Your first indication the prequels would be bad?

[Tulin]

Indeed.

"Lower levels of canon" is the concession Lucas makes in order to get the fanboys to keep filling his pockets with cash.

As soon as it becomes necessary to contradict ANY element of these "lower levels of canon" he does so IN A SECOND. Like blind, worshipping church-goers who defend their priest even though he's been caught with an altar boy, the "True Believers" continue to defend their Master.

To mix metaphors, it has been proven the emperor has no clothes!

 

[Skywalker]

Not that any of it really matters more than the rest, in the grand scheme of things. It's all fiction; it's all just "fluff." People can like what they want to like, and vice versa.

 

[EnsignRicky]

Personally, I feel people should be free to enjoy whatever level of canon makes them happy, without being made to feel like they fell into the Kool-Aid punch bowl. I'm sure there are many on these very boards who would argue with a passion that Captain Janeway is dead; And they're entitled to be right as well.

 

[Jono]

When the movies didn't immediately meet my visions for what they should be I thought they were bad. Over time I've changed my views about the prequels and decided all in all they weren't bad.

 

[Nardpuncher]

^ Umm, you have no clue what you're talking about. SW has been divided into various levels of 'canon', and most of the material which falls into the lower levels of the SW canon is recognized as being part of the franchise's overall shared mythology and universe, but the lower levels of canon have no immediate bearing on the 'primary canon', which is the films, the Clone Wars television series, and anything else that George Lucas himself has personally declared to explicitely canon and binding upon the rest of the SW universe and mythology.

I know all that, it's still just fluff. They killed the Evil Wizard in his castle, his evil empire fell, they all lived happy ever after.

THE END.

Yep...that's the way it is.

I've never read any Star Wars books, but I've heard about them and how Luke, Han and Leia's adventures just go on and on seems depressing to me. I think the EU stuff is now taking place 30 years after Return of the Jedi.
It just feels to me like a bunch of people hanging around a nightclub after everyone's gone home and they've turned the lights on.

 

[FordSVT]

The 60 Minutes segment in March of 1999.

I actually told myself that the voice of Jar Jar must've just been a temporary one as it sounded just too silly.
I didn't hate him as much as many others did though once I saw the movie.

But in the theater the first 10 minutes of Episode I just felt off. Edited weirdly and the whole prequel trilogy felt like it was filled with first takes.

It was. Lucas is notorious for having his actors stand in front of a blue screen, wave their arms around, say their lines and move on to the next scene. Portman and McGregor have said as much. The man doesn't care one whit about getting great performances out of his actors, and the mostly wooden performances (especially in the first two) are the fruit of that lack of effort. Any scene between Anakin and Padme is almost unwatchable, I shouldn't be laughing at some points and yet I am.

 

[FordSVT]

To be fair on the droid thing, I think the 'infantry' models were controlled by the Droid control ship and had no independent thought. The droids with the colors and no backpacks were independent, I think.

There's actually a scene that was cut from AOTC where they storm one of the spheres and try to shut down the droids from there, only to have them re-activate because the TF learned from their defeat in the first film.

If it was a matter of them being independent because of the potential for their enemies using the same tactic as in TPM I could partially understand it. However, the Droids appear to have independent personalities even in TPM - remember in the hangar bay on Naboo one of the droids is referred to as a "Sergeant".

Giving them the ability to act independently in the event of a loss of communication with the control ship is a good idea, of course. However, it would make much more sense for them still to be able to communicate with each other directly via non-verbal communication.

If you don't make use of these potential advantages then the only advantage they give you over the Clones is numbers.

I just don't see the point of creating machines to do a job humans could do if you're only going to make them do it worse. I mean, what other human limitations did they build in for no reason other than to anthropomorphize them ?

Wasn't the droid army essentially created to be a threat and cannon fodder for the Emperor's clone army? It strikes me that they wouldn't want them to perform too well against the clones, and otherwise why resort to clones in the first place?

 

[Mr. Sin]

Regarding the Expanded Universe, Lucas has let a few things from the Expanded Universe into the films-mainly, the name of the Republic's capital planet-Coruscant-comes from Zahn's trilogy (Although concepts for a city planet date back to ROTJ-Endor was originally the moon of that planet).


Most obvious however is the character of Aayla Secura, the blue Twi'lek Jedi who made her debut in John Ostrander/Jan Duuresama's prequel comics and appeared in the films. Quinlan Vos, her master, was also going to appear during Order 66 but his scenes were cut.


Here's a wiki on the EU elements in the films-not 100% accurate but it gets the point across:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/C-canon_elements_in_the_movies

 

[FordSVT]

I know all that, it's still just fluff.

It's not "just fluff" because it has bearing and substance within the overall SW universe; if the 'extraneous material' (i.e. lower levels of canon) existed in a vacuum and had no impact, bearing on, or substance within the fabric of the SW universe as a whole, then you could call it "just fluff", but that's not the case.

Star Wars books and video games and secondary materials are no more "canon" than the Star Trek books and games are, but I know Warsies like to think they are, otherwise they'd never be able to win any of those stupid Star Wars vs Star Trek "my universe's dick is bigger than yours" debates. Lucas doesn't give two shits about the EU when it comes to creating new material or making money from new ideas and anyone who thinks he does is delusional.

 

[JoeZhang]

The 60 Minutes segment in March of 1999.

I actually told myself that the voice of Jar Jar must've just been a temporary one as it sounded just too silly.
I didn't hate him as much as many others did though once I saw the movie.

But in the theater the first 10 minutes of Episode I just felt off. Edited weirdly and the whole prequel trilogy felt like it was filled with first takes.

It was. Lucas is notorious for having his actors stand in front of a blue screen, wave their arms around, say their lines and move on to the next scene. Portman and McGregor have said as much. The man doesn't care one whit about getting great performances out of his actors, and the mostly wooden performances (especially in the first two) are the fruit of that lack of effort. Any scene between Anakin and Padme is almost unwatchable, I shouldn't be laughing at some points and yet I am.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the first two films are mainly filler, The story Lucas wants to tell makes up the bulk of the last film, so all of the stuff like the podcast races etc are to fill time - he admits as much in a 2005 interview (I have the quotes in a book at home, so will dig them up if anyone is interested).

 

[Mr. Sin]

The main people behind the EU is canon thing are Lucasfilm licensing (Mainly Leeland Chee, Pablo Hidalgo and a few others), but Lucas himself has said he doesn't really read the EU, although like so many of his statements, that is somewhat contradictory, as there is an old interview that states Lucas did read Dark Empire and gave it the thumbs up.

 

[Nardpuncher]

The main people behind the EU is canon thing are Lucasfilm licensing (Mainly Leeland Chee, Pablo Hidalgo and a few others), but Lucas himself has said he doesn't really read the EU, although like so many of his statements, that is somewhat contradictory, as there is an old interview that states Lucas did read Dark Empire and gave it the thumbs up.

I'm quoting just to be a name-dropper and say that Pablo Hidalgo is an old friend of mine.
I remmeber when he applied for the job at Lucasfilm (he'd already done stuff for West End Game's Star Wars stuff) and I was envious. I told him I'd wash dishes at the Lucasfilm cafeteria if I could!
There was some online addition to the main Star Wars site when Episode II came out that was like some Galactic Republic online newspaper and he used my name as an anagram for a reporter...my only SW claim to fame.
Oh yeah, one of our buddies asked him one time when he came back to Winnipeg (where we're from) what George Lucas smells like. Pablo said "money".

Here's the article suing my name as an anagram....maybe you can guess my name from it.
http://www.holonetnews.com/54/news/1352_1.html

 

[Gaith]

Taxation of trade routes? Give me a break -- I thought I'd tumbled into an episode of The West Wing.

At least then we'd have gotten decent-to-masterful writing!

 

[Mr Light]

Wasn't Dark Empire the first ever continuation, though? What came first that or Heir to the Empire?

 

[Skywalker]

Heir to the Empire was released in June 1991, Dark Empire started in December 1991.

 

[Mr Light]

Wow, I had no idea they came out that closely together! I recall reading that the comic had to do a last minute rewrite to accommodate the novel, since in the comic Coruscant is under Imperial control.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

In fact, I can confidently state that those who view the Pequels in a positive light actually outnumber those who take the opposite viewpoint, but because the 'haters' tend to be more vocal, they have come to represent a 'majority opinion' in the eyes of many.

The people who despise the prequels may be a majority, but from my experience with SW fans, the actual majority prefer the OT and find the PT underwhelming, or they can list only a handful of things they enjoy about the prequels.

That said, the Prequels are by no means perfect, but neither are the 'Original' films, despite nostalgia indicating otherwise.

Nostalgia for the original films is one of the biggest reasons the prequels were a success.

As for my first indication, well, I'd love to say it was watching the special editions. However, I only saw the first two in the theater, and I missed out on the "Han shot first" controversy completely.

The first thing I noticed was when the first toys released for TPM were battle droids that looked like Daffy Duck. I remember seeing them on the shelves at Target and thinking, "what the hell is this?"

 

[Mr. Sin]

^Originally they were going to be more menacing and Stormtrooper like.

However as production continued and they designed the Neimoudians, they decided to make them into droid versions of the Neimoudians. However, the Neimoudians were then completely redesigned into something resembling the Duros from the original trilogy (Their original design lived on as the Geonosians).'


Dark Empire BTW was originally a Marvel project, but after Marvel lost the license the project went to Dark Horse.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

^Originally they were going to be more menacing and Stormtrooper like.

Well, my concern was more the fact that they were not only not very intimidating droids, but that they were droids at all. I felt that this took the human element further out of these films, and was another factor in the kiddification of Star Wars.

In the original trilogy, there were countless storm troopers gunned down by the main characters and other rebels. Imagine how much tension would be sucked out of these films if the storm troopers weren't human, but droids.

 

[EnsignRicky]

^Originally they were going to be more menacing and Stormtrooper like.

Well, my concern was more the fact that they were not only not very intimidating droids, but that they were droids at all. I felt that this took the human element further out of these films, and was another factor in the kiddification of Star Wars.

In the original trilogy, there were countless storm troopers gunned down by the main characters and other rebels. Imagine how much tension would be sucked out of these films if the storm troopers weren't human, but droids.

I think the reasoning was that in the OT much of the combat revolved around blaster fire; Something that Lucas even censored down a little in one of the SE releases.
In the prequel era, lightsabers play a much larger part and it probably would have been a little over the top to have Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon defending their young Queen and scrappy young chosen one by cutting a swath of dismembered body parts all across the galaxy.
Cool? You bet, but somehow it doesn't quite fit the tone of this particular chapter. Enter the Keystone Cops, just lining up to be destroyed in all kinds of amusing and inventive ways; Enough to last a trilogy.

Also, it fits with the overall arc of Palpatine pitting manufactured machines against manufactured men in a manufactured war.