Ep. 1784 - This Is How Disney Destroyed Star Wars
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
12
sentences flagged
Toxicity
46
sentences flagged
Hate speech
35
sentences flagged
Summary
Nearly a decade and a half after Disney purchased the rights to the Star Wars franchise, it s now without doubt time to write the obituary of Star Wars. And whether you're a big Star Wars fan or not, it matters because the culture matters. When multi-billion dollar conglomerates ransack and murder parts of the culture, it's worth talking about. And we know that the murderous plot is now complete. Time of death can officially be recorded on the coroner's report.
Transcript
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Nearly a decade and a half after Disney purchased the rights to the franchise, it's now without any doubt time to write the obituary of Star Wars.
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And yes, plenty of critics have declared that Star Wars already died at one point or another, and many of them were probably right, but now there's no denying it.
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And whether you're a big Star Wars fan or not, which admittedly I'm not, it matters because the culture matters.
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When multi-billion dollar conglomerates ransack and murder parts of the culture, it's worth talking about.
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And we know that the murderous plot is now complete.
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Time of death can officially be recorded on the coroner's report.
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And we know that because the new Star Wars film, The Mandalorian and Grogu, is out in theaters this weekend.
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The executives at Disney and Lucasfilm managed to completely annihilate perhaps the most
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beloved entertainment franchise in American history, which would have been totally unthinkable
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back in the 1990s. And anyone who grew up in the 90s, you well remember this. When people were
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lining up at midnight to get into the premiere of The Phantom Menace, now looking at this,
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it's like lost footage from another civilization. Watch.
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It's one of the biggest premieres of all time. The level of sustained interest in this
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franchise over time was unlike anything else in the history of filmmaking. It was at the time,
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by far and away, the most wildly popular and iconic movie series ever. It was basically the
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Michael Jackson of film franchises. And like Michael Jackson, it is now dead under nefarious
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circumstances. Now you can see some photos from the 1983 premiere of the Return of the Jedi on
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the screen right there. 16 years later, The Phantom Menace drew similar crowds. In fact,
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even before its release, episode one was packing theaters. A lot of people don't remember this,
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but in 1999, almost nobody had high-speed internet. So if you wanted to see a movie trailer,
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you had two options. You could wait approximately 17.5 thousand hours to download it.
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And if somebody calls you in the meantime on your phone line, then you'd have to start all over
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In the case of The Phantom Menace, in November of 1998, the teaser trailer was apparently
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attached to Meet Joe Black, The Siege, and The Waterboy.
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And according to Variety, around 500 people in Los Angeles bought tickets to The Siege
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at a theater, and a third of them walked out when The Phantom Menace trailer was over,
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because that's the only reason they went to the movie.
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It became so common that theaters began promising audiences that they would re-air the trailer
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after the movie so they could get a second look.
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although no such bribe should have been needed to convince people to sit through the water boy,
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perhaps the dumbest comedy ever made, which makes it a cinematic masterpiece in a certain kind of
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way. In any case, again, nothing like this had ever happened before. People were so pumped for
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Star Wars that they bought tickets to other movies just to see a commercial for Star Wars.
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Now compare that enthusiasm for the original trilogy and the prequels to this audience reaction
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This is going to be one of the better audience reaction videos we've seen,
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if only because the comedic timing couldn't be any better.
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Please don't say it. Oh God, no. They all anticipate what Ray is going to say, like a detainee at a CIA black site who knows the waterboarding is coming.
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the sheer stupidity and predictability of the line
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They're hoping it won't happen, even though it's inevitable.
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And then after the moment finally comes, the revolt begins,
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and you're informed that the film was directed by the one and only J.J. Abrams.
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But even J.J. Abrams, as talented as he supposedly is,
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couldn't direct an audience reaction video as good as this one.
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Everybody assumed that this was kind of rock bottom for Star Wars.
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After all, it's hard to get any worse than fans walking out of the theater and taunting your film in viral social media videos.
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But somehow, under the stewardship of Disney executives, Star Wars has been subjected to countless additional, even more extraordinary humiliations since the 2019 release of Rise of Skywalker.
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And now those humiliations, which we're going to talk about in detail, have finally brought the Star Wars franchise to the point that it's not even hated anymore.
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Here's a picture somebody uploaded of an early release midnight screening of The Mandalorian the other day.
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Compare this to the footage we saw from The Phantom Menace.
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There's one guy in the entire theater, which probably is not a great sign.
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Certainly quite a contrast to what we saw with every other Star Wars film, particularly the good ones.
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Wife and I at the premiere of Mando and Grogu, a lot of different premiere, a lot different premiere than other Star Wars openings.
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Even if you don't care at all about Star Wars, these images are still depressing.
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Because, again, they represent the death of an iconic part of American culture.
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You can go online to book tickets at your local theater, as seen here,
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and you'll probably find that most of the seats are empty.
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Meanwhile, the guys at Film Thread also went to an early screening of this movie.
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As you listen to their extremely unimpressed reaction,
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notice that the lobby is mostly empty in the background.
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All right, Alan, we got out of The Mandalorian and Grogu.
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What are your social media out of the theater reactions?
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It was on the positive end of the spectrum for this film
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missing the thrills, surprises, challenges, addition of really anything of note to the
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franchise, not to mention a vested interest in seeing its characters grow and change.
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The Mandalorian Grogu is the most boring Star Wars movie yet. Variety raves, quote,
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an efficient adventure that only pretends to be a real Star Wars movie. It's basically the most
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positive thing anyone could say about it. Inefficient. It's efficient. If that's the
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best thing anyone could say about your movie is that it's efficient, then that's again a bad sign.
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Now, first of all, before we go any further, I have to ask, who exactly decided that The Mandalorian and Grogu is a good idea for a movie title?
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It might honestly be, without hyperbole, the worst title ever.
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I mean, from a pure aesthetic perspective, it's a nightmare.
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Said out loud, it has all the melody and grace of like a box full of silverware tumbling down the stairs.
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Most people, myself included, don't know who Grogu is, but he's a character in the movie and so is the Mandalorian.
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So that's good enough for the title, apparently.
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Imagine if they named the original films like this.
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And maybe you'd have Star Wars, Han and Chewie.
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And then the grand finale, Star Wars, Darth Vader and Palpatine.
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And by the way, if you're going to have a character in your movie named Grogu, which you probably shouldn't,
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the worst thing you could do is put that character's name in the title of your film.
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Grogu sounds like, it sounds like, it sounds like your least favorite dish that your Polish
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grandmother cooks. Now, Star Wars titles, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, even The Phantom
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Menace, used to have a certain vibe. You know, they evoked a particular feeling. They sounded
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operatic and epic and fun. And now they just named the two main characters and that's it.
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Instead of bringing to mind an epic space opera, they bring to mind, you know, children's cartoons from the 90s.
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The Mandalorian and Grogu sounds like it belongs in the same pantheon as Pinky and the Brain, Ren and Stimpy, Cow and Chicken, except worse than all of those.
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Now, to be clear, as bad as that title is, there is a reason why they chose it.
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and it's entirely related to priorities like merchandising and brand recognition and algorithms
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and so on. That's the whole problem with Star Wars and most Hollywood films generally. They
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are constructed in corporate boardrooms by non-creative people who are trying to figure
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out how to monetize a brand. No good movie has ever been made that way or could be made that way.
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Good movies must originate from the creative inspiration of a single artist,
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but under Disney's leadership, that's not what happened with Star Wars.
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First, they threw out George Lucas's outlines for a new trilogy.
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Then their plans for an original story hit a major snag.
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Disney, as a public company, had promised its shareholders that they would quickly pump out Star Wars films
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at a cadence of one per year in order to realize profits on their $4 billion investment.
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But when the original screenwriter of The Force Awakens decided he needed more time,
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Disney's leadership, Bob Iger and Kathleen Kennedy, got rid of him instead.
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And they put J.J. Abrams in charge of the project with an extremely tight deadline.
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He had to get the film out in just a couple of years by 2015.
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So instead of coming up with an original story with a detailed plan for an entire trilogy,
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His only real contributions were, you know, a black stormtrooper, a few relatively uninteresting mysteries with no answers at all.
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He simply simply didn't have time to do anything else.
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I mean, the truth is, based on J.J. Abrams' history in the industry, he probably would have copied A New Hope anyway, even if he had an extra decade to produce this film.
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We all remember Lost, which was the classic example of his storytelling, if you can call it that.
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which is the cheapest and laziest way to tell a story.
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Anybody can tell a story where weird stuff happens, right?
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by just having weird stuff happening all the time
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The challenge, the part where you have to be an artist
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in a real storyteller, Teller is in landing the plane, bringing all the threads together in a
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coherent and meaningful way, which J.J. Abrams doesn't know how to do and has no interest in
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doing. What makes all this even more confusing is that in an interview with Collider after the
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conclusion of the sequel trilogy, Abrams explained that when you're making movies, it's really
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important to have a plan before you start. And he treats this like a massive revelation that he's
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only figuring out now after making multiple blockbusters and television shows over a period
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of several decades. And here's what he said, quote, I feel like what I've learned as a lesson
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a few times now, and it's something that especially in this pandemic year, working with writers has
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become clear. The lesson is that you have to plan things as best you can, and you always need to be
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able to respond to the unexpected. Having a plan, I've learned in some cases, the hard way is the
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most critical thing because otherwise you don't know what you're setting up. You don't know what
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to emphasize because if you don't know the inevitable of the story, you're just as good
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is your last sequence or effect or joke or whatever, but you want to be leading to something
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inevitable. I mean, this has to be one of the worst quotes from any director. I mean, this is
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the like storytelling, uh, insight that you're offering. It's a bit like hearing a director say,
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you know, it's really important to have a camera. The lesson I've learned after all my experience
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directing multimillion dollar projects, the lesson I learned is that really without a camera,
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well, you can't shoot anything. I had to learn that lesson the hard way a few times.
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Showed up on set without a camera. They said, well, where's your camera? How are you going
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to film this? And I said, oh, oh man, you're right. Never going to forget my camera again.
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Yes, JJ, it's very important to have a plan when you make movies. Put another way, it's crucial to
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have some kind of overarching artistic vision so that you actually are telling a story because
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Otherwise, you're just playing Mad Libs. And if the executives at Disney knew what they were doing,
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they would have demanded that J.J. Abrams come up with some kind of plan before they hired him. But
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that was never their goal. They simply wanted to produce the safest moneymaker they possibly could.
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So they came up with a technically competent but completely empty series of movies. They
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assembled the movies from pre-existing parts according to a formula like Ikea furniture.
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And the end result had all the artistic inspiration and beauty of Ikea furniture.
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A part of the explanation here, other than a time crunch, might be that Disney was simply
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too afraid to do anything else. You probably remember, you might remember the red letter
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media review of The Phantom Menace, where the guy uses the weird voice to deconstruct the film.
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It was an effective takedown. It went viral before viral videos were really a thing. And we can
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assume that everybody at Disney saw it and reactions like it. The video opens by saying
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George Lucas is basically an idiot surrounded by yes men. Watch.
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Nothing in The Phantom Menace makes any sense at all.
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It comes off like a script written by an eight-year-old.
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It's like George Lucas finished the script in one draft.
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Like, turned it in and they decided to go with it.
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Without anyone saying that it made no sense at all or was a stupid, incoherent mess.
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I guess at this point, who's going to question George or tell him what to do?
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that questioned him creatively a long time ago.
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that a Star Wars prequel will be an instant hit,
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The base point of the review was that Lucas' film strayed too far from the formula that most successful movies use,
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where there's a clear protagonist who experiences some kind of hardship, conquers adversity, and gets the girl in the end.
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The video acknowledged that some directors can stray from the formula because they're talented, but George Lucas doesn't have that talent.
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You see, in most movies, the audience needs a character to connect with.
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Typically this character is something called a protagonist.
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When you're in a weird movie with like aliens and monsters and weirdos,
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the audience really needs someone who's like a normal person like them to guide them through the story.
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So in addition to being like an everyday kind of schlub,
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usually the protagonist is someone that's down on their luck,
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...or someone where everything just doesn't always go perfectly for them.
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Either you choose to be at your desk on time from this day forward...
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No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley.
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Eventually they'll be confronted with some kind of obstacle or struggle that they gotta deal with.
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will find themselves in the lowest point where it seems like all is lost.
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But eventually they'll pull through and conquer whatever force opposes them.
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Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, or Jim Jarmusch, you really shouldn't stray away
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too far from this kind of formula. Now, this came out just a couple of years before Disney
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purchased the rights to Star Wars. It quickly racked up millions of views, became, you know,
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kind of defying the consensus opinion about The Phantom Menace. Pretty much everyone agreed with
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it. And I'm not going to defend the prequels here. I think most of the criticisms in the review make
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sense. I've made many of the same criticisms myself. But Disney and J.J. Abrams drew the
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wrong conclusions from the video. They decided that based on the popularity of that video and
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other reactions like it, Star Wars fans simply want a very predictable stock adventure story
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that follows a familiar arc. And on top of that, Disney most likely concluded that everybody hates
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George Lucas and that it's a bad idea to entrust a single figure with total creative control over
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the franchise, so they allowed J.J. Abrams to make the first film and handed the second film to
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Rian Johnson without any coordination or planning whatsoever. And the result was a trilogy that
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made the prequels, which mostly did suck, in my opinion, look like classics in comparison.
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Because you see, even when the prequels didn't work, and they often didn't work,
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they didn't work because the artist, George Lucas, made bizarre creative choices. But at least it's
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still art. At least they were creative choices, which is a lot better than a film that's too
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afraid to make any choices and has no creativity at all. You know, when a film with a bad creative
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vision, when the creative vision is bad, it's at least bad in kind of an interesting and distinctive
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way. But this Disney slop now is bad in the most generic and bland way possible because there's no
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creative vision behind it now if you get a chance pull up some behind the scenes videos of how lucas
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made the prequels um here's a few of them watch i feel there's more to this my master the two jedi
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maybe using the queen for their own purpose the main things here we have the uh walking hologram
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generator which will be added in computer graphics but it's in front of everybody's walking um we
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have a map painting of uh feed city to put back there and the light fixtures on the wall in the
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hallway are not what George wants so we're gonna replace them with something
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else when the camera pans over to look out this archway we want to have filled
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that archway full of tanks and and battle droids so it's relatively
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straightforward shot even the pass by shots go for a lot of sound to loudest
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sound you ever heard to no sound within the side well see what you can do with
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it and see what happens. Okay, ready, set, your ears ready, kind of starts quietly.
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It's almost like the Sebulba sound should be making go up and down, but it should always be there.
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Now it's there when you see it, it's not there when you don't.
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You want to build that tension of the fact that it's right on his tail there.
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And if you don't hear it, you don't really get the sense that it's right there all the time.
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And if anything, that giant sound should be getting bigger and bigger during the whole thing
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Because that's the thing that you're afraid of, is the fact that that guy's just going to push him.
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The engine's going to come right over and right into his head.
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whatever you think of the finished product they're hammering out new scenes and new locations they
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were working out the details of the pod racing scene and all the sound effects that would play
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throughout they wanted to get the lighting of the palace just right they weren't preoccupied with
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recreating the original trilogy they wanted to make something new and that's what they did was
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the dialogue kind of stilted? Yes. Were many of the characters weak? Yes. Was a lot of the acting
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not great? Yes. Was the opening crawl about a trade war pretty boring? Yes. But no one can
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accuse the prequels of trying to rip off the original trilogy. The choreography was different,
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the set pieces were different. And if you happen to be a fan of trade wars and political debates,
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which is possible, and now tariffs are all the rage again, then there's something here for you
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to watch that wasn't in the original films by contrast take a look at the making of documentary
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for the force awakens the entire time they're fixated on what happened before on nostalgia
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can't go five seconds without talking about the older films and how badly they want to emulate
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them they come across like people who are desperate to figure out what made star wars appealing so
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they can copy as much of the original films as possible they never talk about any of their bold
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What we would do is we would have sort of weekly check-in meetings with J.J. where we'd
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have a conference call, you know, a video conference call, and we would go through the
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J.J. is very adamant that we kind of go back to the core aesthetics that made the original
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trilogy so great, and a lot of that was driven by Ralph and his sensibility.
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And for us, it's kind of going back home in many ways, both for the visual look and the
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There was a feeling when I was a kid, when I saw Star Wars for the first time, that it
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There were things like being outside the sand crawler and seeing those treads, those massive
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So we wanted to go back and embrace the look of those original films, which was all part
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of the feeling of how they were able to transport you into that universe.
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things that are relevant, things you're identifying with. Certainly for all young
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kids when the movie came out they either wanted to be Luke Skywalker or they saw
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themselves as Han Solo and I think that was a part of our challenge was how are
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we going to bring new characters into this series that had that same kind of
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power. What was made clear to me very early on was that it was going to be
00:28:13.940
shot on film, which is something that I love. I love working with film. When you're making Star
00:28:20.200
Wars, there's really no choice but to shoot it on film. You have to, because the originals were
00:28:24.460
shot on film, and it's very much part of how we remember them looking and feeling. There's
00:28:30.600
something that you need to capture on celluloid, no question. The villain in training is interesting
00:28:35.500
for me because in talking about villains in Star Wars, you don't and can't get better than Darth
00:28:40.860
Vader. It's sort of the thing. They had created an image that was unmistakable. You don't need
00:28:45.660
any explanation. The guy walks through the smoke, you get the whole thing, and he's the most
00:28:50.140
threatening villain of all time. The idea that this is a character who's influenced by that
00:28:56.140
darkness started to allow a masked villain, which feels essential in a Star Wars universe, to take
00:29:03.200
form and not feel like we were being naive and acting like there wasn't a Darth Vader. Maybe
00:29:08.920
putting on the mask makes him feel more powerful. It makes perfect sense that this
00:29:15.040
guy has had a huge impact on everybody and yes this figure looms large for our
00:29:23.140
villain too. There's so many nods to Vader and how they first meet him and I
00:29:30.220
think JJ was after something more youthful and unpredictable and someone
00:29:34.760
who isn't polished and even in his lightsaber it's not quite finished. The
00:29:38.620
scene that made me feel like oh my gosh this is crazy is when all of the casts are around that
00:29:45.540
table planning. I just want to say one more thing when everyone's done. The moment that meant the
00:29:50.040
most to me personally was Ackbar was on set. And you know security's been so tight we're not allowed
00:29:57.620
to take pictures or anything but I had to take a picture of Ackbar on set and show it to my
00:30:01.340
brothers because we loved Ackbar you know it's a trap. How is it possible to power a weapon of that
00:30:06.200
tries. They're fangirling about Admiral Akbar being on set. They're making sure all the visuals
00:30:12.520
look like the original trilogy. One callback after another without any new ideas. From a business
00:30:17.380
perspective, it makes sense, at least in the short term. The film made $2 billion, and as a result,
00:30:23.280
Disney decided that there must be insatiable demand for Star Wars products, even if they're
00:30:28.880
unoriginal and uninteresting. Having no respect for the audience at all, which is another problem
00:30:35.100
with all these companies. They have no respect for the audience, think the audience is stupid.
1.00
00:30:40.420
And so they think that, well, you'll just guzzle down whatever slop they give you.
1.00
00:30:46.020
And it doesn't matter. A lot of the criticism directed towards higher education is deserved.
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Many universities charge absurd amounts of money to teach students things that won't help them get
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a job and probably shouldn't have been majors in the first place. Meanwhile, half the country is
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buried in student debt. So when a university actually tries to do things differently, it
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stands out. My show is proud to be sponsored by Grand Canyon University. GCU is a private,
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than the standard garden hose. Most people have had the exact same experience. You pull it 10 feet
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suffer through for no reason. There's another option with pocket hose. It's the pocket hose
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ballistic. And unlike most reinvented products, this one actually makes sense. The pocket hose
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ballistic is reinforced with a liquid crystal polymer used in bulletproof vests making the
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anti-burst sleeve practically bulletproof the liquid crystal polymer fiber is also five times
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stronger than steel at the same time the hose itself is lightweight easy to move around and
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easy to store turn the water on and it expands turn the water off and it shrinks right back down
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to pocket size and now for a limited time when you purchase a new pocket hose ballistic you'll
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and data rates may apply. That's why Bob Iger thought that it made sense for Disney to flood
00:33:07.220
the zone to release one film every year along with a slew of television shows. It began mass
00:33:12.600
producing this stuff. And to that end, Disney created something called The Volume, which is
00:33:17.020
basically a cylindrical soundstage that's surrounded by LED screens that display video game style CGI
00:33:23.140
backgrounds. It was supposed to be much better than a traditional green screen, and it would
00:33:27.540
fool audiences into thinking that Disney was shooting on location or building complicated
00:33:32.180
sets, which they weren't. Watch. While filming this scene from Disney's The Mandalorian,
00:33:38.000
the actors could see their surroundings, but the surroundings weren't actually there.
00:33:42.460
All of this is just LED screens, displaying backgrounds pre-made in a video game engine.
00:33:49.580
Compare that with this fight scene from Avengers Endgame, where actors jumped around in a sea of
00:33:54.620
green imagining how VFX artists would make this planet look once filming had ended.
00:33:59.820
The Mandalorian is one of the first major productions to choose LED walls over green
00:34:04.300
screens, and the benefits for the actors are just the tip of the iceberg.
00:34:08.460
led walls make the lighting better filming smoother and in certain cases cost a lot less than using
00:34:13.580
green screens now you may be thinking this isn't so new i've seen something like this before and
00:34:18.940
you're right kind of the predecessor to what we see on the mandalorian is a driving scene like
00:34:23.820
this one from dr no you've got the actor in the car and behind them a screen with footage of the
00:34:28.540
road they've traveled but the technology was limited say you want to move the camera angle
00:34:32.940
during the scene. That projected footage can't move with the camera. But by using Unreal Engine,
00:34:38.300
tech borrowed from the video game field, that problem is solved. Artists can create a
00:34:43.020
photorealistic 3D background that moves strictly with the camera's field of view, known as the
00:34:47.900
frustum. So if the camera swings around and changes angles, the background shifts in precisely the
00:34:53.180
same way. This allows motion tracked cameras to execute traditional cinematography techniques
00:34:58.700
within the virtual set achieving cinematic movements like the parallax effect where an
00:35:03.660
object in the foreground moves at a different speed than the background amplifies the illusion
00:35:07.660
of filming at an actual location he says lighting is one of the key benefits of working with virtual
00:35:12.700
sets the light coming from the leds provide realistic colors and reflections on the actors
00:35:17.500
and props something you simply can't achieve with green screen like most tech demos it sounds
00:35:23.420
convincing enough it seems to solve all the problems of traditional green screens uh the
00:35:28.140
executives at Disney concluded that it would help them mass-produce shows like Kenobi and The
00:35:32.720
Mandalorian, and nobody would notice that they were cheaping out. But actually, people did notice.
00:35:39.520
This is a video from the YouTuber Zax giving a few examples of how using the volume for some
00:35:45.000
very awkward staging decisions that made no sense in the context of the story. And full disclosure,
00:35:50.480
once you watch this video, there's a good chance you won't be able to stomach any of these Disney
00:35:54.500
star wars shows anymore if somehow you were able to do that to begin with here it is the volume is
00:36:00.500
basically a sound stage that's run by ilm under their brand stagecraft it's a super cool technology
00:36:07.140
but it can be super limiting but with the volume and stagecraft there's no choice it can look like
00:36:13.460
your characters are anywhere but they're really on a small stage and you can change the backdrop
00:36:19.540
but it's always a circle remember that but if you need more than one actor to move through that space
00:36:28.100
it gets silly fast and so what you get is scenes like this from kenobi the one that launched a
00:36:34.100
thousand memes the chase starts in a circle and that's because the actors can't gain or
00:36:40.660
lose any distance between each other because there's no distance to gain so they look like
00:36:46.500
parents who are trying to lose a race to their kid to boost their self-esteem so now he's gotta
00:36:52.340
escape but there's a freaking laser fence those are hard to get around they are except for this
00:36:57.620
one which is very easy to walk around oh well good yeah so they panic for a second trying to
00:37:02.180
get through but then obi-wan realizes he can shoot the control panel and get through why didn't he
00:37:06.660
just walk around well this is much more exciting sir i don't know man just walk around the hill
00:37:16.500
but it gets even dumber with all the stormtroopers taken out obi-wan runs up to the checkpoint which
00:37:23.120
is made of powerful lasers and he can't quite figure out how to shut them off so he decides
00:37:27.540
to shoot the controls and hope that it will deactivate the lasers now i want you to take a
00:37:32.040
very close look at this image right here and tell me what do you think obi-wan should have done now
00:37:38.000
it might make sense for obi-wan to want to disable these lasers if he had intended on using the
00:37:42.960
vehicle but he doesn't to be fair bringing the truck through wasn't the volume's fault
00:37:49.520
no there was a scripted reason for that not a good reason but a scripted reason and what
00:37:55.140
possible reason could they have i'm gonna have to circle back to that so i'm gonna guess that
00:38:00.620
the reason that he didn't go around the laser fence was because there is no around the laser
00:38:06.400
fence and they also couldn't go over it because there is no over it it's a curved led screen and
00:38:14.160
i'm going to posit that these are the edges of that screen and once you can recognize it you
00:38:19.520
start seeing it everywhere like maybe if it's not in the volume you have them be surrounded by a
00:38:23.440
dozen stormtroopers and he has no chance or they have leia or something because the volume they're
00:38:28.960
coming from one direction and there's only three of them with this filming technique you can't have
00:38:32.880
actors enter or exit that circle while on camera so they kind of got a teleport outside the volume
00:38:38.900
circle perspective change obi-wan and leia are saved and now all the performers are inside that
00:38:45.500
circle and so they can interact there's another example where vader is in front of a wall of
00:38:51.220
flames but he could clearly just walk around it if he wanted to but with the volume the actors
00:38:55.860
can't walk around anything now with the exception of and or pretty much all of disney star wars
00:39:00.140
shows have relied on this crutch and it's obviously making the shows worse now for comparison here's
00:39:06.080
how lucas was filming his big climactic showdowns 27 years ago and this is what filmmaking looked
00:39:11.500
like in the pre-disney era watch let's get that and action
00:39:30.140
Now, with the wonders of modern technology embraced by Disney, none of this is possible
00:39:53.540
anymore. Characters can't fall from heights or chase each other around because they're
00:39:57.160
confined to a tiny stage surrounded by led screens on all sides and by the way this is a long topic
00:40:02.160
of cgi it needs to be said that the prequels actually had some extremely well done sequences
00:40:06.280
uh the opening of revenge of the sith is one of them so so was the lightsaber duel at the end of
00:40:11.700
phantom menace and the pod racing somehow a movie from three decades ago in several respects
00:40:16.780
looks better than what disney is producing now but the star wars content isn't only terrible
00:40:53.880
of the new trilogy, in which forced guests to be locked away in a windowless building
00:40:58.060
that was supposed to resemble a spaceship. And the whole pitch was that you get to hang out with
00:41:04.040
Rey and all these great new characters. But the fans didn't respond to any of this, because all
00:41:09.220
of these new characters are garbage, and the hotel was a frankly insane idea. Because who doesn't
0.96
00:41:15.340
want to stay at a hotel with no windows? And so they shut down the hotel, and now they're bringing
00:41:21.820
back characters from the original trilogy for their theme park. And this is how they're introducing
00:41:51.820
they don't look anything like the you know actual characters but i guess these are the
00:42:16.020
best actors disney could find they were desperate to give their customers an alternative to kylo
00:42:21.120
Ren, and so they had to scramble. Now, think about what a humiliating about-face this is.
00:42:25.880
They were convinced, to the point that they spent a billion dollars on the idea, that people were
00:42:29.360
clamoring to walk around the Disney Star Wars universe they created, and now they're realizing
00:42:34.020
that actually nobody wants to do that. It's quite likely that no one at Disney has any idea what
00:42:39.560
went wrong. In fact, it's guaranteed they have no idea. Let's be honest, the cost of living isn't
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This is from an exit interview that Kathleen Kennedy did with Deadline a few months ago
00:43:45.660
She was asked about the low points in her tenure,
00:43:51.260
The lows are that you've got a very, very small percentage
00:43:54.100
of the fan base that has enormous expectations,
00:44:00.420
then you know going in that you're going to disappoint them.
00:44:03.320
I'm not sure there's anything you could do about that
00:44:07.840
and try to stick to the essence of what George created.
00:44:10.020
he embedded incredible values into star wars and what it has to say the whole idea of hope and fun
00:44:14.860
and entertainment and what he's done over all these years that's what i tried to preserve and
00:44:18.900
i wouldn't do that any differently and i wouldn't change anything that we've done over the years
00:44:23.740
no of course you wouldn't kathleen yes according to kathleen kennedy a very very small percentage
00:44:29.500
of angry fans who she's previously suggested are misogynists are upset because they want to
00:44:34.200
continue to see pretty much the same thing. Apparently, the backlash is coming from a tiny
00:44:39.960
sliver of the Star Wars fan base, which perfectly explains why the entire franchise is bombing right
00:44:45.220
now, which makes a lot of sense. 1% of fans hate change, and therefore, nobody cares about
00:44:52.000
a Star Wars movie for the first time ever. Never mind the fact that Kathleen Kennedy's idea of new
00:44:58.000
and interesting content is a cheap-looking LED wall, along with shows built around the trials
0.97
00:45:02.780
and tribulations of black lesbian witches.
0.96
00:45:06.920
Actually, that's selling the acolytes short.
0.99
00:45:09.300
They also managed to shoehorn gender-neutral pronouns into the show as well,
00:45:25.640
Now, this kind of dialogue was inserted into these shows
00:45:28.000
as a deliberate effort by Kathleen Kennedy to make a political point.
00:45:33.580
Quote, my belief is that storytelling does need to be representative of all people.
00:45:40.440
Operating within these giant franchises now with social media and the level of expectation, it's terrifying.
00:45:46.120
I think Leslie, the showrunner of the Acolyte, has struggled a little bit with it.
00:45:50.040
I think a lot of the women who step into Star Wars struggle with this a bit more because of the fan base being so male-dominated.
00:45:55.560
They sometimes get attacked in ways that can be quite personal.
0.99
00:45:58.040
Now, it's actually difficult to string together so many idiotic comments in a row, even if you're
1.00
00:46:03.220
trying to. No, storytelling does not need to be representative of all people. It's impossible for
0.99
00:46:11.320
storytelling to be representative of all people, for one thing. There are more than 8 billion people
00:46:15.840
on the planet. And as a practical matter, no film or television show can represent whatever that
00:46:20.460
means, all of them. But even if it were somehow possible to say, cast all 8 billion people in
00:46:26.080
your show and represent every single one of them, that would not improve the storytelling at all.
00:46:30.540
It's irrelevant to this. In fact, it's not just irrelevant to storytelling.
00:46:34.340
Representation is not just irrelevant to storytelling. It's anti-storytelling.
00:46:39.120
Okay, a story should not represent the wishes and desires and fantasies, much less political
00:46:46.060
ideologies, of every single person who hears the story. It should instead represent the singular
00:47:22.900
I want to hear your story. That's what we're all sitting here for.
00:47:27.640
Does the Godfather represent all people? Does Moby Dick represent all people? Does Michelangelo's
00:47:34.720
David, does Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, do any of these iconic works of art through their various
00:47:39.780
different mediums represent everyone on the planet? Were they crowdsourced? Were they made
00:47:45.640
democratically after taking into account the priorities and preferences of the voting majority?
00:47:53.620
If Francis Ford Coppola or Melville or Michelangelo had taken that approach,
00:48:00.920
And if they had been made, they wouldn't be masterpieces.
00:48:03.700
They would be watered down, lowest common denominator sludge,
00:48:07.440
stripped of everything challenging and distinct about them
00:48:09.780
in an attempt to appeal to the largest number of people.
00:48:19.060
And if their vision is brilliant and beautiful and their skills can match it, then their creation will be representative of no one's desires but their own and yet will connect with and inspire and fascinate billions of humans for centuries.
00:48:37.540
Now, George Lucas obviously created something like that with his original series.
00:48:42.400
He obviously created something that connected with billions of people for, if not centuries, decades.
00:48:52.140
Disney used to create art like that decades ago.
00:48:56.740
But they, along with most of the rest of mainstream Hollywood today, no longer create art that inspires and fascinates billions across generations because they no longer create art at all.
00:49:06.580
Art is not something, again, that can be constructed strategically in a boardroom as part of a strategy to monetize your IP.
00:49:18.180
No art has ever been made that way or could ever be made that way.
00:49:25.180
So if you're making films that fail to connect and fail to rise to the level of art at all, then what do you do?
00:49:32.260
well disney decided that the best strategy was to yell at the audience for not liking their
00:49:38.300
product enough and this has been the pitch for years now you know uh if you hate the terrible
00:49:45.480
product then you hate women which is which is something that everybody associated with the
00:49:49.600
acolyte of course kept saying very explicitly watch i want to ask you both because this is
0.71
00:49:54.780
i would say arguably the gayest star wars i think by a considerable margin and uh are you excited
00:50:11.580
No, I know you are gay, but I'm asking are you excited
0.97
00:50:13.780
about putting this, you know, this is going to be
0.92
00:50:23.680
by gay stuff. Well, that's true, but in my world
1.00
00:50:32.160
And yet people have told me that it's the gayest Star Wars.
00:50:38.620
No, I think that Star Wars is so gay already.
1.00
00:50:48.120
and then send each other a reference photo.
0.91
00:50:57.420
I think it's canon that R2-D2 is a lesbian.
0.82
00:51:07.400
Now, if you think that all these people should never work in Hollywood again,
1.00
00:51:10.440
then according to Kathleen Kennedy, you simply hate women.
1.00
00:51:16.320
You want to be told the same stories over and over again.
1.00
00:51:20.020
I mean, that's how completely retarded these people are.
1.00
00:51:23.560
That, obviously, they're also completely missing the point.
1.00
00:51:25.740
The problem is not that the audience wants to see the same thing over and over again.
00:51:33.780
Like, what you're doing is the same thing over and over again.
00:51:37.440
Okay, just using the same formula and plugging in different characters and then throwing in some gender pronoun nonsense, throwing in a lesbian or a black person, that's not something new.
00:51:51.620
but this was their strategy to take the formula to take a formula that they didn't create
0.99
00:51:57.440
and then make it new by like oh we're going to have more black people and lesbians in it than
1.00
00:52:02.740
before and what you need to realize is that these dumb narcissistic destructive women are in charge
1.00
00:52:12.020
of pretty much every corporation in the country right now i mean star wars is the least of our
1.00
00:52:16.340
problems in that respect. Actually, Kathleen, the problem with the Disney content is that it's
00:52:21.740
terrible. I mean, let's go back to that Red Letter Media video for a second. It's true that
00:52:25.460
the original films were formulaic, but they also executed the formula well.
00:52:30.520
You know, Luke goes through the hero's journey, suffers, loses his hand before triumphing in the
00:52:37.880
end. That's classic storytelling. Now, Rey, on the other hand, was created in a lab by Kathleen
00:52:47.220
Kennedy and the feminists at Disney. Her arc makes no sense. She learns the force one minute
00:52:52.660
and she's defeating Kylo Ren in one-on-one combat the next. For his part, Finn kind of does nothing
00:52:58.760
after the first movie. Poe was written as a Han Solo clone. They completely change Luke's
00:53:04.240
personality. Han Solo doesn't evolve either. Basically, at every turn, you could tell that
00:53:08.300
Disney was winging the new films. It's not that they had a new vision. The problem again is they
00:53:13.060
had no vision whatsoever. Their only goal was just pumping out as much content as possible
00:53:18.800
as a monetization strategy. Here's a post from a Disney official X account dated December 2020.
00:53:27.640
Quote, over the next few years, roughly 10 Marvel series, 10 Star Wars series,
00:53:32.880
15 Disney live-action Disney animation and Pixar series, plus 15 all-new Disney live-action Disney
00:53:39.980
animation and Pixar features will be released directly on Disney+. Now, almost six years later,
00:53:47.400
out of 10 Star Wars series, we're finally getting a movie. They apparently canceled a bunch of other
00:53:52.480
projects for one reason or another, and this grand new movie, after all this time, is a repackaged
00:53:57.320
season four of the show, The Mandalorian. That's what The Mandalorian and Grogu is. The budget of
00:54:04.600
this alleged major motion picture is less than $170 million, which is a fraction of the budget
00:54:08.560
of every other modern Star Wars film. Disney's throwing this on the screen because they're out
00:54:12.800
of ideas. They figure they might as well try to sell some toys before the franchise is put on a
00:54:17.420
definite hiatus. So that's exactly what they're going to do. Now, George Lucas was attacked,
00:54:22.900
rightly so for including Ewoks in Return of the Jedi and Jar Jar Binks in Phantom Menace as a
0.89
00:54:28.540
cynical ploy to sell merchandise, which is a significant reason for his enormous wealth.
00:54:33.740
But Luke has never made an entire movie from start to finish solely to sell toys without any
00:54:38.080
meaningful plot, characterization, or reason to care about anything that happens. It took a series
00:54:43.400
of catastrophic decisions by Bob Iger, Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Rian Johnson, and company
00:54:49.320
to get us to this point, but we're definitely here.
00:54:56.980
Disney has created in its place a political project
00:55:11.020
It's that, contrary to what Kathleen Kennedy expected,
00:55:13.420
millions of Americans are refusing to go along with it.
00:55:19.220
about hating women or hating new ideas. They just hate the bastardized, pointless, insulting,
0.99
00:55:26.620
trashy, low IQ mess that this franchise has to become, has become. Which is to say that Star Wars
0.99
00:55:35.140
is dead and Disney killed it. That'll do it for the show today and this week. Talk to you
00:55:53.220
widely considered one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.
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A man who had a vision for a colorblind society,
0.63
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What unfolded behind the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963
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We wanted to show you a clip of the I Have a Dream speech,
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In fact, King's family has made a lot of money suing media outlets.
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What they're doing makes it very difficult to judge Martin Luther King Jr.
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not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.
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Is America today stronger, more unified, and racially equal than before King's rise?
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These questions demand answers, and as Americans, we are entitled to a full accounting of the Civil Rights Movement and its consequences.
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King's Movement fundamentally transformed our country and our system of government.
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I speak as a citizen of the world. Each day the war goes on, the hatred increases, though the cause of evil prosper.
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The first part of our two-part special on the Civil Rights Movement, a new constitution, available now on Daily Wire+.