The Reason why George Lucas needs to make episodes 7-8-9

See: Dark Empire.



The only practical villain I can see in a sequel trilogy is Palpatine, honestly. I mean, after the prequels, there isn't a single villain from any source that honestly compares well.

Although if you really wanted to radicalize things, you could have some sort of violent anarchist character who doesn't want anyone reuniting the galaxy and does his level best to keep the galaxy in endless war.

 

"Although if you really wanted to radicalize things, you could have some sort of violent anarchist character who doesn't want anyone reuniting the galaxy and does his level best to keep the galaxy in endless war."

Yeah, I thought of some character like that. Maybe even call him King Kayos?

But to what end would be his point of all the chaos. Palps had a plan. What would be his plan?

 

Maybe he's like this guy:


Agent Of Chaos

 

Yeah ok. Something like that.

 

Yeah, I have something of a dislike for the various Imperial admirals and so on trying to re-establish the Empire in the EU. The Empire's Sith leadership practically guaranteed that the Empire would never, truly, be about order in the way hardline dictatorships here on Earth are; the Sith, when you get down to it, ultimately promote chaos, bloodshed, and anarchy by the nature of their philosophy of making the dark side ascendant. The Dark Side does not grow stronger through order and peace; it grows stronger through warfare & bloodshed, and on a personal level, anger, greed, and other emotions of a negative nature. None of those have anything to do with order & stability.

So, a Sith Lord whose chief goal is simply spreading chaos and anarchy really is the logical end point of the Sith doctrine, IMO, as opposed to the mirror-image of the Jedi Palpatine was-trying to reach the same goals with excessive means.

 

There's various references around that suggest that GL did, in fact, have some input into Dark Empire, certainly he kept a close eye on it while it was being made & has been quoted as saying that he liked it.

It would be nice to think that some of his original ideas for a post-ROTJ saga made it in there, but one recent quote indicates otherwise:

"I've left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more features. There will definitely be no Episodes VII-IX. That's because there isn't any story. I mean, I never thought of anything. And now there have been novels about the events after Episode VI, which isn't at all what I would have done with it. The Star Wars story is really the tragedy of Darth Vader. That is the story. Once Vader dies, he doesn't come back to life, the Emperor doesn't get cloned and Luke doesn't get married..."

You never know, though, there might be material in Dark Empire that was taken from GL's notes.

 

I think that quote is more based in the fact that George ended the story in ROTJ; obviously if he hadn't, the Emperor would've been around for the sequel trilogy-presumably, anyway.

Plus George was the one who suggested using Palpatine; the writer's original plan was to bring back Darth Vader.

Which would've been the stupidest idea ever, honestly.

 

"Some men just want to watch the world burn."

I prefer the name Darth Wisosirius...

Darthboba, I'll agree that the post-RotJ EU admirals perhaps don't quite fit the understood-post-PT Sith philosophy, but they were very much in line with what we saw of the Empire in the OT. Whatever evil ends the Emperor might have had in mind, the Empire WAS a tightly-run fascist dictatorship.

Also, count me as someone who thinks the Sith have become WAY overdone in SW since 1999. The Sith have a very specific ideology, so it's silly that of all the Force-powered beings in the galaxy, those who turn away inevitably are drawn to this one order. I also prefer the pre-PT EU's much less homogeneous approach to the Jedi Order in general.

 

I'd say your listed complaints are more due to authors getting ahead of themselves with the Empire than anything else. Not to mention that it hasn't been 1998 for eleven years now.

I do agree with you about the newer EU limiting Forcer baddies to always being Sith Lords, but that's hardly a fault of the films, which is what I figure you're getting at. It's hardly the film's fault most EU authors have little inclination to widen Star Wars up. There's a few who do; most do not.

 

I don't care what year it is; as far as I'm concerned, Star Wars is a place where Greedo never got a chance to squeeze the trigger.

And besides, given all the changes that have been made over the years, there's no reason things couldn't be changed BACK.

To be perfectly honest, the reason I like the pre-PT EU is because it's basically (with a few exceptions) "The Continuing Adventures of Luke, Han, and Leia". And that's what Star Wars was and largely still is for me (and a lot of other people). The phrase "More Star Wars" will always be defined in my book to mean "More space battles and adventures with the OT cast". The OT is the core story; everything else is just a spin-off.

 

That's nice, and unfortunately there's not much real reason to keep talking to you about changing things if that's your stance. Toodles.

 

What I find most interesting about that quote is that he implies that he's refuting the stories that have come with the EU, not that he ended it, although he does say that he did end it, sort of. Effectively, he says, "that's not what I would have done with it at all." I like to think that he spat that out thinking, "Oh, come on, that's not what really happened!"

Based on numerous quotes that date as late as 1983, he did have a concept for post-ROTJ stories that weren't just spin to keep the fans happy, & earlier on it sounds like they were for something much different to "something, something, Luke, Leia & Han, New Republic, Chewie baby-sits the kids".

Episodes VII-IX did exist at one time, & they weren't going to be just about Luke, Leia, Han, Lando & Ackbar hanging around waiting for something like the Borg to attack with something more powerful or insidious than the Death Star to threaten Coruscant.

 

I think that this would be quite possible to make a new trilogy, just look at star trek or 007. Those are two of the longest running franchises in movie history, and as proven by their latest entries, they still offer great entertainment.

The idea that star wars would be milked too much by a sequel trilogy would be an ignorant, short-sighted idea. If Bond can get his groove on for Twenty-Two films and still be a badass, why can't star wars? Continuing the Skywalker legacy can work, what with todays CGI effects. It could easily be used to youngerize our old faithful OT Trio.

If it followed a star trek route though, this opens more possibilities. Complete reboots could be used to show the universe from a different perspective or era. Or, it could act as a Deep Space 9 or Voyager spinoff style, concurrent with the OT, but from a new band of heroes. This theory also has a better chance of avoiding continuity issues.

If done carefully, a sequel/ spinoff trilogy could work.

 

I don't know if GL will ever do anything else with things past ROTj, but if he leaves it in the hands of his kids, you can bet they will. And wow, will it be something to see how people react to that.

 

[image=http://bajan.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/rope-noose.jpg]

 

^

By the way, with all this talk of "reboots" lately, I just wanted to point out that the concept of "rebooting" being needed generally applies to things that are not working correctly... which does not apply to Star Wars.

 

I absolutely agree in the need for Lucas to complete the saga in episodes 7,8, & 9, adding more immortal characters to the SW legacy and reestablishing the Jedi Order as it's beacon. He was not left the saga to the imagination in the past, why would he leave the story in the darkness and unfinished? That's not like the great George Lucas.

- Luke

 

I don't know if GL will ever do anything else with things past ROTj, but if he leaves it in the hands of his kids, you can bet they will. And wow, will it be something to see how people react to that.

Oh, no telling. Some people will hate it, some will love it, but I think SW overall isn't viewed by pop-culture as it once was, so I don't think there will be a very large reaction one way or the other.

 

That's the saddest thing I've read about Star Wars in recent years - mainly because it hit home just how true that is. The relentless saturation bombing of the world with all things SW since 1997 has turned it into just another franchise, & even if GL was to announce that he was making his original episodes VII-IX, there would be just as many groans as cheers in response, if not more.

I'd like to see them, but would they be any good? I'd rather just read the original notes from the late 1970s-early 1980s than sit through some trilogy of bland soap actors sleepwalking through too much CGI imagery, in a story lazily chucked together & filled out with too many battles & nothing emotionally engaging whatsoever.
Sadly, I think that's what we'd end up with, & that's not a swipe against the PT. The PT did have a solid story at its heart. The Sequel Trilogy probably doesn't, & so it would contain all the worst aspects of the PT with none of the best.

 

I think I'm gonna have to disagree that SW is "just another franchise" today. Sure, it's a franchise, but seriously, how many movie franchises are still major deals 30+ years after release? The only other multi-film science-fiction saga from that timeframe that current projects are being made for is Alien, and the two AvP movies and the upcoming Alien prequel really aren't major news. Also, the Alien EU, despite having a good run in the 1990s with plenty of novels and comics, is more or less dead now.


Star Wars is unique in that it's retained it's appeal for one long time with alot of people.

 

^ Totally agree. It may seem like "just another franchise" at any given time, but if one takes a step back and looks at its history, its continued relevance, and its "staying power", it really does stand apart from the rest. The others (for the most part) all fade away sooner or later.

Not to sound too cheesy, but there really is something magic about Star Wars that enables it to keep gaining new fans while keeping all the old ones. And I say that is the case even knowing how the PT annoyed some older fans, and I also think that would be the case even without the new (somewhat kid-oriented) content (The Clone Wars) that is coming out now.

 

The OT continues to be relevant, in spite of the PT spitting on so much of what made it great. The PT itself has already largely faded away (if the prequels are brought up - TV character references or whatever - it's pretty much exclusively about how bad they were), and the only reason SW continues to have staying power beyond OT nostalgia is because there's an ongoing kids' cartoon. But I'll tell you, if Lucas had done a high-production-value cartoon about Luke, Han, and Leia (rather than cheapies about the droids and Ewoks) a few years after RotJ, it would have been magnitudes bigger than TCW.

I completely agree with Stryphe and Nub that the SEs and PT have diminished the franchise's overall standing. For two decades the name Star Wars stood for the best space adventure could hope to be. Now it only half stands for that. Given another few successes like this May, Trek will officially steal the space adventure crown.

 

I'm not disputing the success, staying power or potential of the SW franchise - just that it used to be much more than that.

At its height in the early 1980s, it was the only game in town - Trek was a cult thing, there was no LOTR or Harry Potter to rival it, only Indiana Jones came close - then, when GL pulled the plug, it went into hibernation & was absorbed into the collective unconscious of a generation.

Its re-emergence in the 1990s was as something cool, not just nerdy childhood garbage. Star Wars pop references were something new & fun in films & TV shows, digging out old figures was enough to make the most cynical of friends sigh wistfully over their old memories - & there was a new trilogy of films on the way that everyone vaguely remembered as having been promised. We were finally going to find out about the Jedi Knights & how Luke's father became Darth Vader. It wasn't just another franchise, it was your childhood being resurrected & everyone, not just the fans, were at least curious.

Now we've seen the new movies, some liked them & some didn't. But the franchise is still around, everywhere. Animated TV series, live action on the way, regular video game releases, books, comics, shopping bags, every single kind of toy. It's been like this for 12 years - nearly as long as it went away for the first time. It's been a concentrated effort by LFL to keep it going, not a desperate attempt to keep up with demand, & there hasn't been the chance for the world to breathe & allow SW to become a fond memory, & with that, almost mythical - the way it did the first time around.

The biggest drawcard of the prequels was that the trilogy would answer the biggest question everyone who had seen the OT had since 1983 - quite simply, what happened in Episodes I-III? TCW & the live action TV series can only answer the questions very few asked anyway, Eps VII-IX would most likely be in the same boat.

We're all fans here, obviously - but sadly, the truth is that the rest of the world couldn't care less about what's going on in that galaxy far, far away, other than as a quick distraction.

 

Lucas needs to make VII, VIII, IX if not for any other reason, then for:

It will make over a $billion domestically. And... he would (like he did with the prequel trilogy) destroy the authors of the books, comics, and games by taking his own illogical sense and twisting the known story for something completely dumb.

It would be great!

And... we'd get to see old Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher doing this for another decade. I'd pay money just to see if 60-year old Luke and Leia can actually fight like they do in the books.

 

I personally think it already has.