Sat Apr 26, 2014 9:02 pm
I'm with you 100%, I've never understood the people who complain when they don't even try to squeeze 80 years of backstory into a 2 hour comic book movie and these angry Star Wars fans are even worse. It's gonna be hard enough to make satisfying Chapters 7-8-9 that are consistent with the original trilogy, let alone the prequels. Trying to factor in Luke having a family with Spiderman's girlfriend and all of the other goofy stuff that happens in the EU while staying true to the existing 6 movies would be impossible.
When it comes to over-explanation, the real culprit is the video games. As I understand, until now the video games, cartoons, comic books were all considered the same level of canon. Out of necessity, the video games would have mechanics like "Force blocking squids" or "Cortosis-weave Battle Armor" that light sabers can't block, to keep the player from having too easy a time. That's not a problem if you can say "It's only a video game!" but when Kyle Katarn shows up in your book, people wonder why he left his morph ball, super missiles and magic squid at home. Thus, explanations.
And people want to do the stuff they saw in the movies, so they all need rules. Lightsaber combat gets broken down into six sets of animation, and pretty soon we've got "The Forms", turning everything anyone ever did with a lightsaber into an established martial art. Luke refusing to fight Vader was a technique. Vader's Force Choke is now a specific power that all Dark Jedi have, and not just Darth Vader being a really bad guy. You want to fly an X-Wing, so they make games where X-Wings are really the Super Mario of the starfighter universe, hardly a snubfighter at all. It categorizes everything and cheapens it so you can experience it for yourself in a game. Then because it's the same level of canon as comic books or whatever else, it cheapens it for them too.
Not that I hate the Expanded Universe or anything, I loved the Rogue Squadron series and the way they looked more at the logistics and psychology of fighter pilots in a universe like the one we saw in Star Wars. But they weren't really Star Wars novels, they were War novels. The original trilogy never stopped to worry about bacta supply lines any more than King Arthur stopped to worry about trenchfoot, and that's the way it oughta be.
You brought up one of the worst parts of the prequels, Qui Gonn doing the blood test on Anakin in Episode 1, and I think the perfect counterpoint to that scene is in Episode IV, when Darth Vader is chasing Luke down the trench and he says "The Force is strong with this one". Vader's not Vegeta scouting power levels, Luke's not Neo hacking the Matrix, there's no "I've never seen a pilot this good!", it's just this natural thing he can feel, like faith or love. It tells us something about Luke in a subtle way and we can read into it whatever want, no science required.
What I'm trying to say, is that I hope they're tearing down the Expanded Universe continuity so that they have creative freedom to tell a Star Wars kind of story without having to make a million wink and nods to 40 years worth of back material, and not so they have creative freedom to create their own Mary Jane and their own World Devastator, Sun Crusher, Galaxy Bomb arms race of stupidity. If they're gonna do that, they might as well stick with what's already been written and rob the nerds for all they're worth.
It is kinda sad though, 'cause they cloned the Emperor like 6 times in the Expanded Universe and it'd be hilarious to see him be reborn and die twice in each new movie.
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