Further random thoughts on Disney and Lucasfilm

Some more notions that have occurred to me….

:: Deals like this don’t come out of the blue. It’s not like Disney called George Lucas in the morning the other day, while Uncle George was enjoying breakfast and the morning paper, and said, “Hey, we wanna buy your company and Star Wars. Four billion OK?” So I wonder if the eternal ‘in development’ phase of the long-promised Star Wars live-action teevee show was in fact ever taking place, or if this was a ‘develop some notions for the next batch of movies’ kind of thing.

:: Obviously this deal has sparked a lot of Star Wars-related comment around the Interweb, and I find about ninety percent of what I’ve read to be either stupid or annoying or stupidly annoying or annoyingly stupid. The main reason is that the vast majority of pieces I’ve read this week on the subject haven’t involved any kind of real comment on possible directions Star Wars may take; instead, it’s all been of the grinding-the-old-axe variety. You know: “Hey, Star Wars is in the news again! Let’s talk about how awful George Lucas and the Prequels and Jar Jar are all over again! And let’s whine about how our childhoods have been destroyed, all over again! Let’s stick that knife in, all over again!” Ugh.

:: I’m not sure it constitutes a consensus, but the most common thing I’ve heard about a possible story for the putative Episodes VII, VIII, and IX is very simply this: “Adapt the Thrawn Trilogy to big screen!” (The Thrawn Trilogy are the novels written by Timothy Zahn back in the early 1990s, which resurrected Star Wars as a going concern and established a lot of the territory for the Expanded Universe stuff.) Now, the Thrawn Trilogy is pretty cool and all (I should re-read it one of these days), but remember when lots of Star Wars ‘fans’ were constantly bitching about the Prequels on the grounds of “Where’s the suspense? We know how the story ends!”? Yeah, I remember that, too.

:: Anyone who says that is an idiot, by the way. Finding out what happens next is not the only reason to experience a story, and anyone who implies that it is doesn’t know a thing about what they’re talking about.

:: I already mentioned the other day that I’m not sure I want to see a long series of Star Wars Episode ___ movies, which would take the story farther and farther from the original story of two generations of Skywalkers. But the solution there is pretty obvious: Drop the episode numbers. If they really want to diverge and explore the Star Wars universe theatrically, I’d be fine with leaving the existing films as the only numbered ones, and just give the other ones titles like Star Wars: The New Republic, or whatever.

:: I have no problem with JJ Abrams directing a Star Wars movie. I just don’t want him writing one. And ditto Damon Lindelof.

OK, that’s it. Again.

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