Mandalorian Season 2 finale. Spoilers galore, stop now!

In 1977, when the paperback novelization of "Star Wars" came out, the subtitle wasn't "A New Hope." The subtitle was "From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker."

Let's think about that. Maybe it was Georgie Lucas' idea , maybe it was from the publisher, but at some point in time, the focus point of the Star Wars universe wasn't the dysfunctional Skywalker family, it was Luke! Further adventures were perhaps planned. Luke heading off to different galaxies to face different (non-Empire) bad guys each film. It wasn't going to be all about Anakin Skywalker, the Empire and an ever growing collection of characters.

Imagine a series of films where Darth Vader doesn't even show up! Imagine "Star Wars II" where Luke leaves Han and Leia to roam the galaxy dispensing justice with his badass light saber, like some intergalactic Clint Eastwood. Each film a new adventure!

That didn't happen.

I loved "Empire Strikes Back," but I sheltered a little disappointment in the back of my mind, especially as all the prequels and sequels never got away from the Skywalker family's problems.

Luke as a standalone badass would never happen ...

Until the second season finale of "The Mandalorian." 

Finally, the promise made in 1977 is fulfilled, we finally get to see Luke be a real Jedi Knight, kicking asses and taking names.

Overdue, but it makes up for his crappy treatment in the last few Star Wars films.

Film review: Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

It's another greatest hits package from the Disney/Lucasfilm factory. New characters doing the same thing. Kind of like "Home Alone 2" and 3.

It's the same, just bigger. We get a "I find your lack of faith disturbing," scene but instead of simply the officer getting strangled, he gets thrown into the ceiling. We get the little guy rises up against the big empire scene again, but instead of Ewoks, it's a kazillion little space ships; we also get Emperor Palpatine taunting the hero at his/her darkest moment, AGAIN with Palpatine.

I kept thinking of the commentary track on "The Phantom Menace" where a special effect guy is bragging about how they got a hundred ships passing by the window in the background of a scene, and I'm thinking, y'know, three ships would have been fine.

I'm a little disappointed, I really thought when Disney announced they'd wrap up the Star Wars trilogy of trilogies, they would have planned the whole thing out *before* the cameras started rolling. No, no, they just made it up as they went along with no forethought into foreshadowing or comprehensibility.

Review: The Mandalorian

The "Mandalorian" and Joss Whedon's "Firefely" belong to the same genre. I'm calling it the Look-we're-clever,-you-think-you're-watching-a-science-fiction-show-but-it's-really-a-western genre.
Both shows are so much like westerns I can't help but think, "why didn't they just make them westerns?"

In the case of "Mandalorian," when I say it's a western, I'm not saying movie western, I'm saying TV western, which is really a whole different animal, isn't it?

I kept thinking of those 1960s TV westerns with Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen each playing a brave hero who's reluctant to use his gun, but will do what he has to. There were dozens of westerns like this on TV in the 1960s, they might have burnt themselves out. Movie directors have two hours to tell their story. TV shows have lots of time to fill. Plots were recycled ... a lot.

And that's what I was thinking about while watching the first three episodes of "The Mandalorian." It's not all that different from one of those old TV westerns. With the exception of a few Star Wars characters, it's not a Star Wars spinoff at all.

It's really closer to "Son of Steve McQueen's Character" in "Wanted: Dead or Alive," or "Son of Clint Eastwood's Character" in "Rawhide."

But, the TV western is dead, and the only way to get people to watch them is to  put spaceships in them.

My other problem with this show is: Is the main character really going to keep his helmet on during the whole run of the show? There's a scene with about six people, all wearing helmets conveying exposition, and it slowly became an episode of the "Power Rangers." This is going to go over great in foreign markets.

How do they expect us to get emotionally attached to a protagonist if we never see his face? I'm sure the Lucasfilm people are thinking, "This is a forever character, like C3PO or Chewbacca, we  don't need an actor!" You can get away with that for the movies, but TV is, once again, a different animal.

Update: I finally caught all 8 episodes and must say the last three episodes are very good. There's a 'turn-the-tables moment in "The Prisoner" episode where the whole show turned around for me. Things start moving much faster and plot threads that started in the first two episodes are finally wrapped up in a very exciting manner. Suddenly I started caring about Baby Yoda.

And he takes off his helmet, which he should do more often.

I was right (Star Wars edition)

Back in this post in January, I said I suspected that Lucasfilm didn't kill off Princess Leia in the last Star Wars movie because they were sitting on footage of the late Carrie Fisher they could use for the next Star Wars movie.

Lucasfilm though said, no, there's no more footage.

I didn't believe them.

I was right.

They just announced the casting for the next movie and they said they would use footage of Carrie Fisher.

It just didn't make sense for me that they'd keep the character alive unless more footage existed.

Whether or not they'll be able to incorporate the footage into the film so it makes sense is a whole other thing. The big continuity disconnect between the last and most recent films though make me think I shouldn't expect the best.

Overdue film review: Star Wars Last of the Jedi (spoilers)

The word sequel in Hollywood is used mostly when they mean to say 'remake."

"Home Alone 2" wasn't the further adventures of Kevin McCallister, it was the exact same adventures of Kevin McCallister from the first "Home Alone."

"The Force Awakens" and "The Last Jedi" on the other hand aren't sequels to the Star Wars films, they're the exact same adventures but experienced by different characters.

The space battles, the long speeches about the Force, the captures and escapes, we've seen it all before. Sure they're entertaining and fun to watch, but ultimately the series ran out of plot five movies ago. The new characters are  just doing what the old characters did.

The only reason Luke refuses to aid in the rebellion is because otherwise, there'd be nothing for him to do. And really, he throws the light saber over his shoulder? Would you do that with a gun?

The Carrie Fisher scenes are curious, they could have easily killed her early on in the first explosion, but once she floats in space to the spaceship you start thinking, "she was dead when this scene was CGI'd in. Then she spends the middle third in a coma, and you have to wonder what she was supposed to be doing in the middle third had she lived. It's a pleasant surprise to see her return for the final third. I suspect they're sitting on more footage of her that will turn up in the third film.

It also seemed they set up mysteries in the first movie to totally forget about them for this film. Snoke? What's his backstory? Umm, I guess we'll never know. Rey? They spent a lot of time convincing us her backstory is a big deal and then they just sweep it off. C3-PO's red arm, I think they totally forgot about that. George Lucas spent years just making it up as he went on, not really concerning himself with continuity or logic. I was hoping Disney would try to be a little more consistent.

Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (spoilers ahead)

The bad news which isn't too bad: Ultimately, it's a remake of Star Wars: A New Hope. It opens with a person under attack planting a message in a robot, then sending the robot off. A loner in the desert finds the robot, and the loner turns out to be much more important than initially thought.
And it ends with an attack on a Death Star that has a fatal design flaw ...again...

..and all kinds of familiar plot elements in the middle.

If you ignore these swipes (and more), you'll have a good time at the movies. It's often exciting, the new characters are great. It's easily better than the prequels. And you have Harrison Ford who is worth every penny of the $20 million he reportedly got.

There's a couple nice surprises: The turncoat stormtrooper, Kylo Ren's parentage.

Some quibbles: It took Luke Skywalker three movies to learn to do things with the Force that Rey learns in one afternoon.

For never handling a light saber before, Finn and Rey are really good with it.

But if you just forget the past, you'll have a good time at the movies.

Lost Trek Lore

If you can find it, try to get Bill Planer’s “Lost Voyages of Star Trek.” It includes synopses of Star Trek scripts that were never filmed.

In the mid-70s, Paramount was going to start a “fourth television network” and its flagship show was to be “Star Trek: Phase II.” The adventures of the Enterprise’s second five-year journey.

Scripts were commissioned, the actors were going to reprise their roles, except for Leonard Nimoy.

New characters were drawn up: Decker, a headstrong, young first officer; Ilya, a psychic, and onetime lover of Decker’s, and Xon, a vulcan who, unlike Spock, actually enjoyed working on a ship with humans and wanted to be more like them. (These three characters might sound familiar.)

Then something big happened: Star Wars. 

Paramount executives who had spent every morning climbing over a new pile of mail from Star Trek fans begging for a Star Trek movie started asking themselves: Do we own any properties that have spaceships in them?

Plans for the fourth network and Phase II were scrapped. (Barry Diller, the Paramount executive spearheading this concept, would take it to Fox. You might have heard of this.)

Roddenberry was ordered: Make us a movie.

Then came an astonishing series of bad decisions, one understandable, the rest bewildering.

Bad decision one: Choosing the director. This is the understandable bad decision. We’re talking Robert Wise. “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music,” Blockbusters both. But most important to Roddenberry: “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Possibly the most cerebral science fiction drama up to that time, and probably to this day. (Call me what you must, 2001 a Space Odyssey was a pretentious overlong boring indulge-o-fest)

Rodddenberry didn’t want spaceships blowing each other up, he wanted a movie just like “The Day the Earth Stood Still”: men in military uniforms sitting around discussing what to do about the alien threat ... if it is a threat.

The problem is, after Star Wars, no one else wanted that. We wanted fast ships and explosions. Instead we got long long talky meetings, and interminable inspections of the outer hull of the Enterprise

Now the baffling decisions: Roddenberry went to the stack of scripts written for Phase II and found “In Thy Image,” a story about an Earth space probe that becomes self-aware and returns to meet its makers. 

Two problems with this script. A) it had been done before as an episode of Star Trek, B) the concept really doesn’t lend itself to a big budget motion picture experience. There are no villains! Now after “Wrath of Khan” I can’t argue that going back to the source material is a bad idea, but Khan was a sequel, building on the original. And if you’re going to spend $20 million (then a lot of money for a movie) to remake an episode of Star Trek, do “The Doomsday Machine” That episode just begs for the big-screen treatment. (Check out the CGI-improved version, you’ll see I’m right).

Baffling decision 2: “Let’s shave Persis Khambatta’s head!” 

Baffling decision 3: Upon finding out the revived Star Trek would be a movie, Leonard Nimoy was suddenly interested. At this point, Roddenberry thought, wow, I can keep Decker and Ilia, but I’ll have to kill off Xon. 

Kill off Xon? 

Roddenberry somehow was thinking that not only were the Star Trek Phase II episodes filmed, they were aired, and the fans would want an explanation on why Xon wasn’t in the movie.

How else to explain his role in the film as the quickly introduced, quickly dispatched Vulcan, making a movie that was a half hour too long even longer?

The film was released, became a hit, but was quickly nicknamed Star Trek: The Motionless Picture. 

So, Roddenbery went into exile and Paramount would never release another Star Trek film without phasers being fired and things blowing up.

When Roddenberry returned from exile, they let him produce an ambitious little TV program called Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Once again, he raided the box o’ scripts from Phase II. Only wherever it said Kirk, he crossed it out and wrote Picard. Decker became Riker; Ilia became Troi, and Xon became Data.

This man was the master of recycling.

As  pointed out in a Cracked article, Roddenberry’s talents were somewhat overrated in favor of people who worked for him. Cracked cites Gene Coon, but I would add DC Fontana and David Gerrold to the mix. When they left Next Generation things quickly went to crap. Interesting thought-provoking scripts were replaced with tropes that were moldy in the ‘60s. Evil twins, unambiguously-good good guys. A captain who surrendered seemingly every episode, the psychic who provided no insight that wasn’t always obvious, the boy genius for whom every episode had to stop in its tracks so someone could explain the plot to him, and a Klingon who got knocked on his ass in every fight.

Star Trek: Phase II could have been the best Star Trek series of them all. Roddenberry was always somehow Star Trek’s greatest champion and worst enemy.

Film review: Guardians of the Galaxy

OK, we got a ragtag team of rebels who bicker, but must band together to fight a force much more powerful than themselves. I will give you it's a retelling of the Star Wars story, but it's probably the best retelling of the Star Wars story since Empire Strikes Back.

This is the kind of movie George Lucas used to know how to make.

The action sequences were relentless and funny. Yes we've seen jail breaks before, but this one starts with a laugh and ends with a surprise that makes perfect sense.

Everytime Quill puts on his Buck Rogers suit you just know it's going to be great.

We get to hear 70s standards in a whole new way, and  they even acknowledged their homages by giving credit to the Maltese Falcon and the Ark of the Covenant.

I never read the books, so I didn't have that to hold  back my enjoyment, but me and my 6-year-old both had a great time at the movies.

More on Lucas

I can't resist adding one more Lucas post. In interviews he's saying he'll be making small personal films now that he's retired. I've been reading interviews with this guy since the '70s, and he's been talking about making small personal films for 35 years now. He's like that old high school friend who keeps telling you he'll be moving to Alaska to run a caribou farm, but everytime you see him, he's still working at the gas station down the street.

It's OK if we're talking about some shmoe in a gas station, but we're talking about the most powerful man in Hollywood. He was talking about making "Red Tails" back in the '80s. HBO beat him to it, and Lucas wound up recycling cast members from the HBO version.

George, you may be the richest, least ambitious person in the history of time.

Side note: You have to love the Mort Drucker one-sheet for "American Graffiti" above. I always thought it was funny that Drucker would later draw the Mad Magazine parody.

It's a small empire after all

By some Internet law, all bloggers must make a comment about the Disney/Lucasfilm merger. So it's my turn.

If it were done during the Eisner era it would have been disastrous because Eisner wouldn't have spent any money on new Star Wars films. He always took the cheap way out, while turning people against each other. This is one of the reasons the Muppet merger never went through until he was gone. (Read James Stewart's "Disney War," about the Eisner years at Disney).

Now, looking at how they've handled the Marvel properties, the Muppets and Pixar, it's obvious they're willing to spend all kinds of money to make something good. (Even "John Carter," you can call it many things, but at no point did they skimp.)

And after looking at the last three Star Wars movies it's apparent they really can't do worse than Lucas himself.

Here's an idea they will never do: Instead of proceeding with episodes VII, VIII and IX, remake I, II and III.

They were terrible! ( I know it's spitting in the wind to point out shortcomings of films that made a skillion dollars, but, see my first paragraph, it's some Internet law I must obey)

I was in the theaters for the trailers of Episode I, it ended with Darth Vader's breathing. The audience went crazy, a new Darth Vader movie, this would be amazing.

Here's what we get instead
Episode I: A cousin Oliver.
Episode II: Whiny teenager, still no Darth Vader
Episode III: Whiny teenager, Darth Vader shows up for the last 5 minutes, doesn't destroy anything, audience is horribly disappointed, except for rabid fanboys who didn't know they were cheated by subpar writing.

What they should have done was... make the last 15 minutes of Episode III the last 15 minutes of Episode II, then make Episode III two hours of Darth Vader kicking ass and taking names and blowing up planets and being the biggest badass in the galaxy.

We didn't get that. Not even close.

So it's probably a good thing.

There's an interview out there of Gary Kurtz, Lucas' producer for Star Wars and Empire. They parted ways for Return of the Jedi because Kurtz saw it for what it was, a cynical ploy to sell toys by making a best-of of the first two films.

Now, if Disney hired that guy to produce the sequels, we might get something good.