PT Should Yoda have been left out of the Prequels?

Too over the top?! But Yoda was literally a puppet that talked backw...

Ehhh. Okay.

 

Ian McDiarmid was just about the only thing that made the PT bearable, but in ROTJ he was a one dimensional cardboard cutout of a villain.

 

I don’t know, his performance as evil incarnate was well done. Was it campy at times? Yes, but that was why it worked.

 

He was a cackling cartoon. How that guy ruled the universe is beyond me.

 

That cackling I feel was manipulative, we see his true nature when his tone goes serious and he says, “so be it Jedi,” “You have paid for your lack of vision,” “Now you will die.” His personality shifts, the cackling is for show, his real ruthless and dark lord self comes forth when he uses Force Lightning. Rewatch it, you’ll see he shifts to his dark lord self, and makes Yoda’s words true, “do not underestimate the powers of the Emperor.”

Edit: The cackling is a ruse, to make Luke lower his guard, then the Ruthless Dark Lord emerges.

 

I'm not knocking McDiarmid. He gave Lucas the performance that he asked for, but the character was a bit of a dud. He was much better in the PT.

 

I still urge you rewatch ROTJ, see how Palpatine shifts from personality.

 

I don't have to. I know it by heart, and I agree with what you're saying, but the character still comes off as almost a parody of evil. David Warner did it better in Time Bandits.

 

Well I think we will have to agree to disagree. I found The Emperor more terrifying in ROTJ, a dark lord of malice, compared with ROTS where I thought he seemed more cartoony in evil when he faces Windu and later Yoda.

 

You know, you're right. He kinda' sucked in the PT too.

 

The puppet.

 

What makes Palpatine works in the long run is that Lucas always knew who was before becoming the Emperor. He was a mere Senator who became the leader of the Republic, and then subverted democracy into a dictatorship. That required Palpatine to be cunning and crafty like Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler when they seized power. And the thing with dictators like Hitler is that once they get power, they tend to delude themselves into thinking they are infallible and start making obvious mistakes while sounding incredibly evil at the same time.

Palpatine acts like a cartoon villain in ROTS and ROTJ because he has already won and no longer has to hide. He can indulge himself to the power trip and sadism without fear of consequences. It's also a natural factor to his downfall.

 

"tangible and alive" in a manner of speaking, I suppose

 

Yes, Oz was successful in making a tangible yet inanimate puppet seem strikingly animated and alive. Not sure what’s vexing you about this description…

 

Again, I don't have anything against puppet Yoda in the OT, or (pre-Blu-ray) TPM, or TLJ, but at the same time, I can't see puppet Yoda as anything but a throwback. His reappearance in TLJ was deliberately anachronistic. I'm not a puppeteer, I don't know anything about it, and I can't do anything but be impressed with Oz' work, but the artifacts of puppetry (e.g. jerky movements, floppy rubbery body that looks hollow) by their nature make suspension of disbelief harder for me than CGI. I think puppets have their place, but more alive? Maybe in the sense that he just moves around more, in a cartoonish way, like Fozzy Bear. I guess he is more tangible in the literal sense. I mean, rubber latex is a tangible material, yes.

I'll concede that CG Yoda looks a lot less conving in 2021 than in 2002 when we first saw him.

 

My ideal is a merger of a physical puppet or person with today’s CGI. Something that meets the level of realism of K2SO, basically. If we see Yoda again, a hybrid puppet-CGI is what I’d advocate for.

But if it’s a choice between CGI from 2000, or Oz’s puppetry? The latter wins. If I get the feeling that a CGI character is a cartoon in live action, I don’t believe it. If I feel like I can pass my hand through it, I don’t believe it.

 

I feel like I can pass my hand inside puppet Yoda

 

Touché!

 

Puppet Yoda seems straight off the toy shelf for me these days. The nostalgia points are still there, but the immersion is not.

 

I like both the puppet and the CGI version. I have slight problems with both in their second films. The puppet seemed a little off in looks and felt more stiff in RotJ, and the CGI version wasn't perfected yet in all of the shots in AotC. It's kind of weird watching the prequels, when the reinserted CGI version in TPM looks like the one in RotS, if not better, and to then have a slight downgrade in AotC.

 

I'd actually argue that he was more necessary in the PT than he was in the OT. There really was no storytelling reason to kill off Obi-Wan and replace him with Yoda as Luke's mentor. At least in the PT Yoda plays a pivotal part. I might even go so far as to say it would've been better and more powerful if Palpatine had killed him in RotS.

 

GL actually realized killing off Kenobi was a problem. The issue was the studio was making him feel like ANH was all he was gonna do, so he put a lot in that was suppose to be in the sequels, the Death Star was suppose to be destroyed in ROTJ.

 

If accurate, I think that explains more about death star 2 existing in ROTJ.

 

It's not accurate. GL never had a "trilogy" planned out when he was writing ANH. That's some BS he made up for the Leonard Maltin interviews back in the 90's. It's easily refuted by reading the MAKING OF books that came out in 2007, 2010, and 2013.

Yes, GL wanted the rights to make sequels when he was doing the first Star Wars. No, this does not mean he had some grand plan worked out. He had vague ideas that COULD make for interesting sequels, but nothing solid.

GL told this same lie to Steven Spielberg concerning Indiana Jones sequels... and if you read the MAKING OF for the Indy series, you'll find out that GL didn't actually have anything more than very basic and vague ideas for ToD and next to nothing for LC other than a haunted castle.

In GL's mind simply having one single idea about what a movie could possibly be about means he has it "planned out".

 

I don't think anyone know if Lucas had the OT mapped out before he made ANH. And I think it's unwise to pretend that any of us, other than Lucas, do know.