bsu legato

By freakish coincidence (or not), I too was out shooting on Sunday. This was the first weekend its been nice enough, and I've been free enough, to spend some time at the range. I had brought nearly all my toys with me but the wind began picking up shortly after we arrived so I had to rush a little before it got too gusty. First up was the M1. Not surprisingly it shot flawlessly, and the new lithium grease I "borrowed" from work worked like a charm on the bolt & receiver. By the time I switched to the Kar98k the wind was getting too strong to do anything usefull, and after only 5 shots I packed the rifles in. Switching to pistols, I ran a few mags through the 1911 just to get the feel for it back after the looooong winter months. Then with the wind getting almost unbearable, it was the moment I had been waiting for since last October. I unlocked the Colt 1851 Navy and loaded it up. The first cylinder was shot offhand, just to confirm everything worked as it was supposed to. The next 12 were benched so that I could get a true feel for what this pistol was capable of. I was quite honestly shocked. At 20 yds it managed a group roughly 2 1/2", with the exception of one flyer that was completely my fault. More amazing was the fact that with 21grains of FFFG it shot nearly to point of aim! Here I was expecting it to shoot anywhere from 6" to 12" high. By this point it was too windy to do anything so I packed up and went home, but knowing just how well my Colt shoots made the trip worthwhile.

Rub it in, why don't you? No, here in Manitoba we have this thing called "winter" where it gets really snowy, cold and generally unpleasant. Fortunately, this year I finally had a second car to drive while my Mustang rested peacefully underneath 2' of snow, and I had room to park them both. Now that spring is here I can finally get it back on the road. The down side is that its going straight to the body shop to get the driver's side floor replaced.

Holy crap, you're right! THEY'RE BOTH ANIME CHARACTERS. With similar character designs... Ok, your need to link everything to either Evangelion and/or Leiji Matsumoto is usually pretty funny but you are really reaching here. Just what exactly is so similar about these two? It's clearly not the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, eyebrows, jawline, cheeks or the costume.

I think we should ban that Dangard Ace guy. I mean...he's been kind of cranky since TO has been getting such lousy weather for the last month or so, especially compared to the sunny prairies. And whats with that name? "Dangard Ace?" Could he have picked a more obscure super robot to name himself after?

Ah....the joys of turning your car over for the first time in the spring. Now I remember what I've been missing all winter long. It was the sound of my new Mac cat-back system burbling thru the tail pipes. Well rest assured that my neighbors got a good dose of that sweet rumble once I got my pony running.

[indy] It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage. [/indy]

I think it was more about losing an engine with three or four TIE Fighters behind him in hot pursuit that made him consign himself to his doom. H That was something I thought the '97 SEs actually fixed. In that version, you can clearly hear that Red Leader's engines aren't...er, running on all cylinders. Then he takes another hit and the rest is history. Now that I mention it, I don't even know if the new DVDs retained that change.

They certainly don't have any Elvis in them, that's for damn sure.

You know...I never heard "Carrie" until after it was pointed out to me. Before that it just sounded like a garbled "HeeEeyyYyy!!" From then on all I could hear was "Carrie!" Then when LFL finally explained their take on it, I decided that I didn't know what I was hearing. If I want, it sounds like "Carrie!!!" or if I'm in the mood, it's "HeeEeyyYyy!!!" I think this is a sign that movies just aren't meant to be watched so very many times. And now I have to pop in the DVDs to listen for JsARC's "Gold Leader" flub.

My point about the ANH gags was that it wasn't some sort of "new" innovation for Lucas or Star Wars, and while can thank Kurtz or Marcia Lucas for their removal we're only doing so because we don't know who to really thank. God knows it's improper to ever acknowledge Lucas's work on these films. Well I do agree that the "clunk" was an unnecessary addition to that scene. And while the troopers in that scene may have been there to put the droids in momentary peril, they're by and large portrayed somewhat comically throughout ANH. Hell, they can't hit Han, Chewie, Luke and Leia from less than 15ft (maybe if they actually aimed, instead of firing from the hip all the time). But you know, there's also a point that fans have clearly reached when they stopped looking at the films in the same light as they were intended. They were intended to be light entertainment, with some mythic underpinings. That's it. It's Star Wars, not Se7en. And if anybody IS to blame for Clunky McKnockshishead, it would be Ben Burtt. Edit: Incidentally, I always felt that Han trying vainly to blow the torch out was more of an Indiana Jones-ism. But I've honestly never heard anybody actually complain about it until today. I'll have to jot this down somewhere.

Well yes and no, Hurin. There were some TPM-worthy goofy gags in ANH that were fortunately excised before the final edit was locked down. Whether we can thank Kurtz, Marcia Lucas or George himself is anybody's guess. Scroll through some of the deleted material on T-Bone's SW Universe and see for yourself. Empire seems pretty much free of that sense of humor, although I would argue that the Ugnaughts playing "keep-away" with Threepio's head was a little on the silly side.

Not a bad set of extras. I'll have to get this.

I thought you were Quadrono.

Jar Jar was more than likely inspired from a similar character in Kurosawa's They Who Step on the Tail of the Tiger. In that film, Toshiro Mifune's character and his retainers have a "comic" porter who tags along for their journey, and is generally over-the-top and annoying.

My cousins kids, 4 and 10 years old, are both big SW fans. OT and PT alike. I'll conduct an informal survey this weekend when I see them. *damn, I deleted my Jar-Jar emoticon.

Obviously the "United Nations" in the Robotech universe has no relation to the corrupt globalist organization that we live with here in the real world. I'm not sure if it's ironic that Harmony Gold would back the UN, or if it makes sense in some dark, disturbing way. In either case, this ad is nothing but propaganda for the naive.

AgentONE told me that was the way it's spelled on the birth certificate.

I've decided that I'm not having anymore birthdays, so count me out.

Come on now....look how long it took readers to realize how talentless Rob Liefeld was.

Meh...Satan was much better in Oh God, You Devil.

I doubt we'll ever know exactly how much of the PT Lucas had imagined back in the late 70's and early 80's. Not unless somebody manages to convince LFL to reproduce the legendary "Notebook" that Lucas scribbled down his ideas over the years. But I'm sure some of it goes deeper than just a superficial "Anakin turns into Vader" type scenario. Much of the plot from Phantom Menace actually stems from the earliest draft of the original Star Wars. It uses many of the discarded elements of that script, the one that was oh-so similar to Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress (more akin to Kurosawa's They Who Step on the Tail of the Tiger, actually). Padme we know is largely a modern invention, since Lucas has already explained that was why he made Leia's memories about her mother so vague. Maul and Dooku were again more than likely invented for the movies, but early drafts of ANH did feature multiple Sith lords. As you pointed out, the emperor was first featured in the ANH novelisation, but yet that prologue is eerily similar to Palpatine's plot as it has unfolded in the films. Was it an invention of Alan Dean Foster, or was he working from Lucas' notes? We'll never know. IIRC, Foster was interviewed a while back and he didn't seem to recall much about writing the ANH novel. As for the troopers, that image I posted was from Star Wars Poster Monthly #4. It was obviously an official publication, but again as with the ANH novel we have no clue as to its pedigree. But that is not the only source. The Star Wars Album ( a precursor to today's souvineer magazine) also hinted that the Stormtroopers may be clones. This was repeated in the Starlog Technical Journal, from 1993. So if there's any blame to be assigned, I'd direct it at Zahn and the rest of the 90's era EU. But ultimately what matters to me is the films, and they make no statement about the Stormtroopers one way or the other. Personally, I find it fits perfectly well with the Empire's motif of "technology over humanity." I see no reason why the Empire wouldn't be so cold as to grow their own legions of disposable troops to send into battle.

Without going into Ep III spoilers (there's a seperate thread for that, of course) I now see why Lucas gave us kiddy Anakin. To me anyway, the overall arc works out fine once you see all the pieces of the puzzle. The flaw lies more in the performances and Lucas' penchant for awkward dialog. IMO, of course. You'll be hard pressed to find me defending anything to do with Jake Llyod, thats for damn sure. But beyond that...? No, I don't mind it actually. Sure there's different ways Anakin could have been approached. Its not like some mathematical formula where there's only one right answer. But without actually comitting all 6 hours of them to film, we'll never know if they would have worked better.

Yes and no. His story has changed over the years, but I believe the truth is that much of the basic plot elements of the PT did grow out of his writing sessions for the OT. Correct probably correct. Possibly. See THIS image. There's annecdotal evidence all the way back to 1978 that they may have been clones. No, but he was originally concieved as part of a larger force of "Supertroopers," a kind of next-level of Stormtroopers. This concept was ultimately dropped. Probably not. But things change, I s'pose. No, Vader clearly wasn't the story back in ANH. Lucas was clearly looking ahead by allowing Vader to survive, however. Vader actually died in an earlier version of the script. But the whole "was he always Luke's father" thing could be an entire thread on its own.

I think a lot of the objections fans and critics have with TPM's Anakin is the fact that he was a kid in the first place. Lets face it, nobody likes kids in movies, and Jake Lloyd was hardly what I'd call a good actor (his performance in Jingle All the Way notwithstanding ). Like dejr8bud said, we need to see that Anakin was good at some point in his life. If he had been a creepy monster from day one, then it would hardly be much of a decent into the dark side, much less an interesting story. I suppose some of this could have been avoided if we had had some sort of teenage Anakin in TPM, but that wouldn't have worked out with the story Lucas had developed. But back to the point, I suppose it is a little creepy seeing that Vader wasn't always a wheezing tyrant who'd choke you for the slightest failure. But what did people expect? Evil child Anakin? Conflicted child Anakin? The bit about Hitler is a good example. Did anybody see the miniseries "Hitler: Rise of Evil?" It did a good job of portraying Hitler's ascension to power in his later years, but the period dealing with his childhood and pre-war years as a crappy artist were extremely superficial. It essentially painted him as being a monster-in-training from the earliest age. While this may in fact be historically accurate (I haven't done the research one way or the other) the fact is that if he was portrayed as anything but evil at any stage of his life there would be lynch mobs chasing after the producers. Nobody wants to be seen as being "sympathetic" to Hitler, no matter how historically correct it may be. Its still too sensitive a subject for too many people. That is why we will never see any portrayal of Hitler other than the raving lunatic we're all familiar with from wartime films. People have an excuse for being that sensitive about Hitler, but not Star Wars. Star Wars is a work of fiction. Pulp fiction to be exact.