Probably the ONE really fun thing George Lucas did with Star Wars

Was this:



And the two follow ups for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Although most people consider Empire the superior of the original film trilogy when it comes to the radio dramas Star Wars is the best and the quality would go down quite a bit from there. Return in particular suffers from the fact that it was made at a *much* later date than the other two and has almost no members of the movie cast represented. In the first two Mark Hamill provided the voice for Luke Skywalker and Anthony Daniels the voice for C-3PO and for Empire Billy Dee Williams reprised his role as Lando Calrissian. By the time Return rolled around neither Hamill nor Williams agreed to be involved and both roles were recast... and it just wasn't quite the same.

As someone who really, truly loves the old radio shows, discovering this when the Star Wars edition was remastered, packaged and sold back in the 1990's was a Godsend. The story actually comes off very well even when you can't see the visuals and it expands upon the events in the movie. Some of the extra stuff is padding but others of it deepen motivations and characterizations. For example, we get a scene where the data tapes are delivered to Princess Leia and we get to actually meet Leia's father, Bail Organa (long before Jimmy Smits played him in the prequels). We also get several scenes with Luke and his friend Biggs which give greater weight to Bigg's death later on.

And here's an interesting trivia fact -- Biggs had a greater role in the movie version of Star Wars as well but all of his scenes hit the cutting room floor (only one was later restored for the "Special Edition" release) and if you listen to John Williams' soundtrack for the movie, the music builds to a crescendo culminating in Biggs' death -- which was supposed to be a dramatic moment as Luke's friend, and his last tie to Tatooine, died. Even though the character ended up mostly excised from the movie the crescendo stayed in the score.

At any rate, the trilogy is, on the whole, delightful to listen to. For years I've used them on long driving trips to entertain myself but it's also fun to listen to after dark. Turn off the lights, stretch out on the couch, and let your imagination paint the scenes.

Droids

So I used to be a big Star Wars fan. Huge. But then George Lucas just stopped knowing when to stop and everything went to hell in a hand basket for me and I just... gave up.

Recently, I was reminded of the Ewoks animated series... and those live-action TV movies... and it brought home just how soon Lucas started circling the drain on some stuff.

While the Ewoks animated series was... not much to write home about, the OTHER animated offering from Lucas's world was actually not that bad... Droids.

Lucas actually got Anthony Daniels to voice C-3PO for the series and it had a pretty good hook at the time -- telling the adventures of C-3PO and R2-D2 before they ended up on Princess Leia's ship. In point of fact, the Droids series is actually FAR more believable an origin for 3PO and R2's friendship than the prequel movies were. Another interesting aspect of the series was that it was done in a serial or 'soap opera' format -- each episode carried over to the next -- continuing the action and plot developments of the previous episode.

Of course, some of this may be my nostalgia, but I honestly remember being quite fond of Droids and less fond of Ewoks and years down the road I could STILL remember at least part of the Droids theme song (the chorus of "In trouble again, in trouble again...") whereas I could remember nothing of the Ewoks theme.

It seems strange that Lucas, so eager usually to milk his creations for all they are worth, has never released the full series of Droids on DVD. Of course, due to my dislike of buying Star Wars stuff and thereby financially enabling Lucas's madness, I probably wouldn't actually BUY the DVD's if they did exist... but I'd put them on a Netflix list and give them a looksee out of memory's sake.

How George Lucas Ruined Star Wars

Yeah, yeah, you've heard it all before and seen it all before but here's the thing... I used to be a big Star Wars fan. In point of fact, if it hadn't been for Marvel's Star Wars comic books I probably wouldn't have gotten into comic books at all.

A lot of things went into my disillusionment... Lucas continually tinkering with the original trilogy (and by that I mean the three movies which were released in the late 1970's through the early 1980's) and re-releasing them onto DVD at a rate of about every year, expanding the universe of characters to beyond Star Trek levels and, most of all.... the prequel movies.

Gluh. The prequel movies!! I won't touch the issues most people talked about (the bad acting, the horrible characters, the stilted dialogue) instead, I'm going to focus on just a few ways that Lucas's inability to stop tinkering with his masterpiece ended up retroactively screwing up the originals... And really, the man CREATED this universe, how flippin' hard was it for him to NOT create these plot holes?!

Number One: Nobody knows Amidala's carrying twins. Here was a case where Lucas was actually trying so hard to keep to his original plot that he instead created an entirely different bit of stupidity. Darth Vader didn't know he had two kids. When watching the original trilogy it was easy to just assume that Anakin Skywalker left his love either before knowing she was pregnant or with her being in the early stages of pregnancy before the twins were discovered. Lucas just had to have Anakin around right up to practically the end of Amidala's pregnancy and the both of them refering to "our baby"... singular. WE in this day and age have had technologies for decades which would have picked up on the presence of twins and yet a far more advanced society with robots and laser weapons and interstellar lightspeed travel does NOT have this capability. Either that or Amidala is a poor mother who doesn't bother to get ANY pre-natal care. Either way you slice it, it's stupid.

Number Two: The droids. Just ignoring the stupidity of Anakin Skywalker building a protocol droid (seriously, he and his mother are practically slaves and he's going to build a protocol droid instead of something that could maybe help with the work?!), ignoring the huge, impossible to swallow, coincidence that R2-D2 and C-3PO would STILL be together after more than 18 years, There is the fact that Obi-Wan doesn't recognize them when he sees them with Luke in "A New Hope" (and dear God, I hate the fact that I have to call it 'A New Hope' just to make it clear which movie I'm talking about. I wish I could go back to just calling it "Star Wars"). Luke already thinks R2-D2 was stolen there was no need to Obi-Wan to say "I've never owned a droid like this". He could have said "No, it isn't mine but it does belong to a friend of mine", etc. but no, he doesn't know R2 or 3PO but he's got a pretty good idea where they came from.

Number Three: Leia remembered her mother. She told Luke that she didn't have very many memories of her real mother as the woman died when Leia was still very young. Yet we see Amidala die shortly after childbirth!

Number Four: THIS is the big one. This is the one that cheeses me off. Obi-Wan Kenobi knows Chewbacca. Now think about the scene in the Mos Eisley cantina.... No matter which way you slice it, Han Solo got played by Chewie. Even if we accept the huge, massive, choking coincidence that Obi-Wan manages to find the one bar where Chewie just HAPPENS to be right at the time he HAPPENS to be there it STILL doesn't mitigate the fact that Obi-Wan knows Chewie. So Obi-Wan tells them their plight and Chewie goes to Han and says what? Obviously, he didn't tell Han the TRUTH. So Chewie lies, or at best omits certain data in order to get Han to take the job. And if we DON'T accept that Obi-Wan running into Chewie was a coincidence -- if, as seems likely, he found some way of contacting him -- then that just adds to the betrayal since Chewie was therefore manipulating Han and luring him into the situation right from the start.

So way to go George Lucas. With three lousy prequel movies you managed to screw up three OTHER movies which were perfectly fine on their own.