Question to those most disappointed with the SW prequels

I guess we'll know soon enough. If the show isn't up to standards that the fanbase will accept then the ratings and other numbers will suffer. It's bad enough the series is on an expanded-package channel a whole lot of people don't get and won't subscribe to in order to watch one half-hour show....I just don't know if Disney XD was a good choice whether it's a Disney-owned channel or not. I could probably count the number of people I know who both receive and watch the channel on one hand and have a couple of fingers left over.

 

I dunno, I thought it all started with Lawrence of Arabia.

 

Your problem with that assumption is that most of the creative people leading the project have a record of doing stuff that appeals to all age groups including adults while working with a very limiting mandate from their corporate masters. They probably have to fire the showrunners imo to get to the level of the marvel shows running on XD.

 

Here's the entire Anakin(Vader)-Padmé sequence on the landing platform of Mustafar in reference to our previous conversations and debates about the Force Choke and her death "from a broken heart" on the delivery table.

Quibbles about execution aside, it's a wrenching sequence.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfX01lURXFk[/yt]

 

There's no assumption in what I've said there, because all I've done is express concerns that are derived from facts. All you've done is offer other facts which lead you to have less cause for concern. Neither of us knows anything, and neither of us have said anything beyond that, except that you're willing to trust the showrunners. I'm not (why should I). I'll go by what I see in the form of evidence from footage, in ads, trailers, and the like, which hasn't been released yet, and I'll make my decision to pay more on my cable bill based on that.

 

Indeed.

 

Poor Vader. His offers to have a family member rule the galaxy at his side always get rebuked, and that person gets maimed in the process.

 

^ By his own doing, no less. Take rejection well, Vader does not.

 

In the early EU Luke briefly turns to the Dark Side and attempts to convert his sister but, naturally, fails as Leia helps her brother return to the side of good.

 

My issue is that it's totally unnecessary. We don't need to know what happens to Padme in this movie and we certainly don't need to know that they're twins or what their names are, or where they are going to live when those story elements are revealed in ANH and RotJ. There was an almost anal need to tie everything up in a bow which totally overlooked the fact that future generations will probably watch these movies in number order.

They never should have called Anakin Vader, they should have left him burning on the mountainside, and they should have shaved most of the last half an hour off the end of the movie. I agree that the earlier scenes are more powerful and IMO they are weakened by all the exposition and bow-tying.

The only thing they needed to do was wipe the droids' memories (and mine). I would not have been averse if they had mentioned that Padme's health had been affected by the confrontation with the Dark Side but leave her ultimate fate unknown at this point. It also leaves some unanswered questions when Ben tells Luke that Vader killed his father, since we'd know that was a lie.

 

We've known that was a lie since 1980 ( or 1983 for those who didn't believe Vader ).

Having Padme's death occur offscreen between trilogies would have been narratively unsatisfying and Lucas would have been heavily criticized for it.

 

This. In spades. This had to happen onscreen for the sake of continuity and effective dramatic storytelling. Fans and viewers needed more than Leia's offhand remark in Episode VI that "she died when I was very young." There always needs to be a balance struck between blatant, nonstop continuity porn and showing little or nothing at all and expecting the audience to fill in the blanks themselves, but in this case showing Padmé Amidala die following childbirth made perfect sense and I don't understand why anybody would be against the drama of watching the mother of Luke and Leia and the most important person in Anakin Skywalker's life die almost at the very moment that cybernetic Darth Vader is born.

 

Yep, execution aside, leaving Pamde's fate ambiguous would have been ... a bad idea.

 

A dumb idea, too. There's no emotional storytelling payoff in not showing what happened to Luke and Leia's mother after spending three entire movies following her maturation and adventures. When you've devoted three consecutive films in a row to telling the story of Padmé's evolution from teenaged Queen of a planet to galactic Senator and then both wife and mother of heroes it makes no sense to not depict her demise, especially when Lucas went through the trouble in the OT of mentioning that Luke never knew his real mother and Leia's memories were faint and just feelings more than anything else (man, those midichlorian-rich Force babies sense a lot in just a few short minutes after being born!) and we got the big reveal that they were twin siblings.

We knew over 30 years ago that their mother died long before the original movie. Not showing that at some point would have been extremely weak. We can quibble over how Lucas pulled off those scenes at the end of Episode III (although her state funeral on Naboo was gorgeous and I have yet to talk to anybody who didn't enjoy that), but it shouldn't even be an issue as to whether or not her fate be depicted on-screen.

 

I think that avoiding the issue of people wondering why Vader would believe her to be dead if she weren't trumped avoiding the relatively minuscule issue about continuity with ROTJ. She's gotta have a funeral that has her body, or otherwise Vader is going to be looking for her and quite possibly could sense her through the Force. If he's looking for her, then that puts Leia at risk. It just doesn't work as well that way.

 

Very much so. It's not just smart storytelling payoff for the audience, her death and funeral are smart payoff for the characters within the context of the films. Like you said, if Padmé simply goes off into hiding after giving birth then Vader can spend the next 20 years wondering if she indeed died and that would likely have triggered a massive intelligence network search for any evidence that his former wife might still be alive and in hiding in some remote corner of the known galaxy.

That's not how Vader should be seen. Part of what broke Anakin's spirit and converted him to the Dark Side in the first place was the knowledge that Padmé was dead, most likely at his own hand. His life bereft of the woman he'd loved so dearly since he was a nine-year-old boy and the silent grief and rage associated with believing his own actions took her life helped make him the character we knew in the OT. A living, hiding Padmé running from the clutches of the Empire like some Dr. Richard Kimble in an endless supply of fancy dresses detracts from that drama and character development.

 

I don't know. Although it would be cool, I don't need to see how Balin got killed in Moria in between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. And his character is quite important in the new films. Same goes for Leia's and Luke's mother.

 

Luke didn't... which implies that in Leia's case it may not have happened during those minutes either.

Ever hear the complaint that her mom is smiling during the ceremony?

 

Yeah, there are inconsistencies between the twins' births and what they remembered a generation later on Endor. The real reason is that Lucas hadn't sorted out all the details yet nor decided how he'd depict Luke and Leia in any prequel films were he ever to get around to making any of them. Now you're left wondering how a newborn Leia just minutes old remembers her mother's sad expression as she died on the delivery table but Luke doesn't. Like you said, Luke had no memory of Padmé but if Leia picked up a Force image/impression of her mother in the moments after she was born then why didn't her brother? And did she at all during those brief moments?

There are moments in the Saga where I try to adopt the MST3K approach: it's just a movie, we should really just relax.

Nope. Not that I can recall.

 

To explain the difference in what Luke and Leia remember we might ask: how are Luke and Leia different? How have their life experiences differed?