi" this and "the Jedi" that, and the thought struck me, "Whatever happened to 'Jedi Knight'?"

[Mr. Adventure]

Padme could tell you some stories about those Jedi Nights....

[JD]

Christopher wrote:

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Huh?? I didn't say the reply was in error, I just said it wasn't addressing the particular question I was asking. The conversation seemed to branch out in a different direction from what I was asking about. I was only trying to clarify what I was asking in the first place.

What I meant was that your reply sounded like you were criticizing me for trying to divert the conversation away from what you were talking about -- which was strange, because I was the one who started the conversation.

Has it been established that Knight is a distinct, limited rank among the Jedi? If so, who actually has that rank and who doesn't? I've just heard/noticed it being used so little these days that I wouldn't know if that's the case or not. I'm sure a lot of this stuff is well-known to dedicated SW fans, but I'm just a casual viewer asking some entry-level questions and there's a lot I don't know.

Knight is the specific rank that goes after Padawan and before Master. I think Jedi Knight is also used a general term for the whole order.

[Admiral_Young]

Yeah it usually goes like this:

-Youngling
-Padawan Learner
-Jedi Knight
-Jedi Master

Then the head of the order (in this case of course Yoda) is called the Grand Master.

[CorporalCaptain]

Here are some estimated counts of the number of occurrences of various substrings, within the OT and PT scripts from BlueHarvest.net and IMSDb in the case of ROTS.

Long TL;DR: This approach is quick-and-dirty to estimate the number of occurrences using the standard tool, grep, so there are important caveats. The count is of the number of lines in each web archive that match the search criteria. The search is case-insensitive. This should be a good estimate of the number of occurrences, because lines are sort, especially in the case of dialog. Unfortunately, the IMSDb script breaks words in the middle, to limit HTML line size, because it uses word-wrap to format the HTML, instead of relying on a static line size. Also unfortunately, not only are both dialog and directions searched by this method, but also the raw HTML and other archive data is; however, the text of the scripts should dominate the matches, since the other data is expressed in computer language. [ETA: It looks like it is possible to get text-only scripts using my browser. I should have gotten those to begin with, so that's a goof on my part. However, even if I reran this with text-only scripts, the process still wouldn't be perfect, because it wouldn't be restricted to just dialog.] Additionally, for two word phrases, it isn't precisely the same as counting all matching lines, because even if it took whitespace into account in a foolproof way (which for clarity I opted not to do), due to the limitation in the program it couldn't take into account line breaks anyway. Additionally, note that the web archives (which were fetched yesterday) do not necessarily reflect the final versions of the scripts or exactly what's on screen.

Medium TL;DR: Experienced UNIX users understand the strengths and limitations of the standard grep tool.

Short TL;DR: It's offered as-is. If someone cares, they can pick up the baton and crunch more accurate data.

$ ls
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht

$ grep -ic jedi *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:167
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:43
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:17
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:20
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:96
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:247

$ grep -ic knight *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:5
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:3
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:8
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:1
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:8
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:2

$ grep -ic youngling *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:3
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:0
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:5

$ grep -ic padawan *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:11
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:4
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:2

$ grep -ic learner *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:4
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:1
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:2
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:1

$ grep -ic master *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:97
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:43
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:14
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:19
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:41
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:79

$ grep -ic order *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:41
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:23
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:18
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:19
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:22
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:50

$ grep -ic 'padawan learner' *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:2
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:2
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:1

$ grep -ic 'jedi knight' *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:3
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:3
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:4
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:8
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:2

$ grep -ic 'jedi master' *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:4
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:1
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:3
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:2
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:5

$ grep -ic 'jedi order' *
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:4
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:0
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:0
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:6

$ exit

[CorporalCaptain]

If we divide the number of times the word Jedi occurs, by the number of times the word Knight occurs (whether upper or lower case), we get a measure of how much more frequently the word Jedi occurs without the word Knight. If the two words always occurred together, the ratio would be exactly one. But the more the word Jedi occurs without the word Knight, the greater that ratio is.

Using grep and a multi-part bash command, that ratio (as an integer, without remainder) can be straightforwardly calculated, according to the limitations described above, and the episodes sorted from least to greatest ratio. The results are:

$ for f in *; do echo $f:$((`grep -ic jedi "$f"`/`grep -ic knight "$f"`)); done | sort --field-separator=: --key=2 --numeric-sort
BlueHarvest.net - Star Wars_ A New Hope script.mht:2
BlueHarvest.net - The Phantom Menace Script.mht:12
BlueHarvest.net - Return of the Jedi script.mht:14
BlueHarvest.net - The Empire Strikes Back script.mht:20
BlueHarvest.net - Attack of the Clones Script.mht:33
Star Wars_ Revenge of the Sith Script at IMSDb..mht:123

The general trend is evident. Generally speaking, as movie release date increases, the word Jedi is used more and more without the word Knight accompanying it. The final ratio for ROTS is roughly two orders of magnitude higher than that for ANH.

This probably isn't exactly what Christopher was asking about, but this is something objective that we can put a handle on, that I think is a step towards answering his question.

ETA: Taking a look at the occurrences of the word Jedi in ROTS, many of them are in the directions, e.g. "The JEDI STARFIGHTERS extend the stability foils on the ends of their wings." But given that the word Knight was detected on only two lines of the whole script [and a manual text search in fact finds only two matches at all], we can conclude that there almost certainly is a definite shift in just the dialog, as indicated.