#919. Obi-Wan Kenobi (the TV show)

Recently I had a chance to watch Obi-Wan Kenobi thanks to another Disney dump of streaming material to home video.  Being one of the genuine fans of the prequel trilogy, this was particularly a big deal for me, with Ewan McGregor reprising the title role, and Joel Edgerton in a supporting role once again as Owen Lars (back in 2002-2005, he was still struggling to make a name for himself in Hollywood, but his career took dramatic swings upward in the years that followed), not to mention Hayden Christensen in one of his several recent revivals of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.

Set a decade after Revenge of the Sith, Kenobi is still reeling from not only the loss of the whole Jedi Order but his friend Skywalker.  In fact he has no idea Skywalker survived the duel on Mustafar.  He eeks out a meager existence on Tatooine, kept a formal distance from young Luke by Lars, unwilling to let a man who failed his own friend have any responsibility over the boy he's taken into his care.  

The remaining Jedi are still being hunted, this time by a band of Inquisitors, one of whom we eventually learn has a considerable secret, a parallel narrative that dovetails nicely with the unlikely and yet compelling reunion between Kenobi and Skywalker.  Right off the bat the stakes change dramatically when Leia is kidnapped from Alderaan, and Kenobi is asked for the first time to rescue her.

The results could've been better, they could've been worse.  

The acting from unestablished actors can be spotty, no real attempt at quality control apparently made in the rush to get through production, which began life as a film but reverted to a TV show when Solo underperformed at the box office.  Like Star Trek sticking to familiar formulas, these Disney+ shows have begun to stick to predictable beats, and you either accept that or you don't, the bad guys keeping the good guys on the run and frequently resorting to backwater worlds that are always this side of sci-fi Western towns in need of some kind of rescue.

Obviously the whole Leia affair is a retcon, one solved in the traditional "we promise not to bring it up in the material that follows but was filmed long before" manner, and even Kenobi and Vader having an epic confrontation of any kind before the Death Star is a stretch, but a more acceptable one.  They likely chose Leia over Luke for the arc in the interests of going for the unexpected, but at least it gives us a little more Bail Organa (once more played by Jimmy Smits) and fleshing out the world of Alderaan.

That the show brought back Edgerton but essentially had nothing for him to do except deliver a few pithy lines early on and then late in the show indulge in the kind of redeeming action sequences he clearly outgrew later, is the most mystifying thing about it.  I've been a huge fan of his for more than a decade at this point, and he's long since proven his exceptional acting skills.  The Leia heist robbed him, most of all, of quality material.

Little enough is asked of McGregor, too, but given the nature of his arc it's more understandable.  He and Christensen get to indulge in the best lightsaber sequences since their heyday, and that alone was surely worth the price of admission.  By the time we catch presumably our last glimpse of Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn, the whole thing has proven worth it.  It's decent material.  I don't know how much it matters to an increasingly restless fanbase who never warmed to the prequels much less sequels, and hypocritically fell in love with goofy animated shows and Baby Yoda after devoting all their time to demonizing Jar Jar Binks.  And truthfully I don't care.

#899. The Mandalorian, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”

Hmm. Let’s maybe get back a little more into blogging (last year is the first one I missed on this particular one since I started it back in 2002!). If I manage to keep this up, this’ll be a brief look at the highlights of what I’ve watched recently, hopefully on a weekly basis.

So this past week I finally saw the first two seasons of The Mandalorian. I’m really behind. I know this. This is a show that until a few weeks ago only existed on Disney+. Except for Paramount+ (and its predecessor CBS All Access) I haven’t really participated in the streaming future. I have spent most of my life without cable TV, too. I view it like that. 

So I finally got to watch it because someone decided to release those seasons in physical media. I got them on Blu-ray, which is itself a format I didn’t participate in until the pandemic started. But I’ve been catching up on that, too. I now have dozens of movies and TV shows on these slightly smaller, smoother, more visually detailed discs. The first one I got was, and also the impetus for, Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, the directorial reimagining of the third film in the series, an attempt to finally make it respectable.

Not really the subject of this discussion. Anyway.

I didn’t really have an urge to watch any of the Star Wars TV shows. I’m a fan of the movies. Pretty much all of them. Modern Star Wars fans and I diverge on a lot of points. They like the cartoons, Rogue One…I don’t. I knew all about the Baby Yoda phenomenon. Kind of hard to avoid. I figured that was probably good enough.

Then this opportunity arose. So I dove in. The absolute best I can say is that it’s really interesting to watch familiar Star Wars elements sort of remixed. I mean, this is clearly (unlike, say, Rogue One) Star Wars. By the second season they’re clearly leaning more heavily into the connective material.

Let’s move on.

I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek. All of them. (Prodigy now being on Netflix, this will change for the foreseeable future.) I’ve followed and enjoyed each new show to varying degrees (Prodigy least, so kind of fortuitous). 

This being said, last year the best new episode in decades (since the end of Enterprise) happened, and in the series most capable of achieving the necessary episodic format to reach it. Which is to say, Strange New Worlds.

The episode is “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” (which you might have been able to guess from the title of this post). It features a character who’s been a regular in the series from the start, a descendant of Khan, being forced in the most literal way possible, to confront her ancestry. 

The whole episode is magical. La’an herself had already been a favorite of mine (as much as it pains her to think of them I love to hear her say “Gorn,” and she was by far the best element of the fantasy episode in the first season, when I truly noticed her for the first time). How she plays off Kirk, and how the episode leans into Kirk himself, interprets him (kind of how Grogu cleverly depicts Yoda’s quip to Luke all those years ago, about he could possibly be so big eating the way he did), which for a character who has existed for some sixty years and this is the third incarnation of him, that’s a special kind of breakthrough.

But yeah, it also dives deeply into Star Trek lore, by giving us a glimpse into Khan’s origins, and La’an’s continuing efforts to reconcile her lineage. The whole experience is, as I may have mentioned, perfect, for all the reasons I’ve touched on and many more besides. It’s the most richly articulated episodes in franchise history, and yeah, one of the best. I have a whole blog dedicated to the franchise, and I have painstakingly detailed the new classics as I’ve talked about all those episodes, classics in Star Trek having become harder to identify the older it’s gotten.

This one goes leagues beyond most of them. And it baffles me that nobody seems to recognize this. So I try to talk about it here and there. I just happened to watch it again, which is why I’m writing about it here now.

I’ve been a fan of Star Wars and Star Trek most of my life, so it’s always nice to know there’s still new stuff worth talking about all these many years later, past the formative material. That’s not a sentiment that gets expressed enough, not these days. I’ve tried most of my blogging experience to counteract that, so it’s fitting to reiterate the point when trying to get back into the swing of it.

Rogue One/Andor: Crimes Against Star Wars

When Rogue One set the new bar of fan interest in Star Wars (the only recent phenomenon would be Baby Yoda, which ironically actually plays into everything fans hated about the prequels, but let's just continue to pretend otherwise), it was really like a slap in the face to everything that had come before.

But let's explain that, shall we?

George Lucas didn't exactly go out of his way to explain the nature of the Rebel Alliance.  The version we saw in A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi was basically an army that continually fought against the Empire, no matter how mismatched they seemed to be.

The version of the Rebel Alliance as envisioned by Rogue One and its prequel series Andor is at best akin to the French Resistance during WWII, and at worst the Arab insurgencies we typically call terrorists, because they just like to blow things up.  

The version of the Rebel Alliance presented by Lucas was very much in the spirit of the American Revolution, a war fought on conventional terms.  Lucas himself envisioned Star Wars as a response to the Vietnam War, although he didn't go out of his way to make the point.  The North Vietnamese did not fight a conventional war.  (Nor did the Taliban, or the Iraqis.  If anyone would bother to remember how the wars with Native American tribes actually played out, we'd see some actual parallels in history.)  That's why it was such a difficult war to fight, why it dragged on for years, because it was impossible to achieve any real objectives.

The Rebel Alliance engaged the Empire when and where it needed to, fighting on the Empire's terms.  

Lucas never really showed what life was like under the Empire.  We saw Darth Vader, we saw the hooded Emperor, we saw military leaders, we saw Stormtroopers.  We saw leaders of individual worlds working with the Rebellion, though they hid their allegiances as much as possible.

We in essence saw a very small portrait of what life was actually like.  We saw a world that seemed totally untouched by the Empire.  We saw another with a thriving business economy that made a deal with the Empire and was left with a permanent garrison, which meant the loss of autonomy.

We saw so very little.  

We saw smugglers working independently, whose rough lives were totally untouched except for attempts to check their activities by the Empire.  

We saw the Imperial Academy as a viable path for youths in search of a future.  We saw the Rebellion as a romantic ideal.  We saw old heroes hiding away for years.  We saw the offspring of Vader hiding from him, from the Emperor.  We saw the Jedi reduced to the idea of some old religion in the span of only a few decades, both by ordinary people and even those interacting with a remnant within the Empire itself.  

We saw an Empire really only interested in control, but leaving powerful regional gangsters in play.

We saw the Rebellion with its own fleet, however small in comparison, hiding away at one location or another, striking out even against the most feared weapons of the Empire.

We did see the Empire use such weapons against entire worlds.  We saw that only the Rebel Alliance seemed at all concerned about this.  But genocidal tyrants are surely known for their outrages.  

We didn't see any efforts to topple the Emperor from power from within.

That would be interesting to see.

We didn't see the Rebels acting as terrorists.

But somehow that's how fans are starting to see them in their preferred new circumstances.  I have a problem with this.  

All the complaints about what Lucas did, what J.J. Abrams, what Rian Johnson did, did they ever fundamentally alter the Star Wars saga?  Did they change the basic character of the good guys?  

If you want to explore the story in ways that haven't been seen before, do it in ways that don't destroy the story.  

A Cheatsheet to Creating Star Wars

Surprisingly, Star Wars in fact did not simply invent itself into existence.  George Lucas worked on a number of drafts (eventually adapted into an excellent comic book entitled The Star Wars by Jonathan Rinzler and Mike Mayhew) before settling on the story and elements as they first appeared in theaters in 1977.  For the purposes of this article, I am confining myself to inspiration Lucas himself would have had, and not more familiar anecdotes like where John Williams adapted previous film scores for his famous fanfares.  Incredibly, some of this does not seem to have been part of the lore, or at least widely speculated.  

Let's get some of the obvious ingredients out of the way.  Frank Herbert claimed Lucas stole Dune (originally published in 1965) wholesale.  There's certainly some merit, insofar as a desert planet and an upstart hero with budding special abilities from an old society and an empire in the mix goes, but otherwise, in terms of what Star Wars (which is what Star Wars was in 1977, not Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope) was on release, it's kind of a stretch.

Lucas himself always said he originally envisioned Flash Gordon, and only settled on original creations later.  The particular Flash Gordon he had in mind, although it's often said he was inspired by the theatrical serials, was probably the 1954-1955 TV series.  

George Lucas was born on May 14, 1944.  He would have been an ideal kid audience for the series, which was adapted from the comic strip begun in 1934 and first filmed in three movie serials from 1936 to 1940, all before his birth.  

Another avowed source of inspiration for Lucas was The Hidden Fortress, released in 1958, as well as the less well-known The Dam Busters, from 1955, which helped inform the end sequence trench run on the Death Star.

All this is well and good, and well-documented.  Here's where we perhaps find fresh material.

I only read Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy a few years back.  Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953) are certainly well-known to genre fans, but are seldom, if ever, talked about in conjunction with Star Wars, and yet, once past the intellectual exercise that is the first book, I found an astounding number of parallels, both in plot and dialogue (just pointing them all out would require a reread and its own article), from throughout the Star Wars saga (one of the more obvious ones being the Mutant being a precursor to the Emperor).

Watching Ben-Hur (1959) as an adult (I only remember watching it as a kid because the climactic chariot race has a few memorable beats that stuck in latent memory) it was impossible not to hear parallels between the British-sounding characters talking about the (Roman) empire in it and the British-sounding characters in Star Wars talking about the Empire, including frequent references to "the emperor" (when in more recent years it's not often you think of the caesars under that term).  It becomes all the more obvious Lucas had Ben-Hur on the brain when he circles around to the prequels later and focuses them on the conflict between adoptive brothers Anakin and Obi-Wan, just as Ben-Hur does with the title character and Messala, who engage in the climactic race after an equally dramatic falling out.

Now, here's where I include some interesting casting choices as part of the mix.

The voice of Darth Vader is one of the signature elements of all Star Wars lore, and here I'm talking about James Earl Jones, and you have surely heard plenty about how that happened.  But what about why?  I happened to be watching old Sherlock Holmes material during the pandemic, when I came upon this scene:

That's the voice of Dr. Watson as portrayed by Howard Marion-Crawford in the 1955 episode "The Case of the Reluctant Carpenter" of the US Sherlock Holmes TV series.  I think you'll agree that it sounds uncannily like Jones, especially as he sounds in the first Star Wars film.  Here's where my point about all the 1950s material the young George Lucas absorbed comes into play.  Whether it was a conscious decision or not, it seems probable to suggest that the future filmmaker heard that voice and filed it away.

The actor himself would have been unavailable when Lucas began filming, having passed away in 1969.  Watching much more of the series you would no doubt be aware that his voice was hardly consistent in its delivery, so that you might never suspect upon watching just any episode.  But to my ear it was unmistakable, and it caused me to take immediate notice.

I previously wrote about Harrison Ford appearing in Gunsmoke (he made two appearances, but the relevant episode is "Whelan's Men" in which he portrays a character named Hobey) in 1973, featuring a scene that nearly exactly parallels the infamous "Han shot first" cantina sequence, a clip I was previously able to include in a post centering on the parallels but now seems unavailable.  But if you happen to be keeping score, it's the twentieth episode of Gunsmoke's eighteenth season.  (If for some reason I had previously misidentified the role, then it's his other appearance, in a different role.)  It's very likely that this was no coincidence.

In the years since Lucas directed the prequels, it's become fashionable to doubt his creative abilities, and even to suggest that the genius of the original films derives from editing.  Pointing out where he came up with various elements isn't to take away from Lucas as the creator of Star Wars, but rather the genius it took to synthesize not only all that material but reconcile it with the ideas he'd already toyed with in order to create a filmable concept.

It may be a saga set in a galaxy far, far away, but for Lucas "long ago" was his childhood, as it often is.  

The Rise of Skywalker’s Emperor Explained

Let’s just get out of the way the fact that a lot of fans think The Rise of Skywalker was stupid. Star Wars fans generally have thought the latest Star Wars movie was stupid since Return of the Jedi. It really doesn’t matter what Star Wars fans say. Three trilogies are now complete, the saga is finished, and now fans can go enjoy their adorable Baby Yoda and not bother worrying about their idiot hypocrisy.

Anyway, Rise of Skywalker featured the return of the Emperor. This may be confusing since the Emperor returned, in the comics, years ago. Boba Fett returned in the comics years ago. Darth Maul was brought back long before he popped up at the end of Solo. These things happen. This particular return is somewhat less randomly nonsensical, and let me explain why:

In my personal favorite Star Wars film, Revenge of the Sith, the Emperor, slightly before he became the Emperor, had an illuminating discussion with Anakin Skywalker (best scene in Star Wars history), in which he explains what exactly sets the Sith apart from the Jedi. He says the Sith use the Force “in ways some might find unnatural,” while arguing that they could even prevent death itself. By the end of the movie he’s done exactly that, of course, transforming the horribly mutilated Anakin into Darth Vader. He also states that the Sith have the ability to create life itself.

In the movies, the life of Anakin Skywalker was never fully explained. There’s a theory that the Emperor actually used the Force to impregnate Shmi Skywalker. He likely did much the same to produce the heir who ended up rebelling and leaving Rey on Jakku. At the end of Return of the Jedi, the Emperor seems to have been killed. It’s equally likely he used the dark powers of the Sith to keep himself alive, but in a greatly compromised state, sort of like Voldemort in the Harry Potter saga, until he could find the power to revive himself. He states that all the previous Sith live on in him (he likely stole the Force from them, as he seems to from Mace Windu in Revenge of the Sith; “Unlimited power!), which might explain why he never has an apprentice who’s near his equal, in power or cunning, but also why he covets Anakin so much, because he alone seems to have anywhere near equal access to the Force, aside from Yoda. The ability to resist him is what scares the Emperor the most, because otherwise he always gets exactly what he wants.

Then Rey does what no one else could do, because in his arrogance the Emperor created the very conditions needed to defeat him. And to complete the irony, Rey rejects her lineage and embraces that of the man he literally created to ensure he would never lose his power. Well, yes, she is a Skywalker, if you really think about it...

Quora

I guess I've been using Quora heavily since about March.  I originally joined Quora in 2015, but it was one of those things, eventually, that I quickly abandoned, until I decided it was a better and more interesting thing than I'd thought.

Quora is a community where you post questions and people respond because they think they have an authoritative answer.  The emails I get provide a digest of responses to various questions, picked because they've been voted by members as good answers.  I don't always agree.  Actually, that's half of why I started taking a more active role.

I've done a lot of Star Wars answers.  I never get tired of that.  It's fun challenging conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom often seems to be wrong, which seems more appropriate the more you think about it.  People specialize in group think more often than they'd care to admit.  They become convinced that their thoughts are their own, but being social creatures we rely on the opinions of our peers for a lot of the decisions we make, and then convince ourselves that there are valid personal reasons why we reached them.  Yeah.  Few of us seem to have the courage for bold opinions. 

Well, anyway, you can check out my responses here.

Well, damn, I think I just got all the hate for the Star Wars prequels

Before you read much further, you ought to know: I still love the Star Wars prequels.  I still love The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith.  But I think I finally get why they're so easy to hate.

And no, it's not what you think.

So let me explain.  I also love the Pirates of the Caribbean films.  I love Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man's Chest, At World's End.  But I don't love On Stranger Tides.  And so there's where we reach my point.  On Stranger Tides is the Star Wars prequels of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  As in, I don't really understand why its exists.  And the thing is, there's soon going to be another one, Dead Men Tell No Tales.  And I suppose the book's still open on that one.  But still.  The original three tell such a complete story.  The next two don't seem...relevant.  That's what I mean. 

Dead Man's Chest is actually hugely relevant to this analogy.  It's the second of the Pirates movies, and like The Empire Strikes Back (the second of the original Star Wars trilogy), it expands on everything that made the first one good, while doing it so well and in such a way that it makes both easier to love and gives the first further justification by making the experience deeper than it previously seemed to have any right to be. 

And like Return of the Jedi (for some fans, anyway; this is the third film in the original Star Wars trilogy, of course), At World's End finishes out the story, but doesn't quite measure up to its predecessor(s). 

On Stranger Tides focuses almost exclusively on Jack Sparrow, the breakout character of the original Pirates trilogy, just as the Star Wars prequels focuses almost exclusively on Darth Vader (specifically, his origin story).  To my mind, I don't see the point, if Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann aren't there somewhere, too.  Star Wars fans rightly kind of began to view the original trilogy to focus at least as much on Han Solo as any other element, Harrison Ford going on to be one of the biggest stars in Hollywood and all.

So the Star Wars prequels, more or less, whatever their creative merit, probably seemed downright incomprehensible to fans of the original trilogy.  That's what I'm saying.  Incomprehensible, inexplicable, everything they...really didn't want to see.  That's it, really, they rejected these things because they seemed pointless, offensiveness in any number of ways because they didn't conform to what fans loved so much about the originals.

That's On Stranger Tides for me.  Dead Man's Chest, I loved it so much when I first saw it, became one of my all-time favorite movies, period, in and out of the Pirates movies.  I care about the Pirates movies today because of it.  But I'll never have that relationship with On Stranger Tides. 

I really, really don't get that one.  I just don't see the point.  Clearly much of it was developed to ape as much of the originals as possible, but because it lacked the specific cast that made them so memorable, the specific story, and replaced them with plug-ins that meant...less, I just can't understand the point of taking it seriously.

So that's what I assume Star Wars fans think about the prequels.  Feel free to disagree, but that's my theory. 

853. The Force Awakens - Refuting the Naysayers Continues

Here's a guy who seems to make a pretty strong argument to not take The Force Awakens seriously.

The first and most obvious mistake this guy makes is assuming the original trilogy was about the fall of the Empire and return of the Republic, rather than the story of Darth Vader's improbable redemption at the hands of his son Luke Skywalker. Little wonder that he fails to understand what the First Order is or why it's significant that Han Solo is killed by his own son.

To wit: The Republic exists in The Force Awakens. The First Order is the remnant of the Imperial military, the muscle the Emperor massed over the years to consolidate his rule, why he was able to officially dissolve the Senate only by the time of A New Hope.  Which is to say, even with his iron grip, he still needed help to effect complete control. Hence, a reliance on big guns like the Death Star and its successors. Also, that's why he needed lackeys like Vader at all. "Unlimited power!" Because even the most powerful Sith, or Jedi for that matter, is still just one person, and therefore limited. Gaining a powerful new apprentice gives Palpatine renewed power, "unlimited" power, just another dude he was able to manipulate to stick around.

Anyway, then we reach the relevancy of Kylo Ren and the significance of his relationship, or lack thereof, with Han Solo. Snoke's power over Ren exists entirely in the boy's lack of emotional control. This is always the downfall of a Force practitioner. It nearly ruined Luke, and obviously it did ruin his father. The Sith thrive on emotion, but even they must control it. Ren killing his father severs a level of emotional turmoil he's had difficulty reconciling with his own perception of his future, and obviously Snoke's as well. Snoke thinks this is for the better. But is it? Without this anchor to what led him to Snoke, Ren is actually closer to redemption than corruption.

As for recurring the Death Star element at all, this is basic military tactics. For almost as long as we've had atomic weapons, we've been trying to get rid of them. But we haven't. They're a permanent weapon of our modern arsenal. They loom constantly. Whether you consider the Death Star as a metaphor or not, it makes perfect in-universe sense to keep building the big gun of the Star Wars arsenal over and over again, just as the Sith keep resurfacing.

The problem with guys like this is that they think they're outsmarting what's already about as smart a Star Wars story as there's ever been.  But ironically, Star Wars was never really about being smart, but about its emotional impact.  It's an adventure that seeks to deepen what adventure stories tend to accomplish.  George Lucas always wanted a complicated story.  He didn't always have the exact details in mind that we've grown to love in the original films, and the most famous examples are the big reveals of Empire Strikes Back (Vader is Luke's father!) and Return of the Jedi (Luke and Leia are siblings!), as any fan who ever read Splinter of the Mind's Eye will have known.  The genius of A New Hope was how Luke is immediately presented as an orphan with an interesting backstory.  That about sums up Harry Potter, too, right?  That's exactly why Harry became so popular, because in seven books and eight films, we find out what made his backstory so interesting, and how it all leads to defeating what otherwise might have been a scary but ultimately generic villain. 

Now, just imagine if Empire Strikes Back hadn't had that big ending.  Would anyone really care about Star Wars today?  Plenty of really popular movies have leveled off to exist in the social morass. They still count for something, but in far more limited ways than when they first debuted.  That could just as easily have been the fate of Star Wars, too.  Yet the story was deepened, with one scene.  One scene!  The rest of the movie is fine, really, but without that one scene, the whole thing looks pretty weightless.  And the thing about The Force Awakens is that it doesn't hinge on one scene.  The whole thing seeks to deepen the story.

The problem is that the prequels did, too.  And fans now think of deepening the story as weakening it.  I think that's insane, I really do.  But that's about where most people are in their consumption of popular entertainment.  They actually crave the superficial.  They like disposable, the shiny baubles that are fun to enjoy and then pass along to the annals of history.  What makes Star Wars so different is that it changed the rules.  We ended up caring too much.  And now we don't know what to think of it anymore.  For most people, it's the happy memories, something that helped build something, that in the books and comics became exactly the disposable landscape they're most familiar with otherwise enjoying.  They don't need to think too much about it.

Now Star Wars is asking them to think again.  For some fans, that's just unacceptable.  Too bad for them.

852. The Force Awakens - Something Old, Something New

As The Force Awakens settles into being a known commodity, the positive reaction that first greeted it has started to give way to more criticism.  One of the loudest voices is Star Wars creator George Lucas, who has begun to call the new film an act of nostalgia.

I'm not here to denounce Lucas's opinion as irrelevant.  As I've said countless times in the past, I love the prequels, unabashedly.  Where others see creative decisions ranging from just plain bad to offensive, I see artistic achievements of unparalleled achievement.  They are, to me, unquestioned elevations in Lucas's talents as a filmmaker.

His biggest problem with The Force Awakens probably stems from what he himself would have done, as he's noted would have been different from what he had done with the previous six films.  The major appeal of The Force Awakens is that it is an act of nostalgia, for the most part.  This was almost entirely necessary to get positive buzz back into the saga.  The dramatic departures of the prequels, if nothing else, certainly succeeded in presenting something that felt totally different from the original trilogy, which fans loved so much because it was raw and dirty.  The prequels are often accused of featuring wooden acting.  At the very least, they featured an era with far more rigged rules of conduct than the originals.  I would argue that the whole point of the prequels was about breaking loose from restrictions that had calcified.  Anakin Skywalker is attracted to Palpatine's vision because it offers him a limitless existence.  Fans abhor Jar Jar Binks because he seems too loose.  The prequels are all about extremes.

J.J. Abrams realized, somewhere along the way, that there had to be balance.  He didn't necessarily steal everything he created wholesale from the originals.  Instead, he built on them.  His Star Wars is deliberately more lived-in than even the original films.  For me, that creates an experience that is arguably better than any Star Wars to date.  He creates a landscape where the known and the unknown work in tandem, among the characters and among the fans.  There's a reason why so much of the action looks familiar.  Too often fans tend to great this sort of thing as a rip-off (Star Trek fans in particular, alas).  But the more deeper the material, the richer the experience.

I would argue that The Force Awakens succeeds because of this, because of its deep awareness, which makes it rich, which makes it feel so familiar.  But it's also new, because it wisely builds on the old material to tell a new story, one that may look predictable at this point, but uses the idea Lucas originally had in the prequels, to continue the saga, to see where the story goes next.  In virtually all of the old spinoff books and comics, the writers lost sight of what made Star Wars special.  It wasn't merely the mechanics, but the storytelling itself.  There's a reason why Darth Vader revealing the truth of his identity to Luke Skywalker was so important, why The Empire Strikes Back has long held its place as the most popular film among the fans, because it was the first time the story was deepened.

The prequels told us a story we already knew: that Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader.  As Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy attests, fans are impatient when they already know how the story ends.  For the first time in thirty years, Star Wars fans don't.  That's why The Force Awakens succeeds.  Well, that and impressive filmmaking.

When George Lucas first created Star Wars, he had a totally different vision than what ultimately came about.  Allowing the story to breathe turned out to be a very good thing.  We're seeing that again.

851. I have seen The Force Awakens (SPOILERS)

I have seen Star Wars - Episode VII: The Force Awakens.  And I love it.

A storytelling geek like me, and not just a Star Wars geek, is bound to love it.  It's cyclical in the best tradition. 

That's all I will say before I again warn you I have SPOILERS in mind as I continue talking about it.

The least spoiler I can say is that it's very reminiscent of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies, in a good way, mind you, because I loved them, especially the original trilogy (the fourth is basically for anyone who might want to just experience one of them, because it's mostly unrelated).  I say this not just because Daisy Ridley's Rey ends up reminding me of Keira Knightley's Elizabeth Swann, but because of a few other elements besides, like the pirates hideout (more or less) where our heroes meet Lupita Nyong'o's Maz Kanata, which clearly evokes a similar haunt from the Pirates films.  The treasure hunt, so to speak, is right out of them, too.

You'll find, in my Episode VII label, two previous posts I've written concerning my speculations and expectations, which ended up being exactly what happens in the movie (from a certain point of view).  I loved that.  I thought Kylo Ren being revealed right away to be Han Solo and Princess General Leia's son was brilliant.  Because it probably sets up something even greater, which is how the movie ends, very strongly suggesting that Rey is Luke Skywalker's daughter.  It's a strong twist, and an ode, to the original trilogy, in two different ways.  First is pretty obvious.  The second is that the big fight in this new trilogy will be between the offspring of the original heroes, who often were at odds with each other anyway.  And still are, come to think of it.

I love how John Boyega's Finn transforms from a stormtrooper to reluctant hero.  He helps make the whole thing more rich than any previous Star Wars (yes, I just said that).  I love how Han Solo continues the tradition of veteran hero dying in the opening film of a trilogy (even if I'm sad to see him go).

J.J. Abrams is once again true to form.  (Big Red Ball 'O' Doom?  Check.  Greg Grunberg?  Check!)  I've been fascinated with his work since Lost.  (Also, hello, Ken Leung!)  He's got such a strong creative track record at this point, it's only appropriate that he next gets to become the next Christopher Nolan, a guy with the ability to unleash big ideas on the big screen as big as he wants.  The next Star Wars is in very good hands with Rian Johnson (check out Brick and Looper right now!).  So it's great that Abrams got to set the ball rolling, and will be able to what he wants now.  Because we are all in for further treats.

The best part of The Force Awakens?  That it's got its own massive payoff, from the lightsabers duels Ren fights with Rey and Finn after killing Han to Rey's meeting with Luke.  This is the best ending of any Star Wars.  It's dramatic payoff that's so good you don't even care that they just destroyed another Death Star-type weapon and completely downplayed it in favor of the human drama.

The worst part?  Carrie Fisher's acting.  But there's always a stiff actor somewhere in Star Wars.  The good news is, the saga is always filled with enough spectacle where it doesn't matter, from the originals to the prequels, to a whole new trilogy. 

And it's just beginning...

850. Box Office: Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace

The year was 1999.  Once again, Star Wars was the most hotly anticipated release of the year.  It went on to become the most successful release that year.  And then to become known as one of the most maligned movies ever.

How is that even possible?  Not every huge success remains popular.  It's strange, it really is.  You look back historically and it's virtually unthinkable.  Going back just twenty years, and there's not a single such success, the top draw of the year, that went on to become unpopular.  The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Top Gun (1986), Three Men and a Baby (1987), Rain Man (1988), Batman (1989), Home Alone (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Aladdin (1992), Jurassic Park (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Toy Story (1995), Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998)...These were all cultural touchstones of varying degrees, and to varying degrees still relevant and beloved today.  (Quibble about, say, Three Men and a Baby, but it doesn't really matter.) 

After The Phantom Menace?  In fact, immediately after, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), suffered the same fate.  It happened again to Spider-Man 3 (2007).  It's time to stop blaming Jar Jar Binks and do some actual analysis.

It's worth starting with Star Wars itself.  Return of the Jedi was widely panned by fans, too, and for the same reasons (Ewoks being indisputably the original trilogy's Jar Jar Binks).  Over time, fans forgot how little they actually liked the last one, and got caught up in the anticipation for the next one.  Why's that, exactly?  Because it took that long for anyone to come up with another blockbuster idea.

From the moment of A New Hope's release in 1977, Hollywood started scrounging for the next big thing.  That's how we got Superman and Star Trek on the big screen.  For the entirety of the '80s, however, big hits looked nothing like Star Wars.  Go ahead and look at the films that topped the box office during that period again.  To find anything remotely resembling the modern era, you have to look at Batman (1989) at the end of the decade.  And then you'll see that there was still no real follow-up for the next decade. 

In fact, if you look at the '80s and the '90s, you'll find that Hollywood embraced one aspect of the Star Wars phenomenon: its family-friendly atmosphere.  With variations (commonly, action), the formula was eventually adapted so that it was thoroughly safe for kids, kind of like how Disney had such a long string of hit animated films, including the latterday surge in this period as typified by Aladdin (1992) and Toy Story (1995).

It should have been very little surprise that Jar Jar happened at all.  Or was attempted at all.  Or the filmmakers believed he would happen, up until they started hearing the public's vitriolic feedback.

But what Star Wars really accomplished, in 1999, was to finally force everyone else to take event movies seriously, the way everyone assumed Hollywood had starting in 1977.  What were the most popular movies thereafter?  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001), Spider-Man (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), Shrek 2 (2004), Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Avatar (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011), Marvel's The Avengers (2012), The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)...In fact, until American Sniper (2014), which snatched victory from another Hunger Games installment at the last minute, every top release since Phantom Menace has been part of a major franchise, with minimal overlap.

In addition to everyone complaining that there are no original ideas anymore (which is always ridiculous), what this means is that Star Wars finally created it own competition, by finally bringing back the concept of mass anticipation.  It took years.  It took about two decades, really.

And it produced the phenomenon of mass disappointment.  Films flop all the time, but it took The Phantom Menace for a hugely successful movie to flop, metaphorically speaking.  Suddenly even a movie people couldn't stop seeing could be nitpicked to death.  And that's what the discussion surrounding Phantom Menace has really amounted to all these years.  Nitpicking is what fans do.  When you produce a culture where fans are no longer a limited phenomenon, you end up with something as absurd as what happened to Phantom Menace.  Now, people just assume it was a bad film, no matter how closely it resembles the same exact tendencies as every Star Wars before it. 

I could go on about the film itself, which I've long admired, if not counted among my most favorite movies.  Hollywood keeps trying to retain the goofy element in these blockbusters, no matter the fan reaction.  That's why Jack Sparrow propelled the Pirates of the Caribbean films to great success, and why Iron Man and his fellow Avengers usually take things tongue-in-cheek.  Anytime a blockbuster tries to play things straight, even the fans are disgruntled.  Which makes it all the more ironic that they continue to insist that Jar Jar was a horrible, horrible mistake.  Hey, you wouldn't have him without C-3PO in...all the other ones.

So here we stand at the precipice of another hotly anticipated Star Wars release.  The question we have before us is: will the fans allow themselves to enjoy it?  The answer could very well define the next twenty years of filmmaking...

848. Kylo Ren is Luke Skywalker's Son!

Everyone knows that classic moment from The Empire Strikes Back: Luke Skywalker has just endured a grueling lightsaber duel with Darth Vader, who caps off lopping off the young Jedi's hand by revealing a terrible secret, declaring, "Luke, I am your father."

It forever defined the Star Wars legacy for some, right up there with the roguish charm of Han Solo and the timeless wisdom of Yoda.  How could the prequels ever compare with that?  Well, The Force Awakens may be taking a page from the original trilogy's playbook...

For months fans have endlessly speculated on the absence of Luke from the trailers.  They began suspecting that he was secretly the masked Kylo Ren, who has already been announced as being portrayed by Adam Driver.  But what if the truth is somewhere in the middle?

In a write-up for Entertainment Weekly, Ren is described this way by Driver: "[He] wasn't loved enough or felt betrayed."

Ironically, fans have been wondering about the lineages of two other characters, the so-far singular-named Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega).  Rey could very easily be a Skywalker herself, or a Solo.  Still, Ren would be by far the more intriguing twist.  After all, we knew Anakin Skywalker by a different name originally, too.

In the films, unlike the many spinoff books and comics, Star Wars has always been a generational saga about the Skywalkers.  The Force Awakens could very easily continue that tradition by revealing the Vader-obsessed Ren as, in fact, his grandson, and the estranged offspring of Luke. 

The unseen hero of the original trilogy in all the released trailers could be hiding new scars from further tragedies.  Or all this could be a further fever dream of a hopeless devotee.  That would be appropriate, too...

840. Star Wars, "a 1977 space movie"

I've been reading a survey of war throughout recorded history, and came across a reference to the 1980s missile defense program, which was famously nicknamed Star Wars in honor of the popular films.  At that time, it was probably embraced with a laugh.

From today's vantage point, we can begin to consider a different context.  As a longtime lover of literature, I've constantly had to confront the notion of historical impact.  Many of the stories we read today come from days long past, and they've transcended their original contexts.  The origin of The Iliad has particularly interested me.  This is a presentation of the Trojan War, written centuries after the fact, credited to a man named Homer, who has undergone considerable skepticism over time.  Did he even exist?  Is it a matter of convenience that we ascribe The Iliad to him?  The existence of Troy itself was in great doubt until Heinrich Schliemann discovered its ruins.

Fans today quibble about Star Wars in every way possible.  They question George Lucas every time he revisits Han Solo shooting Greedo.  A hundred years from now, if anyone is still talking about Star Wars at all, will they even care?  This is the sort of thing I think about.

Will it become a footnote, the way the military survey handled it, or will history be kinder, the way we presumably view Star Wars now in relation to the outdated missile defense system?  Does Lucas continue to be a visionary every time he tweaks his own work?  Because in time, if Star Wars endures at all, it will be revisited.  We're seeing new creators entering into the saga for the first time even now, something that was previously unthinkable (until you consider Lucas didn't direct the second and third movies).

Film is such an interesting topic.  We've seen multiple formats emerge in preserving it for home consumption.  Critics have routinely touted the early movies as enduring classics.  I've been wondering about that.  Some film-makers (Orson Welles) seemed to grasp the enduring nature of the medium, while others (the vast majority) were fine with the limits of their age, which become more and more obvious over time.  As an art-form, film has been nascent, and there's no other way to describe it, the youngest of the arts by far, something that was initially slow in development, but has taken great strides in the blockbuster age, the very era that has routinely seen critics bemoan the end of serious cinema.  Imagine if ambition were a crime in art.  So long, Da Vinci!

The better and more consistent the technique, the better films are in general.  If the medium becomes worthy of an enduring legacy, does it in fact become something that can credibly be envisioned as still being done in a hundred years?  And if then, are they still holding all the old movies as untouchable, the way some people today like to think of them?

Which is to say, is Star Wars as we know it truly sacred?  Or can multiple versions truly compete?  Fans, many of which are the original fans, consider Star Wars untouchable today, even by George Lucas himself.  In times to come, if it truly is untouchable, which is to say enduring, it will have to be more malleable.  The original versions might endure, but there will have to be others, if not to replace the originals, then to justify them.

Or it really will become a footnote in history, "a 1977 space movie."  Just another forgettable cultural ephemera.  History marches on!   

833. On the Passing of Christopher Lee

I delayed this tribute a little because I suspected there'd be a flood of them.  Sure enough there was.  And of course Christopher Lee deserves it.  The funny thing is a lot of what he's known for today skims only the surface of his life, the recent past, what one wonders he himself might have considered all that important in his experiences.  But this is what many of us have to work with.

And that means two roles, Saruman and Count Dooku.  Peter Jackson's greatest accomplishment in his Lord of the Rings trilogy was in the casting.  In truth given such a ridiculous bounty and a relatively thankless villain's role contrasted against Ian McKellen, Lee was almost easy to lose in the shuffle.  Then George Lucas came along and added him to the Star Wars prequels beginning with Attack of the Clones, in which he becomes the embodiment of Sith potency.  I've long championed these films and many a head has been scratched in trying to figure out why.  One of the reasons is Christopher Lee.  Having been introduced to him, in effect, through a relatively disappointing role, I found his Dooku a revelation.  During his discussion with the captive Obi-Wan Kenobi, Dooku dispenses with his apparent innocence in such a casual manner, the mark of a truly confident actor, and of course it's the acting that fans most complain about in these films, yet there's Lee commanding the scene so effortlessly, setting the stage for Ian McDiarmid's best work as Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith, and it's here that perhaps the whole story Lucas has attempted to convey should be understood: Anakin Skywalker's fall is about frustrated youth, the extravagance of inexperience, everything we're denied so happily in the fallen world of the original trilogy with its very casual interpretation of heroism, the very thing Dooku shatters so elegantly...

The last time we see Lee in epic mode is in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.  It's more of a cameo than anything, but the remarkable thing is that Saruman is reclaimed from the abyss in an instant, summoned for a moment of great heroism, the complete opposite of everything we'd seen previously from him.  It is very much like a fond farewell, not so much to the character but to the actor.  I realized as I was watching what a cherished moment this was set up to be, and it is undeniably the best sequence in the movie, perhaps the true justification of Jackson's return to Middle-Earth.

All of which is to say, farewell Christopher Lee.  You accomplished many things in your life.  One of them was to imprint yourself into our memories, in a way that will only continue to unfold.  As they say, the road goes ever on and on...

A to Z 2015 - Reflections

As some of you may have caught, I nearly didn't participate in A to Z this year because my mother died at the end of March.  In fact, the original material I did pursue at the start of the month was abandoned because I'm still trying to deal with her death, and sometimes it's a lot harder than other times.  Everyone dies.  But the awareness of death is a personal matter you can absolutely not estimate ahead of time.  She started dying, technically, in the fall of 2010, when she was first diagnosed with cancer, and there have been many rough patches along the way, including last April, which was the start of the traumatic end process...

I ended up switching topics to Star Trek, and that was hugely appropriate.  Even though she didn't become one of those die hard fans who typify interest in the franchise, my mother was one of its original viewers, and every time I popped in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, she'd cry when Spock dies.  (Except the last time.  But at that point, most of her was changing.  I clung and still do to the lasting remnants of who and what she had been throughout her life.)  In a very real sense, I owe my interest in Star Trek to her.

This being May the Fourth, however, I'm not going to continue talking about Star Trek, but rather switch topics once again.  Hey, why not?  Star Wars was a dominant feature of my childhood.  I grew up with four siblings, and Star Wars was one of the few things that united all of us.  We watched the original trilogy all the time.  It got to the point where my mother would literally fall asleep every single time we watched it, and we joked that she did see the whole thing, but only cumulatively speaking.  In hindsight it's probably clear that she was never quite as enthusiastic about Star Wars as we were.

But in her last year, my dad and I still got her to watch most of the movies all over again, and she was perfectly fine with that.  Star Wars had become a constant for her.

I've posted this video before, from How I Met Your Mother, how when Ted tries to understand how Stella has never seen Star Wars before, he and Marshall absolutely cannot understand it.  (For me, it's still baffling, and I absolutely mean it, that there was such a tremendous backlash to the prequels.  But people like what's spontaneous, a discovery.)  Here's the video again:

(It also baffles me that people hated How I Met Your Mother's ending.  But that's a topic for another day.)

Different people have different experiences.  This is sometimes extremely hard to appreciate, and very people are willing to admit this.  When we're forced to confront our differences, we also discover how different we really are.  But sometimes the differences are not as great as we think they are.

Taking part in A to Z for another year, no matter the circumstances and however much my experience was affected by those circumstances, or how little other people know Star Trek compared to me...this was actually the best experience I've had with it to date.  In past years I didn't really understand how it was supposed to work.  I don't mean in relation to others, but for me.  The moment I let go of my own expectations, I started to have fun.  I couldn't ask for better than that.

#790. Star Wars: Strange Magic?

One of this year's earliest releases ended up being what should have been considered inevitable: a fully animated George Lucas film.

This was Strange Magic, which like 2012's Red Tails and two out of the six original Star Wars films was directed by someone else, but the George Lucas is strong in it.  Specifically because the Star Wars is strong in it.

After reading the Dark Horse comic book adaptation of The Star Wars, the original vision of the saga, in which names and situations are familiar, but everything's scrambled compared to what ended up on the screen, it's become hard for me to separate Lucas from his variations.  Strange Magic, in some sense, is the courtship of Padme and Anakin all over again.

Although to be more specific, it might even be an alternate version of Darth Vader himself, the later fully villainous version of Anakin Skywalker.  Strange Magic's Bog King is an unhappy fellow who has instituted an oppressive regime, much as how Vader first appears in A New Hope.

It's worth noting how even in the films as they have been presented, Star Wars still remains difficult to completely reconcile.  Luke and Leia being siblings was something that kind of happened in Return of the Jedi.  Anyone familiar with the novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye will remember what New Hope and even The Empire Strikes Back implies about their relationship.

Lucas involved triangle romances, or implied triangle romances, in the Star Wars prequels, as Anakin believes Obi-Wan Kenobi is somehow involved with Padme by Revenge of the Sith.  This is one of the singular misunderstandings about the saga yet simultaneously one of its most popular elements, insofar as the romance between Leia and Han Solo, as emphasized in Empire Strikes Back, which also introduced Vader being Luke's father.

Lucas working with complicated relationships was evident in American Graffiti, a film about high school students.  To some extent, how much a fan understands or appreciates what Lucas has done throughout his career, and not just Star Wars, affects how they view Star Wars itself and their ability to interpret what is and isn't accomplished in it with regards to the prequels.  Yet Lucas himself always viewed Star Wars as far more fluid than the fans would, which has contributed to a widening distance between his impact on what makes Star Wars what it is and what the fans think about that.  This is where Strange Magic enters the equation, again.

This is a movie that makes it clear how different Star Wars can be, in any number of ways.  The Bog King softens when he realizes Marianne can see him as something other than a monster, and the idea of true love as a source of power akin to the Force represented by the presence of an imp who could very easily be seen as a variation on Yoda, whom Lucas once referenced as a classic magical bunny, as in Alice in Wonderland, who randomly appears to facilitate matters.  Now, seeing Yoda as just a "magical bunny" is difficult in itself, because his original appearance in Empire Strikes Back as a wise sage instead of the strange little miscreant he first seems to be drastically affected any other interpretation.  The Yoda in the prequels has a far more gleeful attitude, especially around young Padawan learners (as seen in Attack of the Clones), something that seemed impossible in Empire Strikes Back and even The Phantom Menace.

Yet context is always key.  In one context, Vader is no Bog King, Luke and Leia had no potential for romance at all, and Yoda is too busy being sage to bother with being playful.  In another, everything is different.  Yet, in the mind of George Lucas, the same.

Strange Magic failed at the box office because it wasn't really a children's animated film at all.  Maybe it was supposed to be, but it might better be appreciated for what it really is, a commentary on Star Wars and how its creator continues to see it.  Lucas is famously uninvolved in the Disney version of Star Wars that begins with The Force Awakens, but he still has things left to say.  Far too often, the conversation has leaned toward the fans being tired of Lucas changing things.  But it's worth remembering that for longer than the fans knew anything about Star Wars, George Lucas was already changing things.

It actually deepens the experience.

#788. The Top Ten Characters from America in the Past Hundred Years

via Paltry Meanderings

10. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce

Debuted in MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors (1968)

After more than a decade of Alan Alda's portrayal in the classic sitcom, it might need reminding that "Hawkeye" didn't even debut in the 1970 movie (played by Donald Sutherland), but in the pages of the Richard Hooker book.  Thanks to the show, however, the character became arguably the iconic voice of 20th century war weariness, although equally an anti-authoritarian prankster and womanizer.  Since Alda, it's become difficult to think of the good doctor in any other context, but the history alone has primed the character for further exploits, perhaps even centered squarely on him (which has already happened for his pal "Trapper" John, by the way).  As the obvious leader of an ensemble, he always stood out anyway, and would likely do so all over again should he remain in that context.

via Comic Vine

9. Rooster Cogburn

Debuted in: True Grit (1968)

After the Coens adapted the book a second time, everyone had a chance to remember that this character debuted in a novel by Charles Portis, not the John Wayne film adaptation from a year later.  Yet the Civil War veteran's significance in Wayne's own history stands tall, not just for the fact that it earned him his Oscar, but remains one of the few names of any character fans will be able to remember with little effort, a fact that helped lead to a rare sequel, the eponymous 1975 film.  That helps distinguish Cogburn as the most iconic fictional cowboy of the 20th century, when the archetype experienced a renaissance.  But it may perhaps be more notable still that the focus isn't even on Cogburn himself, but the young girl he helps find justice.

via Entertainment Weekly

8. Sarah Connor

Debuted in: The Terminator (1984)

The biggest surprise of the testosterone-heavy '80s action movies era is that its biggest icon is a woman, the mother of the hero.  Sarah Connor's significance increased still more in the sequel, Judgment Day, when she has to prove she isn't crazy (a theme shared by many fictional female icons, including one on this list, and Ellen Ripley), and the later Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series.  Before her son John could grow up to defeat the robotic uprising, Sarah not only had to survive attempts on her own life, but protect them both in further harrowing attacks from the future.  Oh, and make time to romance the guy who happens to be the father.  But you don't see him getting his own TV show, do you?

via Empire Online

7. Hannibal Lecter

Debuted in: Red Dragon (1981)

"Hannibal the Cannibal" is a true 20th century monster, who needed only a handful of minutes of portrayal by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs to become ingrained in popular culture.  The creation of novelist Thomas Harris, who wrote four books, all of them adapted into film, based on the character, Lecter debuted onscreen in the 1986 thriller Manhunter, later remade after its namesake, Red Dragon.  Recently revived all over again for television, Lecter's strange combination of cultural refinement and abject sadism is a stark update of the monster archetype, a symbol of the continuing obsession with serial killers, and is perhaps assured greater longevity in his original form than either "Hawkeye" Pierce or Rooster Cogburn, proving all over again the endurance of the written word.

via Oz and Ends

6. Dorothy Gale

Debuted in: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

The lost little Kansas girl who introduced us to Oz is the oldest character on the list, the L. Frank Baum whose legacy grew substantially with the huge success of Judy Garland's portrayal in 1939's film adaptation, which wasn't even, in fact not nearly, the first such attempt.  Dorothy appears in thirteen of Baum's original fourteen novels, not always as the lead.  She made a return to the big screen in 1985's Return to Oz, which was controversial in the sense that she was no longer portrayed by Garland, she didn't sing, and yes, like Sarah Connor later, had ended up being considered crazy.  Zooey Deschanel plays a contemporary version of Dorothy, "D.G.," in the 2007 TV miniseries Tin Man.  A classic literary orphan figure, Dorothy's defeat of the Wicked Witch has lately begun to be overshadowed by the Wicked Witch herself, starting with Gregory Maguire's 1995 book Wicked, whose popularity increased when it was adapted to stage.  For now, however, Dorothy remains the most popular Oz figure.

via Genius

5. Tarzan

Debuted in: Tarzan of the Apes (1912)

Edgar Rice Burroughs first published Tarzan's debut in the pulp All-Story Magazine, then two years later on its own.  Hollywood quickly and wildly embraced the character, a prototypical civilized man in an uncivilized world.  A number of TV adaptations have also appeared, and among recent film appearances are 1984's live action Greystoke and Disney's animated version.  It's worth noting that comic books have any number of characters inspired by Tarzan, from Ka-Zar to Sheena to Kraven the Hunter.

via Hollywood Reporter

4. Zorro

Debuted in: All-Story Weekly #2 (1919)

Another icon to emerge from the pulps is Johnston McCulley's creation, who like Tarzan has long been a favorite of Hollywood.  A direct precursor to the idea of the superhero, much like the earlier Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro is as much known for his mask as the man beneath it, an aristocrat who scoffs at the vigilante's adventures in his personal time.  Clearly an inspiration for another character on the list, and in fact some versions literally an element of their origin, Zorro continues to be revived periodically, recently in the pages of comic books, which have curiously tended to leave him behind.  Also of note is Isabel Allende's 2005 fictional revival, which took the character in more of a literary direction.

via The Plumber 702

3. Spock

Debuted in: "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (1966)

The lone holdover between the two pilots commissioned for the original Star Trek ("The Cage" was later spliced into the two-part "The Menagerie"), Spock is the iconic alien of the 20th century, and he looks very much human, doesn't he?  A true representation of both our fears and hopes in that regard, Spock is a much-cherished colleague and friend who nonetheless still encounters xenophobic hostility.  His cultural norms, and the ways he practices them, set Spock apart as much as his pointed ears.  Spock quickly leaped ahead of Kirk, the intended lead character of what would become a whole franchise, a point emphasized in the 2009 reboot when the only returning actor, Leonard Nimoy, appeared alongside his successor in the role.

via Alpha Coders

2. Batman

Debuted in: Detective Comics #27 (1939)

In a century dominated by superheroes, which is a phenomenon we see continue at the movies today, there remains none more iconic than Batman, created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, a character that has weathered numerous interpretations, from the self-deprecating Adam West portrayal in the 1960s TV series to the brooding Christopher Nolan cinematic vision epitomized by 2008's The Dark Knight, as well as a constant surge of comic books from such creators as Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Grant Morrison, all of whom converged in the late '80s to explore his past, present, and even future.  

via Today

1. Darth Vader

Debuted in: Star Wars (1977)

It's rare that the villain so decisively outshines the hero, but that's exactly what Darth Vader did from the start.  In George Lucas's original vision, Vader as he's known now is nowhere to be found, but his screen debut proved immediately compelling, and the twist ending of The Empire Strikes Back created the opportunity to change the saga forever, which is what happened in a separate series of films as Anakin Skywalker's transformation from naive recruit to tragic figure and finally villain is explored in detail.  A new kind of fictional icon that forever changed the landscape around him, Vader's is the story of a true antihero, whose improbable redemption comes in the form of a son who refuses to give up on him.

#785. The Portman Wars

Natalie Portman recently spoke about how doing Star Wars nearly ruined her career.  Now let's set the record straight:

That's a complete exaggeration.  All it really amounts to is a classic instance of someone disassociating themselves from an experience they now regret.  For famous people, this is Appease the Fans Syndrome.  In other words, everyone says she was horrible in the Star Wars prequels, and so now Portman wants us to believe it nearly ruined her career.  #SympathyTears.  Everyone feels better.  The end.

Except it's not even remotely believable, no matter how accurate it might be to what she actually experienced.  Today, Portman is an Oscar-winning actress who can choose whatever she wants to do, even when she works.  Quite an enviable position to be in, even better than starring in three of the biggest blockbusters of all-time, as far as living arrangements go.  But let's rewind a little and see how we got there, shall we?

In 1999, Portman is featured in the hotly-anticipated Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.  Previous to this, her biggest claims to fame were a child actor performance in 1994's Leon: The Professional and supporting roles in 1996's Everyone Says I Love You and Mars Attacks!  There's a three-year gap between Attacks! and Phantom Menace.  Following her casting in Star Wars, Portman stars in Anywhere But Here and Where the Heart Is, both of which are box office misfires ($18 mil for the former, $34 the latter) despite being fairly generic feel-good movies featuring a suddenly high profile actress.

Now, according to Portman, after the horrid reception (although, of course, giant box office returns) of Phantom Menace, she became persona non grata, and could only subsist on personal recommendation.  Which would be fine if this were somehow a span of many more years than we're actually talking about.  And yet just a year after the release of her second Star Wars film, 2002's Attack of the Clones, Portman co-stars in her second biggest non-blockbuster hit to date, 2003's Cold Mountain (hey, would you like to read a completely unrelated rant concerning Jude Law and how he starred in a thousand movies at the time, had this one hit, and actually became persona non grata for years?), and then a couple of smaller releases in 2004's Garden State and Closer.  Then 2005's final Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith.  And then V for Vendetta.  And eventually, 2010's Black Swan.

The thing casting directors love above all else is casting to type.  They love that.  It's the rare actor who manages to avoid that, but even then, versatility is a type, too.  Portman's type, for all intents and purposes, was created in Phantom Menace.  And it wasn't Slightly Terrible Actress (because of the directing, apologetic nerds scream!) but rather, Girl Most Likely to Have Unfortunate Relationship.

That's exactly what she is in Star Wars.  And that's what she is in V for Vendetta.  That's Black Swan, the full art version.  Portman has a fairly limited range.  Her acting, if you care to watch, say, Revenge of the Sith and Black Swan back-to-back, doesn't vary that greatly.  The feel of the material changes, certainly.  But not the acting.

I'm not saying Natalie Portman is a bad actress, or a good actress, or a mediocre actress who keeps getting high profile gigs regardless of her talent.  Landing Star Wars made her career.  Don't even make the Professional argument.  Most child actors have no adult career.  That's a fact.  And when they do, they certainly don't go on to win Oscars.

But Portman's type rang true for casting directors.  That's how she landed Cold Mountain, which if you've never seen it is all about people whose lives were made miserable by the Civil War, but in this instance in an Odyssey kind of way.  Portman plays third fiddle in the actress side of the film, to Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger (I'd ask whatever happened to her, but if you've heard about her new face, then everything else is semantics, isn't it?).  If she needed special favors to get a minor role, then so be it.

Garden State is Zach Braff's best-known film to date.  The would-be new Woody Allen had a window where he could do whatever he wanted, and co-starring with Natalie Portman sounded like a pretty good thing.  Portman made a cameo in 2001's Zoolander, which is a good way to let everyone know you don't take yourself too seriously (although Zoolander is seriously hilarious; after I finish writing this up, I'm going to practice my Blue Steel!), which is another way of saying, Portman had a shrewd sense concerning her career prospects from the start.

Making a string of minor art films starting with 2006's Paris, je t'aime, was another shrewd decision.  After the fiasco of the mainstream effort following her initial casting in Star Wars, Portman knew she had to reconsider her options.  Prior to Star Wars she effectively had no real public profile.  She opted to build her indy and critical cred.  Even a notorious flop like 2007's Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium  couldn't slow her down at that point.  2008's more successful The Other Boleyn Girl probably helped with that.  Suddenly she was visible for something other than Star Wars, and it was a relatively good thing (and also just about Eric Bana's last visible mainstream release, and once again, unlike Portman he's never managed to turn it around).

So Black Swan comes around, everyone loves it, Portman unleashes a flood of new movies.  And then does the Thor movies.

All of which is to say, Star Wars didn't ruin Portman's career.  And word of mouth from sympathetic filmmakers didn't save it.  This is not a story that confirms how bad the prequels were.  It's all about an actress who maneuvered her career in ways few others would have considered, and had remarkable success at it.  Everyone regrets decisions they've made.  I'm sure Portman regrets Wonder Emporium far more than Star Wars.

#740. May the Fourth Be With You

This is Star Wars Day.

Mainly because it's 5/4 and it sounds vaguely like something from the movies, but you know, it doesn't really matter.  I think people generally like Star Wars.  (Understatement alert.)  Although I've been looking at a book in a bookstore (it is still a thing) from a critic celebrating reviews he wrote back in the late '70s/early '80s and his only remarks on Star Wars are completely dismissive.  For some critics, you can never admit to liking something popular.  Then again, the only reason anyone ever hears about anything is that it is in some sense popular.  But I digress.  I don't mean to beat up on that unnamed critic.  His larger point is that he relished the days when it was okay to write at length about movies in reviews, which is clearly something I do myself sometimes.

And I could write at length about Star Wars again.  I could write about the prequels (which I unabashedly love) or the new movie that's coming down the pike (ooh! shiny cast photo that's been making its way around the Internet!) or the Dark Horse adaptation of George Lucas's original script (final issue being released this Wednesday, folks).

Or I can just make a vow to watch at least one of the movies today.  I think I can do that.  Hopefully.  I've been watching Star Wars my whole life.  I think I will still be able to say that in five years, ten, twenty, however long I've got.

Because I love Star Wars.  So may the geeky reference be with you!

#694. You Were My Brother!

I'm one of the crazy people who loves the Star Wars prequels.

(I've admitted this before.  Don't act so surprised.  I'm not on any mercy mission here.)

I love them for a variety of reasons.  One of them is surely because I loved the original trilogy so much growing up, but that particular prerequisite don't seem to hold much water with other fans, and so when I talk about the prequels, I usually have to explain more than that.  This time I'll be talking about Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The prequels are often seen (when not completely dismissed) strictly as the story of how Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader.  Even people who generally hate them begrudgingly admit that maybe Revenge of the Sith is not as terrible as the other two (especially The Phantom Binks).  In truth, that's my favorite of them, too, and the basis for everything I will eventually focus on later.

I will continue to argue, however, that one of the reasons the prequels get such a bad rap is that they came in at the start of a new movie era.  The originals, did, too, only they were the ones to usher in that era.  The prequels were released at a time when numerous blockbuster franchises competing for attention had just become a thing.  Today we wouldn't really bat an eye at it.  We've very comfortably slipped into a time when most of them can very easily be hits at the box office and still be talked about kindly by the fans afterward.  This wasn't always the case.

The Phantom Menace was released in 1999.  Fans had been waiting nearly twenty years for another Star Wars.  It was going to be a massive hit one way or another.  In that sense, instant success regardless of the actual response was another thing Star Wars pioneered.  The problem it faced that year was that The Matrix was also released.  The Matrix stole the zeitgeist.  It didn't have something blatantly uncool like Jar Jar Binks running around.  It defined cool the way that Star Wars previously had.

And then Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy debuted two years later.  For some people, these films immediately supplanted not only The Matrix but also Star Wars as the new cool. I mean, they even gave the arguably much bigger phenomenon Harry Potter a run for his money.  When the two Matrix sequels were finally released, they had lost the zeitgeist just as they'd stolen it from Star Wars.  There are always a number of ways to explain why something is a failure, and most of the time people quickly agree with the first person who says it's the material itself, but I happen to favor the lemming effect.  Once a reputation is soiled, it's hard to clean it up.  Once someone says something's bad, everyone else just sort of takes it for granted that this is exactly the way it is.  They internalize the thought process, assume they came to the conclusion themselves.

(And will continue to believe that years later.  Because most people never really reconsider things.  Not for nothing, but I know I'm capable of this.  When I first saw the video for U2's "Beautiful Day," I became convinced that Bono and the rest of the band had jumped the shark.  I totally gave up on the band.  Some time after, I became a bigger fan of U2 than I had ever been before.  And loved the song and the whole album around it.)

Getting back to my intended point a little, when Jackson's original Tolkien trilogy came to an end, one of the highlights of Return of the King was the moment where Sam tells Frodo that he can't carry the ring, but he can carry Frodo.  It was the ultimate statement of the fellowship they alone had carried from the first film.  It was the last great moment of the trilogy.

Revenge of the Sith ends on a comparable note, also in a setting of molten lava, when Ob-Wan and Anakin are dueling what had until that point been one of the most legendary unseen moments in Star Wars lore, the fight that ends their friendship and ruins Anakin's body, forcing him into his iconic Vader apparatus.

And near the end of it, Obi-Wan utters the words: "You were my brother!"

And so I want to talk about that.  I think it means a little more than it seems to on the surface.  I think it resonates through the whole prequel trilogy.

For Obi-Wan, he basically means it literally.  In that moment, this is the greatest betrayal of the whole Star Wars saga, and on the basis of that understanding, this is easily one of the elements that elevates the rest of the material, for me, far above the common estimation.

Going back to Phantom Menace, one of the first things Obi-Wan says after meeting Anakin for the first time is a fairly dismissive comment about "pathetic lifeforms," which is his way of linking the boy with the annoying Jar Jar.  Yes, even in Phantom Menace people know that Jar Jar is annoying.  That's the whole point of the character.  In that moment, Obi-Wan is just like any other Jedi.  He doesn't see Anakin's potential at all.  He's nothing like his mentor, Qui-Gon Jinn.  (This in itself might be jarring, because in the original trilogy, the older Kenobi is basically on par with Yoda, who is the closest match to Qui-Gon the saga has.)

It may need reminding that in Phantom Menace, Obi-Wan himself is still only an apprentice.  That's one of the major points of the prequels, the extended apprenticeship the Jedi experience in order to be fully sanctioned as a knight.  It's something Luke Skywalker experiences in the earlier trilogy, but it's perhaps all the more shocking to learn that the very young Anakin is still considered too old and that Ob-Wan, who at this point is probably about as old as Luke will be when we first meet him, is still just learning the craft.

All of this is to say that as far as he is concerned, once Anakin actually is inducted into the program, they are more or less on equal footing.  (Que the epiphany that even in that, there's poetry in how the final duel plays out.)  Despite his misgivings, Obi-Wan ceases to consider Anakin anything other than a brother Jedi-in-training.

Which is to say, they grow up together.

By the time of Attack of the Clones, they're still working alongside each other.  This is not like the relationship between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in Phantom Menace.  They're still on equal footing.  By the time of Revenge, the distance has widened a little, but that's because everyone has begun to sense the danger Anakin represents and is no longer keen to advance him so quickly.

But as far as Obi-Wan is concerned, Anakin remains a brother Jedi.  It was never really for Obi-Wan to consider the nuances of the prophecy concerning Anakin, and he never really did.  He accepted the interpretation at face value.  In some ways, he actually was in awe of Anakin, considered it a privilege to work alongside him.  If that's never really clear until the climactic moment in Revenge, consider this the moment where that's corrected.

All along, especially throughout Clones and the first few acts in Revenge, Obi-Wan and Anakin are inseparable, the way we only imagine Luke and Han Solo are in the original films.  Han was always far more cynical about the whole relationship than we can sometimes think.  They spend more time apart than at each other's side.  That's probably why it's so easy to view the first trilogy in such rough terms.  Even the parts that work together don't really work together.  In the prequels, everything is too streamlined, it seems.  I've argued in the past that this is because we're in times where the old ways are still functioning.  It's Anakin slowly smashing them apart, moreso than Palpatine, that creates the conditions necessary to produce a guy like Han Solo.  Anakin is not Han Solo.  He's not Luke, either, and neither is Obi-Wan.

Their dynamic, then, is the whole basis for the prequels.  If you view it through that prism, does your opinion change at all?

To me, the prequels were never meant to be carbon copies of the originals.  They had their own story to tell.  The originals were about a classic heroic journey.  The prequels were the far less explored villain's journey.  If there's a hero to root for in there, it's an equally tragic one.  And that hero is Obi-Wan, the one who never saw it coming, was blinded the entire way by a friendship that once established he never questioned.  Yes, he gets the big triumph at the end, but clearly he still loses.

Tellingly, whenever Anakin foreshadows his fall, Obi-Wan isn't present.  Those moments are reserved for Padme, the slaughtering of the Sand People, for instance.  It was Qui-Gon who understood everything about Anakin, from the start.  Yoda and the rest of the Jedi, including Obi-Wan, only considered the elements of the prophecy, good or bad.  Obi-Wan's imperfections, or perhaps his purity as a hero, rest in what he's missing, just as Anakin's journey depends on what he's missing, too.

Obi-Wan initially views Anakin as just another tag-along.  Qui-Gon saw far beyond that from the start.  Padme makes the observation in Clones that mentors have the ability to see the flaws in their pupils that the pupils otherwise overlook.  Qui-Gon questioned where Obi-Wan went with the flow.  He even became good friends with both Anakin and Padme, and not only didn't see their relationship develop, or that Anakin's dark side was slowly emerging.

The flaw in the whole Jedi philosophy was also something Obi-Wan unwittingly uttered, that "you're either with me or against me" is a Sith concept, but it's the Jedi who reject those among them who go against the regular order.

I'm not here to argue that Obi-Wan was basically an idiot, who didn't see what to others (especially the audience) might have seemed pretty obvious.  Every other Jedi, including Yoda, didn't see it coming either.  Something about Sith lore blocks Jedi awareness.  I'm here to say that Obi-Wan took certain things for granted, along with every other Jedi.  He was the quintessential Jedi, in fact.  And he thought Anakin was, too, or wanted to be.  And he considered Anakin to be his brother.

So he was betrayed on all accounts.  By the time he had to do something about it, he didn't hesitate to butcher Anakin.  This is easily one of the most shocking moments in the whole Star Wars saga, even if you know it's coming from the moment they clash for the final time in A New Hope.  Tellingly, of course, in that moment, Anakin describes their relationship in very different terms.  He describes it simply as mentor/pupil.  The worst thing about how Revenge ends is that Obi-Wan never figures out where he went wrong.  He believes for twenty years, even, that he was still right.  That's why he initially describes what happened to Luke's father as a betrayal.  Because for Obi-Wan, that's the only description possible.

And by that point, just before he dies, Obi-Wan has reduced the whole thing to the only thing that still makes sense to him, that it's not really about friendships at all, but about the Force.  The very thing he was focused on all those years ago when he dismissed the little boy he first met as just another straggler his mentor had picked up in their travels.

But, that's not what he really thinks.  He's still protecting himself.  He's more honest with Yoda, more honest with Luke.  The old Obi-Wan, which is to say the young Obi-Wan, really was far too focused on his studies and his wishful thinking and his best case scenarios to even consider such honest moments, to consider himself on par with Yoda, for instance, or to speak so honestly, to think so honestly.

When you think about the prequels like that, I think they become less about what they weren't and more of what they were, a character study in the Star Wars saga.  Two character studies.  Of a pair of brothers.  And a betrayal.

To the common assessment, the prequels were a mess, a vision George Lucas had that was flawed in too many ways.  For me, all of these elements explain everything far too well.  They're too calculated to be considered mistakes.  They were deliberate.  In their own way, they became, for me, at least as iconic in the whole saga as the first three films.  Even the execution is knowing, the so-called wooden acting.  There's a formality built into this vision of the old Republic, that without it an important piece of the puzzle is missing.  Qui-Gon has always been one of my favorite characters.  He's an anomaly in every way, and with good reason.

Obi-Wan and Anakin, both should have taken so much more from their fallen champion.  The fact that they didn't leads directly to that molten lava.

"You were my brother!"