PrinceOfNaboo and Simon Maxwell pointed out in the comments section to a previous post about a new video on starwars.com entitled “The Rise, Fall, and Redemption Of Anakin Skywalker.” Except only about a minute of the five minute video features “Anakin Skywalker.” The rest of it–four minutes!–features Eps IV-VI.
Really, Lucasfilm? Maybe Disney really does need to get up in their business.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these, but as you might have already noticed, much of the media on this week’s big news have taken the opportunity to bash the prequels and spread lies. Already I’ve chewed out some hack at Wired.com and let ‘em have it at the Wall Street Journal among other sites.
I’m not out trolling, this is stuff I read all of the time anyway. But what’s especially grating is that these media douches don’t realize those “lousy” prequels made a lot of money and they were widely praised when they were first released, especially AOTC and ROTS. If you see this sort of thing going on, call them on their b.s.. If you see something factually incorrect, set them straight. We’ve been bullied and pushed around too long.
starwars.com has a new game on its site, Galactic Spy. It’s kind of an I Spy/Where’s Waldo game where you look around Watto’s junk shop looking for various objects and characters. Go check it out.
H/T to maychild for alerting me to this post on IMDB’s board:
The problem with the haters and their elitist attitudes is they feel their taste is so refined, and above the rest of the masses, they can look down and call them “sheep” or “gushers”, or any derogatory term.
Truth is, their much like the Grinch. Wallowing away atop their mountain, despising all the Whos and their merriment. Meanwhile, they wallow alone, isolated in a prison of their own making, forged in contempt.
Ohhh, how they hate the prequel trilogy. Especially the Phantom Menace. The Menace is a film they can’t stand in the least. They hate the films. They hate the cartoons. They hate the t-shirts, video games, and great big electro whocarnio floons! And then! Oh, the toys! Oh, the toys! Toys! Toys! Toys! If there’s one thing they hate! All the TOYS! TOYS! TOYS! TOYS!
“I know just what to do!” The Grinchy Trolls laughed in their throats.
“I’ll make an alternate account, to mock and to gloat.”
And they chuckled, and clucked, “What a great grinchy trick!
With this alternate account, I’ll be such a prick!”
You’re all monsters, Internet Trolls. Your heart’s an empty hole.
Your brain is full of spiders. You’ve got garlic in your soul.
Internet Trolls! I wouldn’t touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole!
“Pooh-pooh to the PT fanboys!” they were grinchily humming.
“They’re finding out now that their Star Wars is sucking!
What happened then???
Every fanboy on IMDB, the tall and the small,
Was enjoying the prequels, not listening to the trolls at all!
The trolls hadn’t stopped The Phantom Menace from earning a billion dollars worldwide. It wasn’t such a terrible shame!
Somehow or other, it’s success came just the same!
You nauseate me, Internet Trolls, with a nauseous super “naus”!
You’re a crooked dirty jockey and you drive a crooked hoss.
Internet Trolls! Your posts are an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of rubbish imaginable mangled up in tangled up knots!
Recently, I finally worked up the courage to send a draft of a letter with which I was finally satisfied to Lucasfilm. Previous versions were too long and the one I ended up sending was much more pithy. I got a fairly quick reply. While I appreciate the response–they didn’t have to reply at all–the tone of this letter was more or less the same as a reply I’d received in 2007 to a letter expressing similar concerns.
After thinking about it and after some semi-private discussion on my LiveJournal, here are the conclusions I’ve reached about Lucasfilm, fandom, and the prequels:
1) Lucasfilm obeys the Prime Directive with intramural controversies, including pro vs. con on the prequels. It will not interfere in any way. It is not going to be proactive with retailers like ThinkGeek that slag the prequels even if those retailers have licensed exclusives and it is not going to twist Williams Sonoma’s arm to make some Darth Maul pancake molds. There’s no sense of moral obligation on its part to “do something” and talking about it is a waste of our time. Why?
2) It’s a business, folks. There are the creative guys who bring us the movies and t.v. shows and there are the business guys who handle all of the rest. When I mused on my LiveJournal why Lucasfilm is so passive about defending the prequels and doing more for them, someone pointed out the reason that should have been obvious…money. Star Wars is still a money-making dynamo even without a new live action film in six years or any prospects for more. As far as the bottom line is concerned, the Star Wars brand overall is strong. They don’t think prequel bashing is a problem because it hasn’t hurt The Brand.
If TPM succeeds in its 3D re-release, it will only serve to bolster this belief. If it doesn’t succeed, though, I don’t think they will say, “Wow, maybe letting people trash the movies all of these years wasn’t too helpful. How can we change that?” I think they will regard the prequels as poisonous to The Brand and we’ll pine for the good old days when we could at least find some clone action figures in the store. They know the first three Star Wars films are always a safe bet, they know little kids like Clone Wars. It’s easy to “shuffle” the franchise to favor whatever Lucasfilm thinks its customers want.
I don’t want to sound like the purveyor of gloom. I dearly hope all of the bluster we see on the internet and among fans is just that, and it has had no real effect on what most fans or moviegoers perceive about the prequels. Unless the 3D’s really terrible or the promotion’s lousy, there’s no reason to believe TPM won’t at least make enough in its run to justify re-releasing the other films in 3D. After all, if everybody really hated the prequels that much, why would anyone have tuned into Clone Wars?
3) There’s an ad on t.v. for a bank where all of the execs say one word, “money,” over and over. WE have to start talking that way ourselves if we want things to change in our favor. It may not have the same emotional appeal as a long heartfelt soliloquy about truth, justice, and art, but the folks who are making the decisions aren’t paid to care about those things. A licensee will produce something if it thinks people will buy it. Her Universe got off the ground not because Ashley Eckstein delivered a speech on sexism in fandom but because she did her own market research and successfully convinced the suits they were leaving money on the table by ignoring young/youthful women fans. I don’t have the time or means for anything that fancy, but the key is to remind people they are leaving money on the table by ignoring the prequels.
4) Prequel fans are at certain disadvantages that might make our responses seem weak and scattered or fuel a perception that we’re apathetic. Most of us love Star Wars enough that we don’t necessarily not buy something because it isn’t prequel-related. We also don’t have anything to hit back against; I don’t feel comfortable attacking Eps. IV-VI to prop up the prequels because I love those films too. I’m guessing most of you are the same way.
There’s a passion gap between many of us and the kind of people who haunt the Original Trilogy.net forum. Like them or not, they have a fire in their belly I really wish we had. Granted, all we want is a little respect while they want to be in charge of actual creative decisions, but who do you think gets pandered to more often even if they don’t get exactly what they want? Who is treated as though they have God on their side by the media? ThinkGeek wouldn’t even think of trying to pit trilogies against each other if it knew it would catch hell from scores of Star Wars fans.
I know what I’m about to say might be taken the wrong way, but I think another issue is many fans who got into Star Wars within the past 10-15 years are not singularly interested in Star Wars as a fandom. The loud crowd is largely around my age, though not exclusively so, and many of them are Star Wars fans (Eps IV-VI) only. They’ll fight their battles while many of these newer fans with multiple interests may find it easier to seek shelter in less contentious fandoms/interests than to push harder for acceptance.
I stumbled across a t-shirt site called We Love Fine, where there’s a decent collection of interesting Star Wars tee designs, including some prequel trilogy stuff. The steampunk and ’80s style tees are great!
One of the ongoing issues with official fandom is the way the prequels are often shoved into the back seat when it comes to promoting Star Wars or licensing Star Wars stuff. Yes, I’m aware there’s a small number of re-published stuff coming out around the time of TPM’s re-release. I have been reading the Qui-Gon comics mini series and just yesterday I noticed a cute but cracktastic LEGO retelling of TPM from Darth Maul’s point of view in the children’s book section at Wal-Mart. Maulsy seems to be picking up in popularity with new belts and wallets from licensee Rock Rebel, what with the re-release on the horizon and his possible posthumous involvement with Clone Wars. It’s a start.
Nevertheless, there’s still a long way to go based on a couple of recent promotions. The General Mills cereal box promotion for the Blu-Ray features all of the movies but the Pringles promotion, which assigns a character with a flavor, only focuses on characters from Eps IV-VI. I hate to be critical of the Star Wars partnership with the Stand Up To Cancer campaign. After all, it is a good cause and I did buy the Yoda t-shirt. But I noticed most of the stuff up for charity auction are, you guessed it, from the latter half of the saga (aside from the 2012 Passat). Despite the presences of Clone Wars’s Jaime King and Samuel L. Jackson, the Stand Up To Cancer promo video with several celebrities only re-enacted scenes from ANH, TESB, and ROTJ. It bugs me that those films are continuously treated as classics while the prequels remain afterthoughts. That has to stop.
Jorge Lacayo, whose post was run yesterday, now has a 45 minute video (in multiple parts) posted on YouTube. It’s nice to see positive minded fans being this passionate for a change!
