The clone episodes are definitely the standout ones, but overall the series is a lot better than the movie would lead one to believe. The movie may actually be the weakest story out of the entire series so far. Even the Jar Jar episodes at least felt like they were going somewhere most of the time.
Knowing there are Jar-Jar episodes make me not want to watch this all of a sudden.
— Alan
They’re actually not bad, although they certainly lack the edge of some of the other stories. The weird part is that in one of the two, Ahmed Best does the Jar Jar voice, and in the second one, it’s someone else who sounds absolutely nothing like Jar Jar. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but you’d think Lucas of all people would be able to dig up a soundalike.
Rumpy
44
Maybe I’m missing something, but not fantasy? What? Everyone tends to classify SW as fantasy instead of sci-fi, so I’m not getting that argument that it’s not fantasy.
He’s talking specifically about the Thrawn triology which was a more strait-up sci-fi story.
Rimbo
46
Not me. Not only did Episodes I-III fail for me, they caused me to re-evaluate my love of Episodes IV-VI. And in retrospect, I find myself thinking that Star Wars isn’t nearly as good of a movie as I once thought it was. Of the movie’s I’ve seen in the AFI’s Top 20 or so, it’s the weakest – and I’ve seen movies outside of the TOp 20 that I’ve realized are better than Star Wars was.
X-Wings, Vader, Han Solo and lightsabers are still cool, but they aren’t what they used to be.
Just what I said. The Thrawn Trilogy, along with the vast majority of Star Wars EU material, is not fantasy. It’s sci-fi with Star Wars elements thrown in. Which is fine for EU crap, but the films should remain epic fantasy.
Rumpy
48
Ahh, I see what you’re saying. I still don’t really understand the comparison though. I find that SW in general has always straddled a thin line between sci-fi and fantasy.
I don’t see how you’d come to that conclusion just based on the films. The only science fiction element in the entire series is the stupid midi-chlorian thing in the prequels. Otherwise it’s all swords and sorcery hosed down in Buck Rogers juice.
The problem is that you can’t really throw the usual rules for television production in with a Lucas project. He can actually afford to make the entire series without getting a pickup order first and know that somebody, somewhere will pay him for it eventually. Moreover, I’d be willing to bet that just based on the home video sales, he’d stand a decent chance of making his money back. That actually makes me MORE afraid for the series, rather than less - it means that he won’t be getting any audience feedback until a lot of episodes are done, which means that if the series doesn’t knock the ball out of the park early, it’s possible that it could be a long while before it changes enough to be good.
Star Wars was always the example I had pitched to me of when science fiction isn’t science fiction. Science fiction, theoretically, is a story about things that could plausibly happen. As time goes on and science gets bigger and badder and covers more ground, stuff that would have seemed theoretically plausible at the time (Warp Field Theory from Star Trek, for example) gets nudged out of the “possible” camp, so it’s a hard comparison to make historically, but Star Wars is an easy one to call, because even in the 70s, The Force was pretty much straight-up magic. The two genres also tend to cover different types of stories - Star Wars was basically an adaptation of any number of fantastic fables and stories that came before it. The focus on more legendary storytelling (as opposed to contemporary examination - for instance, a science fiction Star Wars might have featured some kind of tension between the apparently millions of fundamentally different humanoid creatures; something that the EU novels tried to introduce with Thrawn), coupled with the addition of magic leads most genre nerds to treat it as a fantasy story with the equivalent of a Total Conversion Mod applied to it.
Zylon
52
Star Wars is space opera.
Rumpy
53
Hmmm, Ok, I can buy that. I’ve never seen it as fantasy though. I mean, there’s tons of sci-fi out there that isn’t plausible that was written early on when Sci-fi was an early genre, and then there’s the kind of hard sci-fi that tends to make more sense with its science. I still consider both of them sci-fi. Maybe it’s in the way people were brought up differently? I never had much contact with fantasy, so myself, I don’t see much fantasy in Star Wars. It see it having far more sci-fi elements in it than fantasy. Lasers, robots, spaceships, planets, etc. I’ll give you The Force and the swords, but even the lightsabers are more like sci-fi in this. But like I said, maybe it’s just me and how I was brought up.
Star Wars has a wizard and a princess and it starts with Once Upon A Time … er sorry, A Long Long Time Ago. It’s explicitly evoking fantasy. The sci-fi part is essentially a skin on a fantasy framework.
The amazing thing is how many people say, “No way, Stars Wars is totally not like that fantasy crap!” and put their hands over their ears even after you point out the wizard and the princess and the magic and the swords and the fairy tale structure of the stories.
(The even more amazing thing is how many hardcore science fiction fans do the same thing when you tell them that Dune, which is where Star Wars stole the magic and the swords from, is at its heart a fantasy novel.)
Rimbo
55
When I read Dune, it struck me as being straight-up SF with a streak of religious credulity. I got the impression that Herbert found the “magic” to be something humans were capable of.
But generally the line between Fantasy/SF is hard to draw because predicting what’s plausible and what isn’t is a sucker’s bet. Take the golden era of the 1960s; AI seemed reasonable, but microcomputers and the modern laptop were fantastical. And any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And there’s some clear overlap; Star Wars has roots in fables, but also draws from SF serials and pulp stories – John Carter, Virginian, running around Mars in a loincloth, rescuing the beautiful red-skinned princess from the evil green lizardmen. Star Trek has plenty of that shit in it as well.
dermot
56
Swords that are basically made of energy don’t sound a bit fantastic to you?
To some extent I’ll grant that it can be hard to call whether a given work is science fiction or science fantasy but I think that what it comes down to is how important the science actually is to the story. Science is meaningless in Star Wars. You could literally replace every single facet of Star Wars with something from the swords and sorcery milieu without impacting the story much. You could probably even do it using the ‘find & replace’ feature in Word. Lightsabers become swords; laser guns become bows; X-Wings become dragons, TIE Fighters wyrms and the Death Star is just a really big castle, Darth Vader the evil vizier who sits on its throne.
There is stuff that features fantastic elements but still qualifies as science fiction because of the way that it treats those elements by which I mean that the work is examining how individual people or humanity as a whole would be impacted were those fantastic technologies to become reality or it’s using fantasy science to explore facets of contemporary society. ‘The Trigger Effect’ by Arthur C. Clarke comes to mind as an example of the former - someone invents a device that can render gunpowder ineffective and the rest of the novel explores the impact that such a discovery would have on the world. The works of Iain M. Banks also come to mind as an example of the latter.
Of course, you also have to grant that something is either science fiction or science fantasy and preclude the possibility that it straddles both.
Zylon
57
Dune is at its heart a transhumanism novel. And it barely had any smegging swords in it. Lots of daggers though.
As in some people are taught what science fiction is and some aren’t? I’m not really sure what this has to do with upbringing.
I never had much contact with fantasy, so myself, I don’t see much fantasy in Star Wars. It see it having far more sci-fi elements in it than fantasy. Lasers, robots, spaceships, planets, etc. I’ll give you The Force and the swords, but even the lightsabers are more like sci-fi in this. But like I said, maybe it’s just me and how I was brought up.
Lightsabers are magic swords. Nothing sci-fi about them, whatsoever. There is not a single thing in the Star Wars films (aside from the midi-chlorians) that attempts to explain itself in anything other than a “that’s just how it works” sense. The space opera trappings are in no way needed for the story to work, it’s just a setting for what is at heart a story that could easily be told with wizards, knights and dragons without losing any of what makes it what it is.
Zylon
59
It could also be told just as well with ninjas, cowboys, or pirates.
That’s genres for ya.
Rimbo
60
They’re not magic. They’re just highly advanced technology that we don’t yet understand. ;)
