More Star Wars

In celebration of my figuring out the Rogue One was not the second part of the sequel trilogy but a stand alone prelude to the original trilogy after 10 minutes of deep confusion (why do both feature brit-speaking young brunette leads?!? why do both have Death Stars?!?), I'm posting the last good Star War movies I've seen and one photo from the new stuff.

Because if you are going to give into nostalgia, you might as well do it right!






The first one is a true product of internet crowd-sourcing. This means that endless clips of parents forcing their kids to act out Star Wars are nestled between drag-queens and shots of R2-D2 @#$%ing a herpes-ridden vending machine. The whole production gets a John Waters vibe. Sheer creativity shoves against the familiarity of fandom until a type of Dadaist intoxication sets in.

Empire begins with a talking head from Lucasfilms giving their stamp of approval and so don't expect any references to STDs in this one. Yet the increased production values does have a benefit - I actually started to get caught up in the plot of the movie. There is enough of John Williams' score left in to tug at the old heart strings. There are also some great animated sequences that make me wish that a few more full-fledged artists were among the re-mixers.

The films act as document of just how much Star Wars merchandise has saturated North America, plenty of scenes recreated with action figures or halloween costumes. Those new Storm Troopers (Clone Troopers?) helmets are so bland they manage to encapsulate the blandness of the prequels in their very design.


Also

Leaked ‘The Last Jedi’ Footage Reveals Chewbacca Balding Since ‘The Force Awakens’


And, though here have been a rash of 'young yoda' art pieces lately, I think this one is most true to Reb's original vision.

I have vague recollections of muscled up Yodas from earlier years

For bedrock level nostalgia here is a TVO clip that has the end of Polka Dot Door, the beginning of a Dr Who and a station ID that mentions Sudbury.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt5g7q_tvo-polka-dot-door-outro-dr-who-intro_shortfilms

The clip was posted by 'retrontario' and the rest of their clips are worth browsing through.

Also:



By the end of the 80s all the best media came in the format of 'hacked' programs - Commander Rick 'hacking' a TVO nature doc to give us Prisoners of Gravity, the pirate signal of They Live trying to wake up people to the alien occupation, Max Headroom the rogue AI from 'twenty minutes into the future' that could only appeared on hacked devices.

Commander Rick banishment to a satellite was very similar to MST3K and Space Ghost, two shows that 'hacked' the media banality that was at there core by cutting-up and commenting on promotional interviews and old B-movies. Hodgson likened MST's setting to the idea of a pirate radio station broadcasting from space. The opening of Space Ghost was of a trippy sequence of tuning into a satellite signal being sent from some craggy moon.

At the heart of all this pirate hacking and commandeered satellites was the political reality that 8 years of Reagan had transformed American pop culture into a vast corporate wasteland, anything worthwhile would have to sneak its way in from the outer-edges.

Videodrome 1983 <Canadian production>
Max Headroom 1987 to 1988 <UK telefilm>
They Live 1988 <Studio B-move>
P.O.G 1989 to 1994 <TVO>
MST3k 1989 to 1996 <low-budget Minnesota television station>
SG:C2C 1996 to 2004 <first program of fledgling Comedy Channel>

In 1983 Videodrome was warning us that an American pirate signal was trying to pour sadism right into our brains through the TV. This warning went unheeded so by 1988 the Reagan Revolution was complete and now it was counter-cultural programming that had to sneak in through pirate broadcasts.

There is another Star War 'fan-edit' =- the 'revised' editions

https://swrevisited.wordpress.com/

The goal of these edits is to be "what the Special Editions should have been!" aka more cleaning-up of the special effects.

Empire Strikes Back has be released and here is the trailers



A complete list of changes can be found here: https://swrevisited.wordpress.com/esbr-facts/

As I have mentioned in other posts, the future of old SF is fan-edits, and it seems like plenty of CGI work went into this projects, and some scenes look nicer, but this completely the wrong way to do it.

Realism, continuity, canon are the great hobgoblins of the fan's mind. Fixing sfx on Stars Wars is just continuing Lucas' "special editions" mindset. I don't want versions where all the seams and wrinkles have been air-brushed out because I'll never believe star wars is real no matter how lifelike it gets and the spectacle is already good enough to suck me in. The limits of special effects, the gaffes, the errors, are where human elements re-emerge, we see an error and think "hey humans made this! thanks for making this!"

The zipper on the costume reminds us that 'fantasy' is not a CGI onslaught that forces you into its world, the zipper is a reminder that if you want 'fantasy' you'll have to meet the artists half-way.

The focus of spx or realism or canon is just Western culture's core materialism infecting area it does not properly belong. Materialism and its methodical ways are for science and the physical world. Making a 'fantasy encyclopedia' or applying a microscope to spx contains a category error (such errors make good art if knownly done). More bluntly corporate media products need cultural and economic research not quasi-science polishing.

Fantasy/SF/horror media can touch a basically religious spot in humans. The images and ideas resonate in a inner place that most of the secular world cannot. Yet we are so trapped in the default materialism of that secular world, we then mistakenly apply materialistic tools to that note of wonder. Then we are puzzled when those tools don't help.

The goal of "realism" in SF/Fantasy games and movies should only be a minor thing because it so utterly unachievable. 'Detailed' has little to do with realism, in any art 'realism' is more often captured by mood, a few telling details, a thin layer of research - all things that give the illusion of realism. The moment you give up on 'realism' as the goal you can see the wonder of illusion and the reality of the material world again.

I'm not against simulator-type games at all, there is a role for this. Historical wargaming and flight simulators can encourage and repay a materialist focus placed on them because they point directly back to the real world. Fantasy cannot. Zombie Apocalypses cannot. Space opera cannot. They are by-products. Only the real-world is dense enough to survive materialist methods.

I don't want to be harsh, people worked long and hard on these editions. Perhaps these 'revised editions' of Star Wars could be equated with working on some valued religious artifact, a combination of religious meditation and skill-training. But they are not acts of restorations where the marks of entropy are erased, their goal to fulfill some imagined sense of lack in the artifact and that is where I differ. The 'lack' in Star Wars they fix is defined in terms of continuity and spx gaps, there is a base sterility to this logic I resist.