The Unsuccessful Star Wars

[XCV330]

coda: tainted by connection to the film, Harrison Ford goes back to carpentry, Alec Guinness writes a memoir about the ordeal in Tunisia that is later turned into a Tony Award winning play by Yasmina Reza in the early 2000's. Hamill and Fisher team up together one more time alongside Bob Hoskins, William Aetherton and Debra Winger in an NC-17 remake of Gilligan's Island so terrible that it ends studio interest in remakes for over a decade, ending the careers of everyone involved except Hamill who finds his calling in animation voice acting, but saving cinema from itself. The end.


also, rubber bug sales skyrocket after the success of Damnation Alley.

 

[Reverend]

Jim Henson would still push what can be done with a "puppet", so there are still possibility.

The company sure (Jim passed away a decade prior to A.I.), but such animatronics are still going to be limited by the hardware capabilities of available computer systems, and if we're supposing that industry is lagging behind, then everything else bottlenecks. They'd still be able to pull of something impressive, just not to quite the same level of fidelity that Stan did.

Without that ability to capture as much as they did in-camera; I can see them abandoning the full scale puppet altogether for all but the master shots, and instead going with a mime or a little person in a suit, either shot on blue/green screen, and composited into the scene to adjust the apparent scale, or using some forced perspective trickery (made more famous by LotR, but was really a VERY old technique.) The illusion of physical interactions without an on-set puppet could at times be achieved with on-set mechanical rigs and gags that would be hidden in the composite (as it was with 'Roger Rabbit'.) In order to get more a emotive performance, they'd probably have to resort with a much larger scale puppet head, used only in for tight-in cutaways (as it was for 'Gremlins'.)

 

[Owain Taggart]

'Jurassic Park' might still end up getting made, but the dinosaurs are instead realised by fairly crude stop motion effects instead of CG, and even that is without the benefit of a decade's worth of experience. The end result is only slightly more impressive than 1976's 'King Kong' remake.

Heck, I'd love to see a take on a stop-motion Jurassic Park done as a fan film. Could be fun

 

[Tuskin38]

ILM would have still existed, it was founded in 1975, and they did work outside of Star Wars, though mostly for friends of George at the very beginning.

Even if Star Wars was a failure I could see the company still succeeding, as Star Wars looked amazing for its time. Their work would have caught someone’s eye.

 

[Reverend]

Heck, I'd love to see a take on a stop-motion Jurassic Park done as a fan film. Could be fun

Well we do still have Phil Tippett's go-motion test footage.

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Plus of course his 1984 short film 'Prehistoric Beast'.

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I will note however, that even this level of technology and craft was only achievable in the early 90's thanks to over a decade's worth of practice. By the late 70's it was already a dying art, with very few able to preserve the institutional knowledge. Just look at the quantum leap from the holochess pieces in ANH to the tauntaun animation in ESB to demonstrate how vital this building and preserving of knowledge is to an artform.
Without Star Wars, and by extension ILM keeping that alive and driving it forwards, stop motion (never mind go-motion!) would have remained a very niche, almost extinct artform. Mostly only showing up in advertising in the form of crude claymation, as a novel alternative to cell animation.

 

[publiusr]

We have Phil’s Mad God at least.

The knock-offs of Star Wars

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[FredH]

Close Encounters still happens; it was made at about the same time and came out the same year.

 

[arch101]

BSG was in development before ANH, so 1979 might have been a huge year for sci fi tv. BSG vs the return of Trek. ABC might even have let Larson make BSG as a series of TV films, as he wanted. Without Star Wars, the network wouldn’t have felt pressured to force-feed the series to the audience as they did. SPFX technology certainly would still have made many films possible that actually got made due to the talents who came together for ANH. Dykstra might have gotten all the ILM guys to join him instead.

 

[Ithekro]

The Black Hole?

 

[FredH]

BSG was in development before ANH, so 1979 might have been a huge year for sci fi tv. BSG vs the return of Trek. ABC might even have let Larson make BSG as a series of TV films, as he wanted. Without Star Wars, the network wouldn’t have felt pressured to force-feed the series to the audience as they did. SPFX technology certainly would still have made many films possible that actually got made due to the talents who came together for ANH. Dykstra might have gotten all the ILM guys to join him instead.

Galactica might have still happened, but I’ll bet it would have looked a lot different.

 

[ralfy]

Maybe it'll be like the Flash Gordon serial, which was what partly inspired it, anyway.

 

[publiusr]

I think ALIEN becomes even larger…getting its own series…though toned down.

Maybe a cross-over with Blade Runner.
A mess when Galactica gets back to Earth.

Without Star Wars sucking all the oxygen out of the room…cross-overs might actually have been more likely.

Know what else was big then?

Telethons…that were on all three big networks.

Say ALIEN makes things a bit dismal…the other Sci-Fi shows wane a bit…maybe go out on top with a big telethon type three-way crossover event for Jerry’s Kids as the last episode of each…as cop shows and doctor shows regain their grip the following season.
Spock dies via Alien and Enterprise goes back to the year 1980 to prevent the outbreak…kill the Cylons and save the Earth…Planet of The Titans…but not as far back.

A very 70’s thing to do I think.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Don't forget television. Without 'Star Wars', there's probably no 'Buck Rogers' or 'Battlestar Galactica'.

If only....if only!

For Your Eyes Only is Roger Moore's fourth Bond film rather than his fifth

sequel.

...if only - The Sequel, as FYEO was Moore's best Bond film by far.