Saga The Great "Retcon" Debate

As I said, I think part of the emotional intensity comes from the idea that it was always intended to be the way it turned out. That just isn't the case. I don't think I can say it any simpler than that.

 

Definitely simpler than my tortured simile.

Though I do think the fact that some clues 'came unclued' is irksome by itself, let alone then being told (by GL or by other fans) that supposedly the story they were clues to never existed to begin with.

 

I'm afraid I have never seen LOST so....I have no reference to it. I can imagine what you were saying but..its interesting - given what darth ladnar said later, that that was also a 'made up on the fly' story.

I certainly found it an entertaining post (and I had almost extended an earlier post into a ramble about similarities with Dune - I might revisit that idea, with your post as inspiration ) and, if a post illicits a discussion (which yours has) and provokes thought (which yours has - in fact this latter is probably a pre-requisite for the former..) then it is a good post I think.

I think it is also that...there are themes that are distinct and don't gel particularly well together. there were certainly themes I took from the OT that simply, imo, cannot be recognised by means of an Ep1-6 telling (as I'm sure I might have mentioned in a post or two elsewhere )

 

Ah. I'll give examples, then:

Spoiler: Spoilers for Battlestar Galactica and LOST

Part of the driving thrust of BSG is that the characters come from a spacefaring human culture that has long been out of contact with Earth, which survives only as a legend of theirs. When their society is destroyed by a robot uprising, they find themselves on the run through the stars, and turn to those legends in order to look for the way to a new home on the long lost planet Earth.

The specific problem many people seem to have with BSG (that it resolved a lot of plot points with, literally, "God did it") is different than the problem that many have with the prequels (that they differed from what was expected, in this case) but there is a commonality in that in both series, there were bits of information that seemed to be clues that could allow the audience - if they were paying attention - to figure out what was going on before it was shown, or to be able to go 'ahhh, I see now' when the final piece put it all into place. In BSG, there is a particular scene where the characters find ruins on a distant planet, and inside there is a room which either displays or takes them to a field at night, in a Stonehenge-style circle of rocks. Each rock has a constellation of the Zodiac associated with it, which they realize must be related to the ancient symbols of their nation-states: Caprica = Capricorn, Tauron = Taurus, etc. There is also a nebula in view, which one character identifies as M8 - which is a real celestial object.

All of this was taken by fans as cluing them in to where the story was going. The characters referred to "M8" for example, which is a modern name for a specific object in the sky. So this must be in the future, if they use some of the same exact terms. How far in the future? Well, some of the Zodiacal constellations had stars slightly out of place... so you could use astronomy software to fast forward or rewind time, to see if those new positions correspond to the movement of those stars in comparison to the others, etc. And if they're using earthly terms and constellations, then it goes without saying that they're looking for our earth.

The series goes on, and at one point the view zooms out and shows us an earth that looks from space like it does now. They keep searching (it was only shown to the audience, not them), and as they travel there are lots of space scenes. The constellations could be plotted as they get closer to earth, so astute viewers thought they might be able to analyze the skies to find out if they were close. Sometimes they would find earthly constellations, and other times the skies were alien.

The characters find a planet called Earth, which is in ruins thanks to a nuclear holocaust thousands of years before. The skies above it are said to have matching visible constellations to Earth, according to a navigator character.

The show goes on, they leave Earth. Long story short, things go to hell, and at the last minute they escape by using their Faster Than Light drive to jump to coordinates one character heard in a vision. When they arrive, it's clearly our Earth. In the past. Like, 150,000 years ago. One of the characters turns out to be Mitochondrial Eve. They name this new planet 'Earth.' Turns out the other one wasn't our planet, just one from their fast that had that name, which they have now passed on. It's a kind of Golgafrincham Ending.

The stone circle scene was later said to be sort of a mistake and the star patterns in the space scenes were random or depended on which default was used to craft the imagery in the CG software they used. The clues didn't really lead anywhere. That mismatch can be irksome to viewers.

With Star Wars, the clues in the OT sometimes don't lead where you think they will in the PT. But they do lead to where you think they will in the 1980s version of the backstory. So it's two issues, I think: one, that the clues don't function as clues anymore, and two, that the version of the story they were clues to is then said to not ever have existed.

Perhaps in Star Wars those lines were never intended as 'clues' to begin with. But with sixteen years between films and a very interested fan population, that's how they worked.

As for LOST... there are a lot of examples of the same kind of thing. One character is said to be super-important but then disappears from the narrative and it's never really explained what made him so important or why. There are a series of numbers that come up numerous times. These are given a pretty cool explanation in some bonus material, but then are given one or two other explanations in the show, one of which is just 'Jacob (a sort of demigod who oversees the Island where the characters are stuck) just liked numbers.' There is a scientific group that studied the island in the 70s-90s, and there are snippets of scientific jargon sometimes used. So fans speculated on those kind of terms... but much of the weird stuff that happened instead ended up being explained as magical powers and whims of two demigod characters, Jacob and an evil nemesis. The whole story, which seemed to have interesting shades of gray and characters who did bad things redeeming themselves alongside 'good' characters with major flaws, basically came down to 'good and evil are the two sides, everyone has to pick one.'

 

Oh, absolutely. In some cases it can spoil the experience if you're too aware of how a film came together early on, but by the time I got particularly interested in the development of SW I'd seen all the films dozens of times anyway. The relative simplicity and highly derivative nature of the SW Saga in story terms, as well as its being familiar to so many people makes it the perfect 'textbook' example of how a fantasy saga can be created.

As has already been mentioned, GL has been considerably more open and frank about these matters in the last few years, and the Rinzler books have been a far more in-depth look at the films than ever came before. Hopefully Rinzler (or someone similar) will get a chance to do TPM & AOTC in the same way (Rinzler's already done ROTS - the book tends to be somewhat forgotten or overlooked, but it's just as intensive).

 

I'm sorry, but this has too much presumption to be taken seriously...

 

That's fair enough. It seems to me, though, that new scenes are often less jarring than changes to existing scenes. I remember that I used to watch TPM on VHS and when I got the 2004 DVD, I noticed the "new" scene with Qui-Gon and Anakin on the landing platform. It was jarring for a time or two, but after that it was pretty easy to accept. Whereas the change from the TPM puppet to CGI Yoda still catches me off-guard (even though I think CGI Yoda looks better given the hideousness of the puppet).

To be honest, I kind of…ignore what Lucas says about the plan for the Saga because I think it's likely that he's changed his mind so much that it's possible that everything he said has been true over the years. I think it's possible, for example, that very early on in the process -- say, when he decided to title ESB Episode V -- that he might have considered making the saga about Vader. But he probably changed his mind and then did so again years later. I think that's just what happens when you've been with the series for as long as Lucas has -- basically over 30 years.

I also suspect (though this is just my impression, not really basing this on any facts) that part of it has to do with marketing the Saga and the films. Which is why I'm happy to read what Lucas says about the Saga but I don't give it too much credence when forming my opinions of the films. For me, it's what's actually filmed and released that matters (so I basically include only the films and the deleted scenes).

I'd say that's true but, again, it's true no matter which episode you start with. Watching the OT before the PT leaves you with baggage. Watching the PT before the OT leaves you with baggage. I don't think either way is necessarily wrong. I happen to like the PT before OT, personally, because I think the OT follows a very classic story telling scheme (that's been very well copied by popular culture) that is much more predictable. Even the "I am your father" isn't necessarily as unexpected as it once was. Whereas I think starting with the PT enhances the OT (particularly Luke's story) in that it shows a contrast and makes the possibility of failure that much more real, given the depths to which we see Anakin sink. You don't have to agree, of course, but I think it's also a mistake to think that viewing the OT first will necessarily leave someone with the same impressions of the film you had. ANH, for example, has become very deeply embedded in popular media and even the political/social state of the world means that people are going to get different things out of it.

In the same way, I don't think that people are wrong if they want to start watching Peter Jackson's Hobbit films before they see LOTR. Or if people would prefer just to watch the Hobbit or LOTR alone.

I understand what you mean, though -- of course people are going to get different impressions of scenes depending on what they start with because they're starting with different (and varying amounts) of information.

What grinds my gears isn't that people came away from the OT with different impressions than what happened in the PT. I think that's pretty normal. It's that some people try to delegitimize the PT because it altered how the perceived the story. Well…so did ESB. After watching ESB, the entirety of ANH is thrown into a different light, is it not? And ESB is not considered less of Star Wars because of this. I don't think it's wrong that fans saw implications in the OT and didn't like the way the PT turned out. But I do think it's problematic when people insist that the PT "doesn't fit" (objectively, not subjectively) with the OT because it didn't play out the way they thought it would.

In regards to Lucas' behavior, I can't speak for the man, obviously, but it seems to me that Star Wars has undergone so many revisions in his mind that he might very well have planned something out at one time or another. For example, I do believe that at one point he had a 9-part (or 12 part) Saga planned. And I do think he may have considered making Anakin/Vader the main character of the Saga early on (especially around when ROTJ was released) and I do think he may have intended to stop once the PT was completed. I think he just changes his mind quite often because he's always bouncing ideas. Don't have any real evidence for that, granted, but it is an impression I get.

I don't expect everyone who watches the PT to include it into their personal canon. For example, I don't include any of the cartoons or EU (not because I think they're bad, but because I don't really get anything out of them). Where I find dismissal becomes a bit of an issue, though, is when there's this notion that some forms of Star Wars are better than others and it becomes a contest to say "well, my Star Wars is better than yours." I mean, ANH might have been the first Star Wars product to be released (aside from the novelization) but I don't think it's fair to declare it the be-all-end-all to what Star Wars is. And I adore the film.