CT What do you LIKE about the originals

The worn, dirty, lived-in look of the sets.

 

Sexy Carrie Fisher/Leia in ESB and ROTJ...

And many other things.

Above everything, Cloud City duel sequence in ESB, especially the first part in the freezing chamber. Just breathtaking. One of the best movie sequence I can think of.

 

For me I would have to go the Emperor at the time he was such a mysterious character. I always wondered what happened that allowed him to take over and corrupt Anakin.

 

I watched ANH last night and really enjoyed the grittiness of it. The starved, bare bones feel to the whole thing.

 

Anything and everything. Nothing will taint my love for the Original Unaltered Theatrical Trilogy - even if I have to buy fan-made restorations opposed to those awful Special Editions.

Ever since 1997, Star Wars started to lose it's appeal - but in my heart it will mean a happier childhood, Kenner/Palitoy Christmases and a mass nostalgia trip of why it was soooooo magical, mentally perfect and why nothing ever came close to that again!

Everybody can say the Star Destroyer opening shot or Vader's introduction as he strides aboard the Tantive IV - but even the simple things like the door of Tantive IV sparking along with those sounds as it explodes is still mesmerizing!

The score, the design, props, sets, drama, the score, the sound design, the visual and special effects, the score (did I mention John Williams' score already?).

 

Um, everything?

The OT is completely enjoyable from beginning to end, with no cringe-worthy moments at all. I love the prequels too, but each movie has at least one moment where I groan and say "Ugh, really George?"

 

"Scruffy looking nerf herder" I've seen said to be cringe-worthy, among other things.

 

That dog in your avatar is amazing!

 

I liked the music and the original suggested scope of the thing.

 

The siblings pashing always makes me shuffle in my seat a bit too...

 

I like ANH and ESB, parts of RotJ.

 

I like the absence of the word "Sith".

 

The story.

 

More creative designs, besides the Venator Destroyer.
It feels more important than the PT, as the PT felt staged and it didn't matter ultimately who won.

 

I always feel like the viewers connection to the characters is so much stronger in the OT. It almost feels like like the viewer is actually a part of the story, a part of the journey. Their emotions, arguments, and problems just feel so more...real than the PT I guess. Not that I hate the PT, I thoroughly enjoyed many moments of them, but when viewing the PT, it feels like so much focus was put into making the perfect CGI worlds and sets and characters that the viewer was left as an outsider looking in.

It's the imperfect brilliance of the OT that consistently draws me to them time and time again, and it's what I like most about the originals.

 

I love everything about the OT. When I think back to my childhood, the original Star Wars films always come to mind (along with Transformers and Ninja Turtles of course). But I always remember not being able to get enough of Star Wars. My friends and I would reenact the lightsaber duels on the playground, and we had a ton of toys. Everything about the movies though, the music, the sounds, the characters are all so wonderful and unique, that I can't help but love them!

 

The practical effects are amazing. It's so cool seeing how much they were able to accomplish without modern CGI. Not that I don't think the CGI takes its own degree of work and talent, too.

 

One thing that still holds true and still a great addition is the ORIGINAL duel between Obi-Wan and Vader. Nothing like it had been done before and is still my favourite.

One former master and his former apprentice. Both old men (none of that age difference like the PT - they were the same age in the initial concept and story until TPM), both toying with each other, it didn't seem massively staged and no dancing/overly choreographed Jedi like the PT.

 

"A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil"

"When I left you I was but the learner. Now I am the master"

 

Yet they were both younger when they both served in the Clone Wars and Obi-Wan told his side of the story from a certain point of view. Anakin is clearly an older man (Sebastian Shaw) in ROTJ as a ghost and an unmasked man of redemption (not to be confused with the 2004 DVD Special Edition with that barbaric ghost with a new head attached and his body mass thinned out) which muted original premise of the storyline to alter a classic ending for the sake of attaching the PT to the OT and buggering it up in the process.

And to quote Vader's line ""When I left you I was but the learner. Now I am the master" - yet it didn't matter. The whole story from TPM-ROTS wasn't even remotely conceived until the early 90's (contrary to what LFL have stated otherwise) so Anakin and Obi-Wan were of the same age and not the 20 years difference like in TPM. Star Wars Episode I - The Beginning was taking ideas from the earliest drafts of "The Star Wars", information from the OT and twisting it to make it all seem like we had dreamt what we had read, seen and been told before. By early 2007 it had all but been fleshed out and was still being tweaked into what we know now as "The Phantom Menace"

Then on May 21st 1999 for nostalgists and those who had lived through 1977-1996, we had all apparently lived a lie...

 

I'd be interested in knowing where it was stated that "Obi-Wan & Vader were originally supposed to be the same age"

 

Take away all the eye candy and far-out atmosphere, and you've still got a set of timeless characters. That's probably my favorite part.

 

I feel like this has a lot to do with the prequels almost exclusive use of Jedi as protagonists. When you've got members of a highly revered and regimented sect as your protagonists who have to live by extraordinary rules regarding their emotions it becomes harder to relate to them through an empathetic lens. You can't judge their actions or relate to them as easily by considering what you would do in their place, like you can with the actions of Han Solo, Leia or Luke in the OT because they have to live by an entirely different set of rules that are only ever presented as the right way of living.

Slightly tangentially, the issue is the fact that there's no attempt in the prequels to present a critique of this closeted and emotionally isolated way of living - the one character we see challenging this by having a normal relationship (Anakin) turns into one of the most terrible men in the galaxy. In AOTC Anakin, acting on his emotional attachments, goes to save his mother but ends up killing an entire tribe of sentient beings. In ROTS Anakin, acting on his emotional attachments, tries to save the Chancellor from extrajudicial execution, and ends up killing basically everyone he knows. You can relate to the initial motive in both cases, but (I'd hope) not the actions he took.

The key difference between this and ESB is that when Luke acts on his emotional attachment to his friends he falls into a trap and gets beat down - he doesn't do anything evil. The audience can continue to empathise with him. Everyone in their life has at times tried to do the right thing and taken a beating for it - you can empathise easier.

EDIT: which I feel I should point out does not on its own make the PT a bad trilogy, it just means that they lack that 'along for the adventure' feel that thebeanpole pointed to.

 

I'll have to try and dig out the article with Lucas/Marquand talking about Obi-Wan/Anakin being the same age (Starburst or Starlog late 1983/early 84) and positively an earlier article of Vader and Kenobi being the same age (Anakin was only in concept at that point during the screenplay stages by Kasdan) and possibly dated late '81.

On another note - to try and tie both trilogies as a supposed connecting complete saga, they had to take the late Sebastian Shaw and replace his head with that of a poorly composited Hayden Christensen and slim down Shaw's still apparent figure for the inclusion. And yet alter it years later in yet another contradiction of terms of further changes within the OT to accommodate re-writes to his new trilogy?

So not for the want of ruffling feathers within the online community - in casting the role of Anakin in early 1982, why did Marquand and Lucas cast a then 77 year old Shaw by personal choice opposed to Guinness who was firmly within his reprising role at the age of 68 and it was very apparent on screen of the age range but yet Anakin was supposedly younger??? But as I said before, Obi-Wan's first tale in ANH states "A young Jedi named Darth Vader" when they were both younger during The Clone Wars, but later reveals that what Obi-Wan told Luke "...was true. From a certain point of view".

Was that an obvious continuity error to state that Anakin/Vader was indeed younger and Guinness' memorable dialogue shot at Elstree in the Summer of '76 was indeed scripted yet ignored by the scripting/casting stages 6 years later from California to Elstree? But then Gurland, McCallum and Lucas got it right when casting an 8 year old for The Phantom Menace in early '97 just 16 years later but is set 32 years before A New Hope and our now American slave-boy is 9 years old so Anakin would only be 45 at the time of his redemption and death? Hmmmmm...

 

For this, consider that in 1977, Annikin and Obi-Wan were supposed to be compatriot Jedi who both fought in the Clone Wars. Darth Vader was a "young Jedi" when he left Obi-Wan's tutelage for the dark side. In a scene cut (and then partially restored) from ANH, Red Leader tells Luke that as a boy, he had met Luke's father, who was a great pilot. The math of this seems to suggest that Luke's father was supposed to have been born something like fifty-five-ish years before ANH (I'm sure Samuel Vimes and TOSCHESTATION remember when this was hashed out in a different discussion awhile ago). And Ben was supposed to be, like, sixties or seventies when the film was made? So they'd kind of have a similar age-relationship to Han and Luke. Not the same age, but similar enough.

In ESB, I can't recall anything that suggests an age for Darth or Anakin. In the Making of ROTJ, there's a Lucas quote about how they're not the exact same age but are visually similar in age. And they cast Sebastian Shaw as Anakin. And the information given by LFL to EU writers (starting with Tim Zahn in 1992, as far as I know) was that the Clone Wars ended thirty-five years before ANH, so at least in the 1990s that would have matched up with an Anakin who fought in said wars at around the same age that Luke is in the original trilogy.

The real issue is that Darth and Annikin were merged into the same character in ESB. These two characters were probably supposed to have different ages originally. If you merge them into the same character, which age do you pick? Do you make Darth older, or Annikin younger? Either way you'll have something to explain away:

-If you keep the Annikin age, making Darth older (which is pretty much what the OT/ROTJ did), then you have to explain why Darth calls Obi-Wan "old man." This could be done by saying it's like Han calling Luke "kid" or "junior." They aren't that far apart in age, but they still use age-related nicknames. Maybe it could even be turned into a reference to a consistent nickname Anakin used for Ben in the old days. You also have to explain why Ben says "a young Jedi," which could mean (for example) that he was young for a Jedi, or that it's old-Ben thinking back to old-days-Anakin (I've heard older people describe people into their forties at least as 'young' sometimes - plus, 'young' can be very context-dependent, as with the descriptions of John F. Kennedy as 'young,' for example).

-If you instead keep the Darth age, making Anakin younger (which is what the prequels did), you have to explain Darth's appearance in ROTJ, plus Darth's training being incomplete from leaving Ben yet his still being a Jedi Knight (which I guess would have to be dealt with in either scenario).

It's just a matter of which option appeals to you/the storyteller more.