One last bit … I know who Lucas really is in his Star Wars films.

Girth Evader: "I have altered the film — pray I don't alter it any further."

Lardo Calorissian: "This film's getting worse all the time!"

Maybe he's right, but with a twist: Spaceballs would have been even funnier if they'd have made George Lucas himself the bad guy in the spirit of Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers series. 🙂

So from that perspective, Lucas did these weird self-parody or fan-fic things that aren't even funny.

Girth Evader: "Now I am the bastard!"

Bun Adobo: "Only a dark bastard of fan exploitation, Girth!"

Yeah, and then Keenan Ivory Wayans can do "I'm Gonna Git You Vader" …

"Why's that muthafukka always surrounded by white guys?"

🙂

I wonder whether it's a symptom of something else …

If you are out of new ideas, or people are so used to your old stuff that you think they don't want your new ideas, then it might be very tempting to think that you can continue to riff on something.

But written works and visual works aren't like Neal Peart getting up on stage and giving the local audience a little extra effort.

At some point, writers and film makers are just trying too damned hard, trying to be too sincere, trying to make this perfect thing that never was going to be perfect.

But life imitates art, and so now we have a literal political candidate in America who has answered the call of "I WANT A PONY" …

John McAfee has bailed out of the US Presidential race.

He has now joined the campaign of Vermin Supreme who, according to John McAfee, has "beyond a doubt the most profoundly simple and effective of anyone’s".

"It’s based on one principle — a free pony for every American. Now who can fucking argue with that?"

I can! Send my free pony now to the creative team at Disney! 🙂

Their "creative team" may as well have written "I WANT A PONY" for nearly every point on their lists, by which I mean an actual pony and not the dosh.

Well, there was some sort of ridiculous horse-riding scene in The Last Straw, and apparently an even more ridiculous one involving a cavalry charge over the surface of a Star Destroyer, while in high atmosphere, in The Fall of Skywalker.

Just goes to show that the Devil Mouse can easily screw up "I WANT A PONY" too.

What Lucas did was to show that he controlled the story to such a ludicrous extent that he could in fact apply "retroactive continuity" to story elements, essentially applying the same thing to the viewers who remember scenes and dialogue a certain way.

That's because Jabba the Lucas always maintained that films are never really finished – he's on the record saying this in the interviews for the 1997 remastered trilogy release. He basically said that films are never completed, they are merely released and can always be improved.

And, unfortunately, he has no problem living by that very philosophy and going back and screwing up his own continuity whenever he wants to.

It ceased to be a story for the viewers to re-interpret after the fact and became this sort of experience you'd have to live through again just to see what Lucas and company have fucked with this particular time.

Yeah, man. One of the best jokes from The Big Bang Theory involved the guys waiting to play STAR WARS on Blu-Ray – "hurry up and start the movie already, before George Lucas changes it again!".

"Actual ending" presumably means "hopelessly convoluted yet linear narrative doesn't shit itself after being rewritten upon the demands of focus groups".

But "Dinosaurs!" definitely means "I WANT A PONY" …

And so does "Complicated monsters". 🙂

But there's been a bigger problem with Star Wars for a long time now.

The way that Lucas took the original trilogy and ran it through so many production laundries so it could be "improved" with silly CGI edits and post-production sound changes wound up inverting the storytelling experience.

The customary and established way of telling stories; they're written, then they're published, and then perhaps there might be the publishing of a "more raw" version that includes stuff the editor took out, but the story mostly stays the same.

That way the readers of a story, or the viewers of a screenplay, get to play around with it in their minds while the story itself stays fixed.

Authors say this all the time, that once they're done with a story, they are well and truly done with a story, and it's now up to the people who enjoy it to "own" in the sense of imagining where it could go.

What Lucas did was to show that he controlled the story to such a ludicrous extent that he could in fact apply "retroactive continuity" to story elements, essentially applying the same thing to the viewers who remember scenes and dialogue a certain way.

It ceased to be a story for the viewers to re-interpret after the fact and became this sort of experience you'd have to live through again just to see what Lucas and company have fucked with this particular time.

And so if I have to come to Star Wars from the perspective that it's this changing blob of experience shit that means I haven't seen it "from a certain point of view" again, I may as well go find something that's actually new.

There's really a lot less of that actually new sort of thing than you'd hope for.

"Duuuude… check it out, man, watch what happens when I wave this blue glowy-stick thing around…. whoa, like, DUUUUUUDE…. wait, did I just cut Billy in half? DUUUUUUDE… gimme another toke…"

Lord, but I hate hippies.

"And we will make…. uhh… Yoda, burn up the jedi libraries. and the republic general will be like… you know, one of thos chicks with the colored hair that fight oppression and Nazis and stuff…. 'ere."