A Tribute To Star Wars

May the Fourth be with you! Ha ha!

The Star Wars movies are some of my all-time favourite films. Of course they are – I was born in 1976, and therefore Star Wars (I refuse to call it A New Hope), The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are some of the fundamental stories of my childhood. Not only the films either; they were the first movies that really pushed the merchandising side of film-making, and so I had a substantial collection of Star Wars toys – the first one I acquired, second hand, was one of the third-stringers, an Imperial officer who got Force choked by Darth Vader, but I moved up the ladder. Heck, I had an X-Wing Fighter. I had the Millennium Falcon!

My grandmother wasn’t impressed by all this. A lot of the characters in the trilogy are pretty much grotesque, and if I was ever ill for no apparent reason, Nan blamed Chewbacca and the others. Medically speaking this was unfair, although a couple of George Lucas’s decisions over the years have made me feel ill if that counts..

Nah, as a kid in the early eighties, it was the aliens, robots and hardware that made Star Wars cool. Nowadays it’s easy to appreciate other aspects of the films, like how Harrison Ford becomes a megastar before your very eyes (“I love you!” “I know.” is one of the coolest moments in sci-fi history), or how there seems to be a whole back-story to the whole thing (I have a friend who thinks the Expanded Universe is better than the films; I don’t altogether agree, but it’s a fair position to take), or how good the costume design in Return of the Jedi is, but back in the day it was all about comedy robots, cool spaceships, and light sabers.

That covers a lot of its appeal – it’s not a science fiction film, not in the strictest sense of the definition. Science fiction, as a genre, is about technology and scientific potentialities and their imagined impact on humans. That’s not really Star Wars. Sure it’s set in space, but that doesn’t really make it science fiction, and while the hardware is seriously cool, that’s pretty much all it is. No, Star Wars is a fantasy movie set in space, complete with naive farmhands, princesses, comedy servants, wizards, swords and magic. It’s got the trappings of sci-fi, and it owes a massive debt to early movie serials like the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon adaptations, but at its heart it’s a fantasy movie with spaceships, and I think that’s a key component of its success. Fantasy, at least in the fairy tale guise that Star Wars taps into, is a bit more accessible than full-on science fiction; I think that’s a big part of Doctor Who’s success as well.

Another reason for the success of Star Wars is the way in which it lends itself to fandom; George Lucas has given his approval to fan films like Troops (Cops with Stormtroopers, basically – you can also join the 501st Stormtrooper Legion if you want ), you can have long arguments about why Chewbacca doesn’t get a medal when he did just as much work as anyone else, and you can sing along to Livin’ La Vida Yoda if you’re feeling musical. Never under-estimate the importance of fandom fodder to the success of all things culturally geek.

A lot of this is rose-tinted glasses – there are aspects of the original trilogy that look pretty dated nowadays – but at the same time it’s hard to see many blockbusters coming along nowadays that have half the impact of Star Wars; they may make more money, but I can’t see people cosplaying Avatar or Titanic in thirty years time. Or maybe, and again this is rose-tinted glasses time, there was a moment in cinema, late seventies to mid-eighties, that saw the release of a bunch of blockbusters that caught the imagination of audiences; Star Wars, yes, but also the Indiana Jones films, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters… Star Wars, to me, just seems to be the king of that movement. Or maybe it’s just because I loved all those movies as a kid.

That’s the key, I think – Star Wars is for kids. And, of course, for adults who can accept it’s for kids and enjoy it because of that. And yet it’s also for the kids who once watched it on BBC or ITV every Christmas, and who had all the toys; for the kids who grew up and sold those toys because they grew out of them, even though they kick themselves because of what those toys are now worth to collectors; for the kids who, somewhere along the line, realised that, actually, there’s no point in growing up if you can’t pretend to have a light saber fight once in a while.

Because, for me and for a lot of Generation X, part of our imagination will always live in a galaxy far, far away.

Happy Star Wars Day 2012

May the Fourth be with you! Ha ha!

The Star Wars movies (originals, obviously) are some of my all-time favourite films. Of course they are – I’m 33, born in 1976, and therefore Star Wars (I refuse to call it A New Hope), The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are some of the fundamental stories of my childhood. Not only the films either; they were the first movies that really pushed the merchandising side of film-making, and so I had a substantial collection of Star Wars toys – the first one I acquired, second hand, was one of the third-stringers, an Imperial officer who got Force choked by Darth Vader, but I moved up the ladder. Heck, I had an X-Wing Fighter. I had the Millennium Falcon!

My grandmother wasn’t impressed by all this. A lot of the characters in the trilogy are pretty much grotesque, and if I was ever ill for no apparent reason, Nan blamed Chewbacca and the others. Medically speaking this was unfair, although the sequel trilogy made me feel sick a couple of times if that counts.

Nah, as a kid in the early eighties, it was the aliens, robots and hardware that made Star Wars cool. Nowadays it’s easy to appreciate other aspects of the films, like how Harrison Ford becomes a megastar before your very eyes (“I love you!” “I know.” is one of the coolest moments in sci-fi history), or how there seems to be a whole back-story to the whole thing (I have a friend who thinks the Expanded Universe is better than the films; I don’t altogether agree, but it’s a fair position to take), or how good the costume design in Return of the Jedi is, but back in the day it was all about comedy robots, cool spaceships, and light sabers.

That covers a lot of its appeal – it’s not a science fiction film, not in the strictest sense of the definition. Science fiction, as a genre, is about technology and scientific potentialities and their imagined impact on humans. That’s not really Star Wars. Sure it’s set in space, but that doesn’t really make it science fiction, and while the hardware is seriously cool, that’s pretty much all it is. No, Star Wars is a fantasy movie set in space, complete with naive farmhands, princesses, comedy servants, wizards, swords and magic. It’s got the trappings of sci-fi, and it owes a massive debt to early movie serials like the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon adaptations, but at its heart it’s a fantasy movie with spaceships, and I think that’s a key component of its success. Fantasy, at least in the fairy tale guise that Star Wars taps into, is a bit more accessible than full-on science fiction; I think that’s a big part of Doctor Who’s success as well.

Another reason for the success of Star Wars is the way in which it lends itself to fandom; George Lucas has given his approval to fan films like Troops (Cops with Stormtroopers, basically – you can also join the 501st Stormtrooper Legion if you want ), you can have long arguments about why Chewbacca doesn’t get a medal when he did just as much work as anyone else, and you can sing along to Livin’ La Vida Yoda if you’re feeling musical. Never under-estimate the importance of fandom fodder to the success of all things culturally geek.

A lot of this is rose-tinted glasses – there are aspects of the original trilogy that look pretty dated nowadays – but at the same time it’s hard to see many blockbusters coming along nowadays that have half the impact of Star Wars; they may make more money, but I can’t see people cosplaying Avatar or Titanic in thirty years time. Or maybe, and again this is rose-tinted glasses time, there was a moment in cinema, late seventies to mid-eighties, that saw the release of a bunch of blockbusters that caught the imagination of audiences; Star Wars, yes, but also the Indiana Jones films, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters… Star Wars, to me, just seems to be the king of that movement. Or maybe it’s just because I loved all those movies as a kid.

That’s the key, I think – Star Wars is for kids. And, of course, for adults who can accept it’s for kids and enjoy it because of that. And yet it’s also for the kids who once watched it on BBC or ITV every Christmas, and who had all the toys; for the kids who grew up and sold those toys because they grew out of them, even though they kick themselves because of what those toys are now worth to collectors; for the kids who, somewhere along the line, realised that, actually, there’s no point in growing up if you can’t pretend to have a light saber fight once in a while.

Because, for me and for a lot of Generation X, part of our imagination will always live in a galaxy far, far away.

(I originally posted this last year, but hey, if you can’t cannibalise your own blog, who can you cannibalise?)

Remaking the Remake (or, How would you redo a classic movie?)

We live in a culture of the remix and the remake, which is, frankly, a little annoying. I mean, does anyone think that the 3D Clash of the Titans is better than the original Harryhausen classic? Was there really any need to remake Psycho? Does anyone really want to see a new Ghostbusters without Bill Murray, or hear an X-Factor contestant murder a classic song about the agony of love?

However, there’s a part of me that’s attracted to the idea of remakes. I think it’s because they’re normally bad – are they bad because they’re fundamentally a bad idea, or are they bad because someone screwed up? Or is it simply a case of no-one having the single, brilliant idea that would make the remake stand on its own two feet and actually add something to the original? Getting Justin Bieber to cover ‘Hurt’ is a terrible idea. Getting Johnny Cash to cover it? Genius.

So I got thinking about this. Announce that you’re remaking, say, Star Wars, and the internet would break in two. But is there a way to make it work?

Well, the best I could come up with would be to make Leia the main character. She’s stuck on Tattooine, when she gets a message from Luke via R2-D2; he’s been caught up in the rebellion and now he’s being tortured and, by the way, you’re my long lost twin sister. The story plays out pretty much as before, only now Leia’s the one who becomes a Jedi and faces down Vader. Maybe give it all a steampunk aesthetic too. The bonus is that you bring the spark between Han and Leia into play almost immediately.

(Doing that effectively guts the most entertaining bits of The Empire Strikes Back, but there’s got to be a way around that…)

I don’t know. There’s so much that could go wrong. And some concepts sound more interesting on paper than they would in actuality. A remake of Back to the Future, where the ‘past’ of the remake is the ‘present’ of the original, therefore making it an eighties nostalgia-fest? Would this even work?

Then there are concepts that seem inextricably tied to a certain time and place. A British version of The West Wing would flounder because Britain lacks some of America’s optimism and would therefore result in a remake being far too cynical. Likewise, is it possible to imagine an American Doctor Who? That’s not to say it can’t be done, but the Doctor is, in many ways, a trickster figure, at odds with the prevailing corporate/military approach to much American TV science fiction. But it seems short-sighted to say that it couldn’t fundamentally be done… And we’ve had successful remakes of Sherlock Holmes (by moving it into the present day) and Battlestar Galactica (by acknowledging that we live in a post 9-11 world).

So, what remakes could you make a success?

Jedi Council: External Audit Report on HR Processes

In response to the rerelease of The Phantom Menace, I am exclusively publishing the following letter, found amid the ruins of the Galactic Senate building on Coruscant.

 

Dear sir,

We have recently completed our audit of events that lead to the domination of the galaxy under the yolk of the Empire, enforced by Darth Vader (formerly known as Anakin Skywalker). During the course of our deliberations, we found that…

No, wait. We can’t go on like this. Normally we would maintain a veneer of professionalism and neutrality, but alas this is now impossible. Sometimes we conduct an investigation where the findings are so atrocious that experienced and hardened auditors have been known to spontaneously combust at the stupidity of it all.

This is one of those cases.

Therefore, we have no choice but to hold one group responsible for the oppression of billions of innocent lives, countless civil rights violations and the destruction of whole planets.

That group is not the Galactic Empire, although they carried out these atrocities. They were, however, enabled and empowered in this by the Jedi Council.

Yes, we are aware that Jedi such as Luke Skywalker played a significant part in our liberation. We do not deny this, and would not wish to cast aspersions on his heroism. However, the majority of his predecessors were, in the words of our chief investigator, “A bunch of loon weasels”.

The following summarises our findings:

 

Age Discrimination

If a child is deemed “Unteachable”, it is not because he is too old. It is because you are bad teachers.

 

Child Protection

Separating a child from his parents permanently is only to be done in the most extreme cases. Buying a child from a scrap dealer is slave trading. Forbidding him from seeing his mother is kidnapping. Some would consider these activities to be cultic. We could not possibly comment, except to say that not one of our investigators has seen evidence of a ‘Force’ or tiny parasitic microbes that allow you to levitate rocks.

 

Duty of Care

If one of your staff approaches you, claiming prophetic visions of the death of his beloved, you have two options – have him committed (it’s quicker) or work with him to resolve the problem. Effectively saying “There there, don’t worry about it” is sure to end badly. Just because your HR department is sociopathic, doesn’t mean the rest of us should suffer the resulting decades of oppression.

 

Workplace Relationships

People fall in love. Get over it. Do not say “Purge your emotions as your girlfriend dies horribly.” This will get you lightsabered to death. Frankly, you would deserve it.

 

Human Rights

When the aggressors in a political situation use battle droids to achieve their aims, you are not maintaining the moral high ground by using an army of clones as your response. An interview with one of the survivors revealed that he really wanted to be a graphic designer; instead he was forced into becoming an Imperial Stormtrooper. He had the luxury of constantly shooting to miss his targets; how many more were forced to shoot anthropomorphic teddy bears in the back.

 

Honesty and Transparency

In the event that you learn personal information about a young person in your care, it is incumbent upon you, when appropriate, to share this information with your charge. Otherwise, he may find himself in a situation where hearing that, for instance, his father was in fact a dictatorial cyborg. This will not result in optimum performance; indeed, it could lead to decades of psychological issues. In some extreme cases, it has lead to people kissing siblings, although we are certain this is not the case here.

 

Staff Development

It has been a long time since helping a colleague face their fears involved inserting them into a tree.

 

Encouragement

“Do or do not, there is no try” is not encouraging. It would be quicker to simply shout “LOSER!”

 

The above are just a few of our findings; a full report will be made available in due course, suffice to say this is the worst example of institutional abuse and incompetence since we investigated Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It has since come to our attention that the Jedi Council is being reformed; upon hearing this news, our chief investigator had just one comment prior to handing in his notice:

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

 

Yours sincerely….

 

Muppets, Yoda, Nerd Rage and Adverts

I am once again experiencing Nerd Rage.

It started when I saw the latest Orange Wednesday advert. Some background if you’re not a regular cinema-goer – years ago, Orange started a series of adverts for their Orange Wednesday 2-for-1 cinema tickets initiative. The concept was that a recognisable-but-slightly-past-their-glory-days movies star would pitch a project to a panel of executives, who would then butcher it with their suggestions for Orange product placement. They were both advertising and a satire on advertising, and they were quite postmodern and funny. Roy Scheider, Patrick Swayze and well, Darth Vader all appeared in these, but the law of diminishing returns has kicked in, and now the opinion of my particular gang is that they peaked with Seagal.

However, recently they’ve been working less on actors and characters from the past, but tying in with current movie releases. And that’s where it gets grim.

See, it was sad to see them get involved with a kids film like Rio.

It was painful to see a part of Liam Neeson’s soul dying on a huge screen as he appeared in Orange’s spoof of The A-Team.

And now, most recently, the spark that lit a rage burning brighter and hotter than a thousand suns was Orange co-opting the Muppets.

I mean, it’s the Muppets. They’re awesome. The Muppets are a part of my childhood – they’re a part of everyone’s childhood, even if that’s technically impossible. They’re fun. They’re loveable. Their friends over on Sesame Street teach kids to read, for goodness sake. I have no rational argument for this, no ethically coherant reason for my anger, but seeing Kermit, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and Beaker being used to pimp text messages and mobile phones is just wrong. No, I can’t explain it; yes, it probably is hypocritical, so if it’s not wrong in absolute terms of good and evil, then at the very least it sucks.

And then, as if one mobile provider wasn’t doing enough to break my heart, Vodaphone released an advert featuring Yoda from Star Wars sitting in a restaurant and bantering about phones. This is where I really am hypocritical, because not only have Star Wars characters been in other adverts, but they also come from a series of movies that pretty much invented the concept of blockbuster marketing. Yoda has been an action figure, a back-pack and part of a duvet cover.

Now, a blog over at the site of the sci-fi magazine SFX puts forward an argument for characters like Yoda appearing in adverts, and again, I find it difficult to argue with it without revealing a Millennium Falcon-full of double standards. But I can’t help it, I saw that advert and shouted “No! No! No!” at the TV. Insane over-reaction in this age of war, famine and economic collapse, but there you go.

I don’t actually think the problem is with Jim Henson or Star Wars characters appearing in adverts. There’s a Volkswagon ad featuring a little boy dressed as Darth Vader and it’s great. No, I think the problem is with the individual characters used. See, in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Yoda had a particular role. He wasn’t a comedy character, who could therefore appear in a comedy advert. He wasn’t the Dark Lord of the Sith, who you’d expect to sell out to marketing executives. He was the wizard, the wise teacher, the magical one. The moment where Yoda levitates Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing Fighter is awesome, because it taps into fairy tales and myths and the wider Star Wars theme of the small and apparently insignificant being capable of great things. When Yoda dies in Return of the Jedi it’s a real tear-in-the-eye moment, and when he starts jumping around with a lightsaber in the prequel movies it’s disappointing because you want him to take down the bad guys in a cool and magical way. It’d be like watching Harry Potter shoot Voldemort in the head – shocking and yet somehow dull.

And the Muppets? Well, they were always a bit Let’s Do The Show Right Here! Now they get to do a show because they’ve accepted product placement, but it’s somehow wrong to see underdog Beaker with an advertising contract from a massive corporation.

I know, I know. I’ve already expanded far too much thought on this. There are better things to be concerned about. I know.

But it still sucks.