Fine, More Star Wars - What's so Funny about Apathy, Your Childhood, and Cash Grabs?

When I was a wee lad, I loved a certain trilogy of films.  I also had contemporaries with a predilection for paste in those days too.  I mean while I was a clever child I was still, at heart, dumb as shit.  Now, while I'm not going to say that the Star Wars franchise of films at the time were dumb as shit, I will argue that the combined opus of six films is, as continually groused about on the internet since restarted in 1999, kinda assy.  Look, let's cut it to brass tacks here: the prequels are shitty movies.  Now, I have never been accused of a lack of sentimentality. Hell, this sentimentality, or hoarding as it's called by some, almost got me on Comic Book Men (I may have overestimated my efficiency at keeping accessories when I talked to central casting, pointless story for another day.).  THe point that I'm laconically making is this: George Lucas already fucked our childhoods.  The mythos of Star Wars, while engaging in it's original form, could not stand without our warm fuzzy feelings.  While some of the ancillary properties that it has spawned since it's inception have actually been pretty solid in my estimation: Knights of the Old Republic, the Rouge Squadron series, the Gendy Tartikovsky Clone Wars films etc, they work mainly because of the talents involved.  This point is backed up, frankly, by the number of times that it has not worked: KOTOR 2, the prequels, a lot of the ancillary material, every other Star Wars book, Masters of Teras Kasi, etc.

If you throw in a keyblade, I'll have kittens.



Moreover, at their heart, the original trilogy of films worked because they captivated our imaginations by combining the tropes of samurai films with the sensibilities and settings of classic serials of Lucas' youth.  Moreover, it is not the story that made Star Wars iconic; it was how it was told and how it makes you feel.  IT is comfort food on celluloid, frankly, and comfort food always has gelatin in it.  I'm not trying to marginalize the tale or the characters, as your connection to them is what fuels this and they are vividly rendered on the screen; it's that the story and themes are some of the most well worn in history.  But it is a tribute to the filmmakers that this tale in particular of the force and gay robots revolutionized popular film and became an iconic part of the last fifty years of Americana.  Pretty much, the original trilogy should be lauded, but somebody already took a big messy dump on your childhood and continually whipped and milked a dead horse for much of the last fifteen years.  So why worry?  Who really cares?  No matter how many times they futz with the original trilogy you'll know that Han shot first; Jabba is only in Jedi, and the Max Rebo band is not fronted by a fraggle or whatever.


So look, the well has been dry for a while.  I mean while compelling for three movies that's all the juice Lucas could get out of them, before forcing me to spend thirty dollars watching inert tech demos on opening weekend during the late 90's/00's.  At the same time there is hope.  And that hope has been mentioned as when in the hands of competent talents there is a life and vibrance within this universe, but this ain't the fucking be all end all.  It's a universe with like 8-12 well realized characters that are at their heart still archetypes following a logical heroic arc, but they're our archetypes that we grew up with.  While the intricacies of the Jedi, the tech, and the geoplitics of it were compelling, um fucking midochlorians are a thing that happened.  I mean the reason that we keep coming back to Star Wars as individuals and a culture is that we loved Star Wars.  Lucas knew that, and Disney knows that, and there are still stories to tell within that universe, but we will always go anyway no matter what, but maybe they'll get someone who can wring some life out of it.  We've seen it done before, and we've seen it bungled on every level, but who cares?  We'll always have the Star Wars that we loved no matter when Greedo shoots or how many ancillary and contradictory scenes of mobile Jabba that they edit in but not on Blu-Ray, but you can't win them all.  So don't worry; your childhood has already been vigorously sodomized for the purpose of fattening the coffers of Kenner and Taco Bell.  We survived because it's a series of movies that you loved when you were 8 or 18 or 38 or legally dead and nothing more, and some pretty good video games and some cartoons of wildly varying quality.  And who knows, maybe these movies will be competently directed or actually have a plotline that can justify the creation of a new trilogy or not feature so much walking and talking and terrible decision making and filler, so much filler, and old timey racism and characters doing neat fight scenes that in a sense invalidate the fight scenes of the original given that Obi Wan is seen flipping around in the prequels and then has an awkward ass sword fight in A New Hope and sure he's old but Count Dooku was old and doing flips in the second and third prequels, and Vader building C-3po, and Obi Wan knowing R2-D2, and Yoda knowing Chewbacca which none of them ever bring up because this was obviously not planned out in advance.

And that's it really.  I don't care that they're making new Star Wars; I've seen good and bad ones.  Just cherish the good times.  And who knows, maybe they'll be good.  If not, they're fucking movies, and you've got real problems, probably. God knows I do.  So that's it.  Your childhood got banged; we're all going to give up the cash, and who cares really?  Also, Disney pretty much let's Marvel do their thing, so I mean you don't buy a company to savage it.