TheForce.Net interviews Henry Gilroy... and Dave Filoni !!! (Your questions answered!)

Thank you everyone for keeping this debate verbose and polite, it's a pleasure to see! However, as has been pointed out, this isn't the thread for it. We are completely off topic, and there are certainly more appropriate threads to discuss this topic. I will lock this thread if I have to, but I'm assuming we'll leave it open for people to post their thoughts on what Dave and Henry had to say in the interview. Thanks again. G_M.

 

Haha, yeah, sorry about that, Garth. We'll try to rein it in, or at least I will. XD

Still, even though off-topic debates are a common feature of forums, I'm thoroughly impressed at your dedication to stay on-topic and civil. Your devotion to freedom as the right of all sentient posters and peace among us is an inspiration to us all, o great mod. And I mean that.

Oh yeah. I'm not sure if it was asked before, but do you see something like this interview happening in the future? Maybe towards the end of season 1 or for season 2?

 

Future interviews are definitely a possibility we'll look into.

Thrawn MacEwok and TFN (and Quest) had begun the groundwork for the interview through Lit, so LACWAC was sorta tacked on to that one. Made sense to me.

 

I thought we'd already seen stuff that is unbelievable. Isn't that what this fuzz is all about?

 

But yes. Very good news indeed. Thanks, Garth, and thanks to all the other mods and people in charge of interviews, to say nothing of the fine folk working on this series.

 

Seriously though, it's so awesome to see that the writer(s) keep in touch with the community.

 

Oh man...more interviews would be great! As much as I like their teasers about upcoming episodes, I'd also like to get more insight into these episodes after they've aired.

 

Right! I mean, it's their job to keep us watching and buying, so let's separate sales pitches from actual content, ya know?

(If the word "unbelievable" had meaning beyond just a generic come-on, it probably means more discarding of canon to bolster the CW universe. The Jedi use the latest and greatest Force power, time travel, to go back in time to Kamino to inject midichlorians into the clones! That's why they're totally different than they were in the movies!)

 

Are the interviews a sales pitch? If it came directly from LFL, maybe, but they seem really excited for what's to come.

 

LOL. He kind of is LFL right now. And what's he supposed to say... no, it gets worse. His job is to tease us. Normally, I would just expect the series to continue to be good, but I trust Dave... I'm sure there will be something to take this thing a little outside the box. Mandalorians vs. Jedi perhaps...

 

They do seem to imply Mandalorians, don't they?

They say something in the interview about how the end of Season 1 is unbelievably awesome, don't they? Or something to that extent, I'll have to re-check exactly what they said.

 

Guys, come on. We internet message board posters make up approximately .001% of the viewing population. If Henry Gilroy is going to do some kind of lame-o marketing pitch to get people to keep watching his show, there's very little benefit from coming here and doing it for us.

I trust him. The first half of season 1 has been a big improvement over the pilot movie. I think the show will continue to get better.

 

Which makes it even cooler that they sat down with us to do an interview. That said, we are pretty good viewers and useful for feedback on what works, what doesn't I imagine.

 

Sure, but we're also about 100% of the customers for LFL's products.

More relevant still is the fact that companies know to please their core buyers because those customers also double as two-legged billboards - only instead of the company paying to have billboards, the customers pay the company to be billboards! In this case, we tell our friends and co-workers about the show, we wear t-shirts and baseball caps advertising the show, and we create enough noise that the media is driven to cover the show. In marketing, this is called cultivating "consumer evangelists". This is covered in Business 101, fellas.

I'm not saying that Filoni & Co. aren't good people. Although I stridently believe that they're cynically turning 'Star Wars' from populist and anti-authority into pro-power and pro-government....I admit that I'm still entertained by the show (mostly, anyway). But let's not deceive ourselves about who these people are and what their goal is: they're businessmen and their goal is to take our money. Period.

 

I agree that they want to take our money, but the audiance that they are targeting is not people on this board. They are going after the kids, after all it is a kids show. And I highly doubt that they are trying to spin Star Wars into "pro goverment" It is a kids show for christ sake!(BTW, GL has the final say on everything that is written, stuff that Filoni and co. wanted had to be change to fit GL's liking)

It is a kids show marketed towards kids, that is all.

Anyway, I believe that the show is getting better. I have enjoyed mostly all the episodes include the Jar-Jar ones! I cannot wait to watch more.

 

And movies were "kids" movies....and yet Lucas manages to convey his political and moral messages in them - including explicit analogies to false flag terrorism (governments attacking their own people and claiming outsiders did it), small groups of private citizens defeating well-trained armies (he compared the Ewoks to Viet Cong), and lots of other adult, sophisticated messages.

The technique is to take complex ideas and chip off all the complexity so all you're left with is the most basic structure, which is then simple enough to be understood by kids. (And for don't think for a second that the pro-government forces are somehow morally above propagandizing children. "Cradle to the grave" is their expression.)

 

The movies were not entirly aimed towards kids though. And you have to keep in mind that we are at the beginning of the war, so it would not make sense to have complete anti-goverment feelings at first. They(Including Senators like Padmé) don't realize what is happening to the Republic till the end, that is one reason why Anakin was upset about Padmé thinking they were on the wrong side.

 

You know, everything I've read and seen from the TCW staff interviews, they mostly seem excited about working on Star Wars and trying to make TCW as much like SW as they can.

If there is a certain philosophical or political slant, I would expect that might be George Lucas' input. If not, and some of the personal beliefs of the writers and directors are creeping into the show, I think that's impossible to stop, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

 

In particular I thought I heard they were trying to make it a little more like the OT ( while of course remaining true to the PT setting ).

 

Which might be true, since there is strong sense of who is "good" and who is "evil". But I do hope as the series progress that the line of good/evil becomes more ambiguous. But we are only in the first year of the war, so there is plenty of time!

 

That sense of "who is good and who is evil" was alive and well in the PT, Palpatine's attempt to muddy the waters notwithstanding.

 

Disagree wholeheartedly. I thought the moral story of the PT was extremely complex and adult. The only clear moral message, in my opinion, is that we humans have to learn to "let go". Everything else was fair game. ("There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere." is a good summation of the PT.)

In my opinion, the only true hero throughout the whole PT was Obi-Wan. He was relentlessly noble, honest, and incorruptible (unfortunately, the CW show has turned him into this institutionalized, war-loving buffoon.)

 

h

 

I agree with you on the first one. I've actually seen bored journalists complaining about the message it delivers to young children (though I'm doubtful Star Wars influences the way they look at politics). Wouldn't go as far as calling it complex though, if you have never seen the PT before you should defiantly get it on the second watch. Your "mini documentary" explains it pretty spot on, but I think for many it's stating the obvious.

I do not however see how you think Obi-Wan differed from the other Jedi. He was also deceived by Palpatine and the PT makes no reference to him being anti-war apart from Grievous referring to him as "The negotiator", but surely that is not how he earned his rank. And if we're gonna go beyond just the PT and take the OT intro consideration I wouldn't call him honest either.