Tag: Star Wars

Long, Long Ago, In a Franchise Far, Far Away

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In the late 1970s a movie studio green lit a modest science fiction/fantasy film called Star Wars that made so much money that the studio and the creative team that owned the rights to it made billions of dollars from sequels, toys and every other monetizing scheme imaginable.

And why did all this happen?  Well, accidentally or on purpose the makers of that original movie tapped into the primal desire of young men (and it was almost exclusively boys and young men) to watch an exciting updating of the young apprentice’s journey to becoming a hero.  Whether it’s young Arthur pulling the sword from the stone or the Marine recruit proving himself on the battlefield of Iwo Jima or the hot shot pilot in a Top Gun movie, every boy (and man) enjoys the visceral experience of seeing the hero prove himself in combat and if he’s lucky enough win the heart of the princess (or in less monarchical times, some pretty girl in general).

And 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm rode that male archetypal fantasy to fame and fortune for almost forty years.  But in 2015 Lucasfilm (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney) launched the seventh film in the Star Wars franchise, “The Force Awakens” and drove a stake right through the heart of that golden goose.  With Kathleen Kennedy producing and J. J. Abrams directing all of that male-oriented story-telling was jettisoned and replaced with “girl-power.”  Kathleen Kennedy gleefully proclaimed that “The Force is estrogen.”  Well, “The Force Awakens” made billions.  Of course, it would have made billions even if it was just an empty screen for two hours.  That’s how much good will had been built up over the course of decades for the franchise.  But the following two films and the various spin-offs like the recent television series “The Acolyte” have completely dried up those wells of enthusiasm that had been produced previously.  The last couple of movies have lost money, in fact hundreds of millions of dollars.  And now the folks at Disney have cancelled a number of Star Wars productions and they’re trying to figure out how to fix their dying franchise.

Well Bob Iger, I’ve got an idea.  First off fire Kathleen Kennedy and all the people who decided to create the monstrosities that caused all this damage.  In fact, don’t just fire them but publicly abuse them verbally and force them to apologize for their heinous sins.  Then make a short trailer video for the next film.

It will consist of all the most egregious scenes from all of the horrible movies you released since 2015 in short snippets in a nightmare montage.  Then we switch to Han Solo in bed waking up from a nightmare and expressing relief that the whole thing was a bad dream.  He then gets up and joins his son, wife and brother-in-law at breakfast and he tells them some of the details of his nightmare and they all have a big laugh at how ridiculous it all sounds.

Then you get some good writers to reread the Arthurian legends and the pulp science fiction stories from the 1930s and you start making money again.

Dah Duh, Dah Dah Dah Daaah, Duh

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2016 was the Star Wars election where a plucky band of rebels blew up the Hillary Death Star and sent Barack Obama careening into oblivion, or was it Jeb Bush?  2020 was the Empire Strikes Back Election.  The rotting corpse of Emperor Bidentine was installed on the throne and the rebels were battered and scattered.  Now here we are for Return of the Trumpi.  To torture this metaphor a little further I’m not sure if Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are annoying enough to be Princess Leia and Yoda.  But at least I’m sure that Chris Christie is Jabba the Hut.

Alright, enough of that.

As a reviled civic nationalist, I have been fighting a rear-guard action against the string of successful predictions of the dissident right for something like twenty years.  They’ve been right about the Bushes and right about the Republicans in general and now we’ll find out if they’re right about the finality of, “We’re not going to vote our way out of this.”  What we have in front of us is the acid test.  Joe Biden has created the perfect storm to force the populace to vote for the Republicans.  If he manages to win the 2024 election then nothing remains to dispute the truth of, “We’re not going to vote our way out of this.”

Granted, I’m already pretty sure it’s true.  But I’ve been tempted back into the game by just how awful a mess Biden has made of the country.  It’s becoming harder and harder to see the America as it was just a few short years ago.  There’s not even the pretense that this isn’t the trajectory they mean to for us to be on.  It’s just homeless encampments, unchecked urban violence and rust belt poverty as far as the eye can see.

It’s hard for me to see how anyone who isn’t either a welfare recipient or a true believer could look at what is happening to America and not say, “enough.”  So that’s why I still have any lingering doubts about the finality of the Left’s victory.  I desperately want to believe that even leftists who strive for all the progressive platitudes but live in the real world wouldn’t be horrified by the collapse of the beautiful world they once lived in and want someone to fix the zombie apocalypse that has unfolded before our eyes.  Even if that someone is Donald Trump, the very devil himself.

So, here we go again.  Another countdown to the “most important election in our lives,” another round of pathetic headlines by the New York Times and the Washington Post assuring us that Joe Biden, notwithstanding the fact that he can’t count past three, is the greatest president since Harriet Tubman and possibly a living saint.  And that his only begotten son Hunter is completely above suspicion and, by the way, possibly a good choice for president in 2028.  Oh, the pain.

Well, the only thing left for me to do is figure out who will be the Ewoks.  Maybe we are.  At this point I feel pathetic enough to fit the part.

Vox Day Has a Good Link on the Star Wars Debacle

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So, it seems Disney has realized that Kathleen Kennedy drove the Star Wars franchise into the ground by turning a boys’ adventure fantasy into a girl empowerment snoozefest.  And according to the source quoted nobody is willing to take over from her because the risk is too great.  http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/06/will-no-one-rid-disney-of-this.html .

Oh, this is too much!  Can schadenfreude cause a stroke?  I laughed so hard I think I burst an aneurysm in my brain.  When you add up the ESPN, Star Wars and the Roseanne debacles SJWs must have cost Disney at least several billion dollars in lost revenue.  Can you imagine the heat that Iger must be feeling?  Oh, it’s marvelous.  And with the ninth movie of the Star Wars saga in production already and J.J. Abrams refusing to take more than directorial control over that pile of risk I wouldn’t be surprised if the House of Disney doesn’t have a major shake-up on the horizon.  It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of progressives.

Read the whole thing including the info at the link and the comments at Vox Popoli, they’re hysterical.  It’s like a textbook case of feminism running a male based activity straight into the ditch.  Oh, my poor ribs, they ache.

Let’s review, Disney pays Lucas umpty-ump billions of dollars for a franchise that is basically a boomer/millennial male-bonding experience and they let a bitter feminist turn it into young Rosie O’Donnell with a light saber meets the First Wives’ Club.  With apologies to Count Rugen, I think that’s the worst thing I ever heard.  Is it possible that Disney is purposefully bankrupting itself to help tank the economy to spite Trump?  It seems plausible.  I mean no one could be this stupid right?

Full disclosure, I’m not the target audience for any of these movies.  I thought the first Star Wars movie was great fun when I saw it on the big screen back in the seventies.  But the second one was kind of disjointed and not as much fun.  The third one was a hot mess.  I mean, ewoks?  After that I was glad that it seemed to be over.  The newer editions are by most accounts terrible and I couldn’t imagine wasting time on them.  But I brought my grandsons to see the seventh one and I was amazed at how derivative it was from the first movie and how unpleasant it turned out.  Now, I’m far from disappointed that the series looks to be going down for the count.  What someone should do is start a new series based on an interesting and fun sci-fi or fantasy series that will draw kids and their parents in.  Hell, they could update the Lensman series and they’d get more mileage out of that than they’ve managed from Lucas’ anemic vision.  The same can be said for the Marvel and DC cinema series.  They’ve milked those characters and story arcs so strenuously that there’s nothing left but watery skim.

So, read the article and get a good laugh.  But honestly, we’re going to need to let these movie studios go broke.  They’re too stupid to live.

John Nolte at Breitbart Reviews the Box Office Performance of Solo and Adds a Little Snark

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How the mighty have fallen.  When the big reveal came in the Last Jedi and we found out that the Force is just estrogen for a lot of fans it must have felt like that scene in Christmas Story where Ralphie is feverishly decoding a secret message and finds out the the secret is a commercial for Ovaltine.  Screw them.

 

Let the Schadenfreude flow.  Embrace the Dark Side of the Force which must therefore be testosterone!  Who knew?

 

http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2018/06/02/box-office-solo-officially-disaster-media-cover-why/

A Few Thoughts About Space Opera

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After finishing up my review of Galaxy’s Edge – Galactic Outlaws, it occurred to me that there was more to say about the category of Space Opera.  Some might say that I was a little unfair to social justice fiction fans.  After all there must be a significant audience of fans with blue hair and cats who really enjoy girl power super heroes and their adventures in space.  So, to say that these are automatically bad just because I heartily dislike them might seem arbitrary and unfair.  It might seem that way but it isn’t.  And that’s because I am the final arbiter of good and bad in science fiction.  I earned this coveted status by living long enough to see everything in the world.  So, once again, all Star Wars movies after Return of the Jedi (and even some parts of them before that point) are irredeemably bad and should be cast into the outer darkness where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  And that lines us up for me to proclaim what does make a good space opera.  What follows is:

“photog’s RULE FOR WHAT MAKES GOOD SPACE OPERA” (patent pending).

It needs to appeal to the sense of wonder of the twelve-year-old boy in you.  Now mind you, it doesn’t have to only do that.  It can also be a brilliant philosophical treatise on the dualistic nature of the universe or a psychological study of the impact of technology on the human race, or even a deathless love story written across the stars of the galaxy.  But if it fails to inspire the twelve-year-old boy in you it’s not space opera.  It may be science fiction or anything else but it isn’t space opera.  And this isn’t even an exclusive precinct of science fiction.  Any adventure story has to satisfy that same basic requirement.  Take the literature of the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century.  A quintessential example that comes to mind is Treasure Island.  Here is a story that was tailor made for the sense of wonder of a twelve-year-old boy.  It has all the earmarks of the tale of wonder.  The boy who loses his father, the quest for riches, exotic locales, colorful and dangerous opponents, the revelation of secret knowledge, the coming of age experience of the world and the people in it.  An adventure story is a story for a boy that kindles his interest in the world around him.  It leads him to think there is more to life than school and chores.  It inspires him to strike out on his own and find his place in the world.

Now I can just hear the modern women and girly men screeching, “Girls want adventure too!”  To which I reply “Stop screeching, you’re hurting my ears.”  But also, I would say that what girls want is neither here nor there.  Boys need the adventure story because it fits their brains.  Girls have been told that they want adventure stories so they want them in order not to get left out in the modern #metoo world that they live in.  And in fact, I don’t really care if there are adventure stories for girls.  More power to them, I guess.  What I do mind is that for the sake of inclusiveness they are ruining all the adventure stories that are coming out of Hollywood.  And that is why I look for good old (and new) space opera and other adventure stories for my grandsons (and for me).

American Greatness Post for Today – Feminism Ruined the Last Jedi

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The pseudonymous Wayne Isaac has reviewed “The Last Jedi.” Since I brought my grandsons to see “The Force Awakens” I knew I wouldn’t be going to this picture. Suffice it to say that it’s worse than I feared. It turns out the “Force” is actually estrogen and that explains why Jedi Knights are so screwed up. They’re plugged into the wrong power source. Or rather they’re just not equipped to be heroes. Who knew? We’ll have to let Alexander the Great and George Washington know. Boy will they ever feel foolish. Anyway enjoy.

Feminism Ruined “The Last Jedi”