Star Wars Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker, available on home video

[sh9000]

 

[Dynaman]

I never paid attention that Gwendolyn Christie was Phasma.  What a waste of a great actress.

[Thom]

Waste of a great actress and waste of a promising character. It's a shame that Phasma was turned into little more than a joke.

[azrael]

 

7 hours ago, sh9000 said:

 

Disney First Order "Stormtroopers" are what happens when you suck the fun outta normal Stormtroopers and give them Nerf guns.

[pengbuzz]

3 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I never paid attention that Gwendolyn Christie was Phasma.  What a waste of a great actress.

 

30 minutes ago, Thom said:

Waste of a great actress and waste of a promising character. It's a shame that Phasma was turned into little more than a joke.

Yeah...both the actress and the character deserved far better than that. My vote would be that she survived TLJ, and ends up taking over the First Order as its' commander.

(I know, unlikely to happen.)

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Thom said:

Waste of a great actress and waste of a promising character. It's a shame that Phasma was turned into little more than a joke.

Well, that's what happens when you try to deliberately make a "cool" character.  She's the Great Value version of Boba Fett.

[Dynaman]

12 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Well, that's what happens when you try to deliberately make a "cool" character.  She's the Great Value version of Boba Fett.

Well, make a cool character that doesn't actually DO anything cool.  At all, ever.  And is only really known for being thrown down the garbage chute.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Well, make a cool character that doesn't actually DO anything cool.  At all, ever.  And is only really known for being thrown down the garbage chute.

Yeah, exactly like Boba Fett... who just stood around looking menacing then got one-shotted by a blind man and plunges headlong into a giant anus monster in the desert.

Phasma arguably accomplishes more than he ever does, but because she's an obvious attempt to create a designated cool character the attempt fails.

[Thom]

I'm hoping for a surprise Phasma appearance in this one, and for her to go down like a boss!

[Dynaman]

Fett at least managed to capture (or lead to the capture) of Han and Leaia.  I can't actually remember Phasma doing anything besides getting thrown down the garbage chute.  I'm not a Fett fan either mind you.  I'm still boggled by the fan adoration of the character.

[jvmacross]

1 hour ago, Dynaman said:

I'm still boggled by the fan adoration of the character.

Maybe it is more to do with what his character represents...the "Manadalorians" (at least before we were all told he actually wasn't a Mandalorian?)

Thus a show about "a" mandalorian and not about "boba fett"?

[renegadeleader1]

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I'm still boggled by the fan adoration of the character.

What it comes down to is this...

Back in a time before the EU, before the prequels we had a a guy in cool armor being singled out by the neck snapper himself Vader about not disintegrating the target, he also talked back to Vader damaging his bounty,  and beat Han Solo at his own game of hide in the garbage.

Granted he did go out like a b**** in ROTJ after his jetpack malfunctions, but that scene also made him cool because he showcased his suits weapons and established him as a walking arsenal.

With some imagination all those scenes pretty much establish him as a cunning badass that doesn't take crap from anyone even the emperor's right hand man, and may be prone to excessive violence with a bunch of weapons at his disposal like jetpacks, flamethrowers, harpoon darts, and missile launchers.

 

That foundation is essentially what makes the Mandalorian the Mandalorian in this new show.

[electric indigo]

Exactly. Before ROTJ ruined a couple of things, Boba was like Clint Eastwood IN SPACE

[Bolt]

The Mandalorian is Fett's legacy.  

[sh9000]

 

[derex3592]

Ok. THAT trailer did at least get me somewhat pumped for one reason and one reason ONLY. JOHN FREAKIN WILLIAMS Duel of The Fates Version whatever this would be!  Soundtracks count for a lot in Star Wars and let's face it, other than Ray's them in TFA, there hasn't been anything else I remotely remember from Ep 7 & 8.  I do remember back  when the soundtrack for Ep 1, 2, and 3 came out, I bought the CD's and played them in my car and at home all the time. Arguably, they could be called the best thing about the prequels IMHO. When Darth Maul lit up his double bladed lightsaber and that track dropped,  I admit, I was 10 years old again in the theater that day and loved it! 

Edited November 29, 2019 by derex3592

[TehPW]

2 hours ago, derex3592 said:

Ok. THAT trailer did at least get me somewhat pumped for one reason and one reason ONLY. JOHN FREAKIN WILLIAMS Duel of The Fates Version whatever this would be!  Soundtracks count for a lot in Star Wars and let's face it, other than Ray's them in TFA, there hasn't been anything else I remotely remember from Ep 7 & 8.  I do remember back  when the soundtrack for Ep 1, 2, and 3 came out, I bought the CD's and played them in my car and at home all the time. Arguably, they could be called the best thing about the prequels IMHO. When Darth Maul lit up his double bladed lightsaber and that track dropped,  I admit, I was 10 years old again in the theater that day and loved it! 

I noted that back when I came out of the theater from watching Ep7: The music was extortionarialy forgettable.

[Chronocidal]

31 minutes ago, TehPW said:

I noted that back when I came out of the theater from watching Ep7: The music was extortionarialy forgettable.

The worst part for me is that up until rather recently Amazon Music had all of the soundtracks available with Prime... I went to play my playlist one day, and got nothing but TFA, because they removed all of the soundtracks but that one.

I promptly deleted the list, and went to listen to my actual soundtracks.  I never cared a huge amount for the prequel soundtracks, because Williams seemed to basically pull off one distinct track per movie, but I can't even the new movies are that good.  One good track per movie is more than the sequel trilogy has achieved, I think, and I can't remember anything from TFA or TLJ.

Edited November 29, 2019 by Chronocidal

[sh9000]

 

[tekering]

Disney is desperately trying to remind us that Star Wars was once relevant.  

"Come back!  We're not finished!  Sure, all your beloved heroes are dead except Lando and the droids, but...  Billy Dee Williams is back!  And it's still Anthony Daniels in the suit...!"

[kalvasflam]

Here is the inevitable problem with this new set of movies, the heroes of your childhood grow old... they get fat, and ugly, and depressed, once, they were the reason you went to the movies, to escape from the present, but thanks to the need to milk the franchise, now you see them in their not so sexy selves, as they wither in the face of youth, hoping to bask in their old glory one last time.   Thank goodness, Disney has  decided to explore the generational divide and remind the old farts that they are old, it's time to move on, and for the batons to be forcibly taken from them by the young generation, because... "let the past die... kill it."

I'm sure there are 20 years olds who saw TLJ, and decided it was a perfect movie to remind the boomers and their immediate successors, GenX that it's time to move on, get out of the way, now, time's up.  Your heroes are dead, and soon, you will be too.... we're taking over.  Sadly, those same young ones don't have quite the spending power of their predecessors, and are still mostly living off of their parents.

But if Sideshow Bob can mooch off of Star wars to pump up the profit a little more, then why not, there is no tomorrow. 

Heh heh, mean, aren't I. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

21 hours ago, Thom said:

I'm hoping for a surprise Phasma appearance in this one, and for her to go down like a boss!

Ah yes, what new and exciting holes with the feared and fearless Captain Phasma fall down this time?

She's already fallen down the garbage chute and into a hull breach the size of a city... why not go for the gusto and fall into a black hole next time?  Surely there won't be another convenient desert-dwelling space anus for her to fall into.

 

 

21 hours ago, Dynaman said:

Fett at least managed to capture (or lead to the capture) of Han and Leaia.

It sounds exciting and dramatic until you realize he just tailgated the Falcon to Bespin.

Other than that, all he does is growl out a protest that Vader might accidentally kill his bounty head and stand around omniously without talking.

 

21 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I can't actually remember Phasma doing anything besides getting thrown down the garbage chute.

Phasma does a lot more talking, for one... she's apparently the First Order's Drill Sergeant Nasty.

She doesn't really do much in The Force Awakens besides talk a lot of sh*t and get thrown down the garbage chute after she takes the shields on Starkiller Base down at gunpoint.  Phasma gets more in The Last Jedi, since she passes sentence on and presides over the attempted execution of Finn and Rose, then gets an actual fight scene with Finn aboard Snoke's ship before she gets the laser trench club or whatever it is upside the head and falls into the hull breach.

That officially puts her one-up on Fett, whose only action scene was shooting Luke in the back of the hand before a blind Han Solo hits his jetpack with a stick, sending him sailing into the side of Jabba's sail barge and then into the mouth of the majestic desert space anus.

 

 

18 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

Back in a time before the EU, before the prequels we had a a guy in cool armor being singled out by the neck snapper himself Vader about not disintegrating the target, he also talked back to Vader damaging his bounty,  and beat Han Solo at his own game of hide in the garbage.

Granted he did go out like a b**** in ROTJ after his jetpack malfunctions, but that scene also made him cool because he showcased his suits weapons and established him as a walking arsenal.

You could just as easily interpret Vader's rebuke of Fett as Fett being a gung-ho moron like Killcrazy from Red Dwarf... the fact that Darth freaking Vader has to remind you that alive means don't kill them when most people wouldn't need to be told twice by one of the highest ranked Imperial officials (and the galaxy's all-time leader in casual workplace homicide) doesn't argue for intelligence or discretion.

Everything the fans built Boba Fett up to be is so weirdly irrational, because he's literally nothing more than another death-prone mook in a slightly cooler mask who checks out with even less dignity than the average masked mook.  His only real trait is that he's a very action figure-y design.

 

 

12 hours ago, derex3592 said:

Soundtracks count for a lot in Star Wars and let's face it, other than Ray's them in TFA, there hasn't been anything else I remotely remember from Ep 7 & 8.

Y'know, that hadn't really dawned on me until you said it.  I'm not much of a Star Wars fan, but I can at least hum a few tunes from the original and sequel trilogies from memory.  I can't for the life of me remember a single piece of music from the sequel trilogy.

 

 

7 hours ago, kalvasflam said:

Here is the inevitable problem with this new set of movies, the heroes of your childhood grow old... they get fat, and ugly, and depressed, once, they were the reason you went to the movies, to escape from the present, but thanks to the need to milk the franchise, now you see them in their not so sexy selves, as they wither in the face of youth, hoping to bask in their old glory one last time.

To be fair, this was a problem with the old Star Wars EU as well... the fans just don't want to acknowledge it.

Ultimately, to keep the story going and have more wars in Star Wars, everything our heroes did must inevitably come to nothing.  The galaxy would never know peace and stability again, and every victory would become a bitter defeat in the long run, because nobody's buying Star Wars without the wars.  Characters would get old, and grey, and long in the tooth, and be forced into many situations that would be ridiculously out of character, the government they helped restore would fall again to the ambitions of Imperial posers, the Sith take over again, etc.

The more I read of the old Star Wars EU, the more convinced I am that these new movies are actually a MASSIVE step up from what Star Wars had before.  

It isn't so much that fans didn't want or expect their childhood heroes to grow old, it's that they didn't expect them to grow up.  The profound lack of imagination in Star Wars's efforts to grow its story past Return of the Jedi requires certain conditions like the Jedi Order collapsing again, the New Republic that Leia worked so hard to establish to fail hard enough for the Empire to come back, and another Skywalker to take up the mantle of the Dark Side and Darth Vader.  Luke's naive farmboy optimism, Leia's belief in the power of democracy, and Han's devil-may-care attitude were never going to survive that.  The result?  Luke goes into exile the way his mentors did, Leia starts her own damned militia and to hell with the government, and Han falls back on his old bad habits after whatever stability he'd gained in a life with Leia broke down when she became a paramilitary commander and went off the grid.

 

7 hours ago, kalvasflam said:

I'm sure there are 20 years olds who saw TLJ, and decided it was a perfect movie to remind the boomers and their immediate successors, GenX that it's time to move on, get out of the way, now, time's up.  Your heroes are dead, and soon, you will be too.... we're taking over.

I'm sure there are probably some Gen Z kids who thought The Last Jedi was a perfect movie, but I suspect those are few and far between given how the response sank Solo and that even Jar-Jar Abrams has been forced to admit Star Wars fans hate the new trilogy in interviews.  That and, a lot of those younger viewers will have been introduced to Star Wars by their elder siblings and parents and will be judging Disney Star Wars by much the same yardstick as older fans.

[Chronocidal]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That officially puts her one-up on Fett, whose only action scene was shooting Luke in the back of the hand before a blind Han Solo hits his jetpack with a stick, sending him sailing into the side of Jabba's sail barge and then into the mouth of the majestic desert space anus.

Actually he was far more active in ESB, because he managed to get a few shots off at Luke on Cloud City.  The only thing he did successfully in ROTJ was trying wrap Luke up in that (physically impossible) cable tie thing from his wrist.  The guy who shot Luke in the hand was a nameless guard on the sail barge wearing a hat like Lando's disguise.

Far as Phasma goes.. the real headbanger there is the fact that she wasn't straight-up executed for treason.  They didn't force her to do jack squat, she willfully shut off the shields to save her own backside. 

[Dynaman]

33 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

 

Far as Phasma goes.. the real headbanger there is the fact that she wasn't straight-up executed for treason.  They didn't force her to do jack squat, she willfully shut off the shields to save her own backside. 

that kinda IS the definition of being forced.  The only real problem is "toughy" was so easily forced into doing so.

[azrael]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

You could just as easily interpret Vader's rebuke of Fett as Fett being a gung-ho moron like Killcrazy from Red Dwarf... the fact that Darth freaking Vader has to remind you that alive means don't kill them when most people wouldn't need to be told twice by one of the highest ranked Imperial officials (and the galaxy's all-time leader in casual workplace homicide) doesn't argue for intelligence or discretion.

Although, you have to acknowledge that bounty hunting is a complicated profession. That being the case...

[renegadeleader1]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The more I read of the old Star Wars EU, the more convinced I am that these new movies are actually a MASSIVE step up from what Star Wars had before. 

Well, that's like your opinion man, you'd be wrong, but it's your opinion.

 

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It isn't so much that fans didn't want or expect their childhood heroes to grow old, it's that they didn't expect them to grow up.

See you post this....

 

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The profound lack of imagination in Star Wars's efforts to grow its story past Return of the Jedi requires certain conditions like the Jedi Order collapsing again, the New Republic that Leia worked so hard to establish to fail hard enough for the Empire to come back, and another Skywalker to take up the mantle of the Dark Side and Darth Vader.  Luke's naive farmboy optimism, Leia's belief in the power of democracy, and Han's devil-may-care attitude were never going to survive that.  The result?  Luke goes into exile the way his mentors did, Leia starts her own damned militia and to hell with the government, and Han falls back on his old bad habits after whatever stability he'd gained in a life with Leia broke down when she became a paramilitary commander and went off the grid.

Then you post this. I can't tell if you're trying to knock the EU or Disney's sequel trilogy, because with the exception of Luke losing his farmboy optimisim that's exactly what the house of mouse gave us. Leia's back to leading some rebellion against something and Han is a failed smuggler again.

 

At least with the EU books published under Bantam the characters grew and changed. One of the first chapters of The Courtship of Princess Leia involves returning home from a campaign against an Imperial warlord and being shaken by the war crimes the Empire. He admits to himself he can no longer go back to being a carefree smuggler and rededicates himself to the New Republic cause. The only time he really goes back to being a smuggler and a scoundrel is in the later EU when Chewie's death breaks him mentally.

[kalvasflam]

I think the point Seto is making is that in order for the franchise to survive and keep the money flowing, there cannot be a happily ever after.

Imagine how boring SW would be if the movie was about the struggles of Leia governing, or Luke looking for funds to set up the new Jedi temple, or how Han is unsatisfied with his marriage because Leia was too busy with work.

Hence Elsa can’t just be queen after Frozen, she has to do something else, otherwise Frozen 2 would not be about empowerment, it would be about the day to day drudgery of ruling a kingdom, who wants to spend hours seeing Elsa haggling a trade deal or settling a dispute between the other ice carriers and her future brother in law.  We can get that in our normal lives.

This is one reason I think John Wick has worked out so well, the story is taking place in the span of less than a couple of months over three movies.

This also goes back to how sad Hollywood is, not able to come up with any new material.

[Bolt]

It's a Sad state of affairs in the land of Laralay..

Not all of the EU was great. But I enjoyed it immensely. I've always been open to what the new SW could be, even if it wasn't my preference. As long as it was good..

It's not good.

As much as anyone wants to talk trash about the old SW and hindsight it down to nothing , it was good. It was why we bought the comics and toys and legos and books and built custom lightsabers that are bada$$.

Yes i'm gonna see this on the big screen, I've seen all eight episodes on the big screen as they premiered. Not gonna skip out now just because it's not what i want or particularly feel vested in. And yes, that means it's not really exciting. I was more excited by Godzilla.

[JB0]

3 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

The only thing he did successfully in ROTJ was trying wrap Luke up in that (physically impossible) cable tie thing from his wrist.

It isn't impossible IF YOU USE THE FORCE.

Boba Fett was a secret jedi. Canon.

[Chronocidal]

3 hours ago, Dynaman said:

that kinda IS the definition of being forced.  The only real problem is "toughy" was so easily forced into doing so.

Or, she could have just as easily have said "Hell no", let them shoot her, and sacrifice herself to save the base she was charged with protecting.

Generally that's what military service involves.  What she did was called high treason.

They didn't force her to do anything.  She chose to betray her oath of service to the First Order, and Starkiller Base was destroyed due to her betrayal.  The fact that she survived to the second movie at all is just one more testament to the overwhelming ineptitude of every single character with any sort of authority in these new movies.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Actually he was far more active in ESB, because he managed to get a few shots off at Luke on Cloud City.  The only thing he did successfully in ROTJ was trying wrap Luke up in that (physically impossible) cable tie thing from his wrist.  The guy who shot Luke in the hand was a nameless guard on the sail barge wearing a hat like Lando's disguise.

Was he?  I don't remember him doing much besides whining at Vader and standing around menacingly.

 

3 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Far as Phasma goes.. the real headbanger there is the fact that she wasn't straight-up executed for treason. 

Who's going to know?  Unless she tells someone herself, literally the only way anyone would find out would be if they were a force user and read her mind, and those are pretty thin on the ground and not part of her normal social circle since her branch of service is normally represented by General Hux.

Any access records related to her disabling Starkiller Base's shields went up in smoke with the base itself.

 

3 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

They didn't force her to do jack squat, she willfully shut off the shields to save her own backside. 

They held her at gunpoint and made her deactivate Starkiller Base's shields under the implicit (or perhaps explicit) threat that they'd blow her head off if she didn't.  That is the very definition of coercion.

I mean, yeah, her actual job is to NOT do that kind of thing but still...

 

 

2 hours ago, azrael said:

Although, you have to acknowledge that bounty hunting is a complicated profession. That being the case...

If you take the bounty head alive, sure... "storm the place, guns blazing and then pick through the bodies afterwards" doesn't really require much smarts.  Boba Fett did have to be warned not to disintegrate the target by Vader.

 

 

22 minutes ago, renegadeleader1 said:

Well, that's like your opinion man, you'd be wrong, but it's your opinion.

 

22 minutes ago, renegadeleader1 said:

See you post this....

 

Then you post this. I can't tell if you're trying to knock the EU or Disney's sequel trilogy,

Oh, I'm knocking both... put simply, both the old Star Wars Expanded Universe and the new Disney Star Wars sequel trilogy are the same garbage, just packaged differently.

Neither the EU writers nor Disney could conceive of a way to move the story forward without effectively undoing the happy ending of Return of the Jedi.  Balance wasn't restored to the Force, the Emperor isn't actually dead, the Empire continues to exist and just retreats a bit from its former key holdings before ultimately reconquering the galaxy, the Republic that our heroes fought so long and hard to restore barely lasts a generation, the next Skywalker generation falls to the Dark Side and repeats Anakin's mistakes, etc.  The old, familiar characters from the movies get beaten into the ground until everything likable about them is gone.

 

22 minutes ago, renegadeleader1 said:

At least with the EU books published under Bantam the characters grew and changed. One of the first chapters of The Courtship of Princess Leia involves returning home from a campaign against an Imperial warlord and being shaken by the war crimes the Empire. He admits to himself he can no longer go back to being a carefree smuggler and rededicates himself to the New Republic cause. The only time he really goes back to being a smuggler and a scoundrel is in the later EU when Chewie's death breaks him mentally.

Remember that time Han, Leia, and a bunch of other characters all collecively got highly selective amnesia about Han's fascist cousin and arbitrarily commit treason against the Republic to help him?  That's some quality writing there, eh?  Or the time that the galaxy was invaded by the BDSM space bat-people immune to the Force?  Or the time Leia almost f*cked a neon green reptilian crime lord who was trying to make Darth Vader jealous and capture Luke while everyone else was trying to track down the Death Star plans and a bad Han Solo knockoff was trying to track down the real Han Solo?  Or the time the giant space lizards who had tongues in their noses invaded to turn people into batteries for their technology because it never occurred to them that you can store energy chemically?  Or that time Han Solo's kids did a multi-novel anti-drug PSA?

 

 

11 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

I think the point Seto is making is that in order for the franchise to survive and keep the money flowing, there cannot be a happily ever after.

Or even a happily after of finite duration... everything must exist in a state of perpetual f*ckedness in order for the galaxy far far away to exist in a state of semi-perpetual war.  The Expanded Universe seemed to have a new major conflict or diplomatic crisis every alternate tuesday.

 

11 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

Imagine how boring SW would be if the movie was about the struggles of Leia governing, or Luke looking for funds to set up the new Jedi temple, or how Han is unsatisfied with his marriage because Leia was too busy with work.

Honestly, a novella of Carrie Fisher-style musing on the nature of politics actually sounds like a pretty good time to me... she had very little time for bullsh*t (or diplomacy, a proper subset of bullsh*t).

 

11 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

Hence Elsa can’t just be queen after Frozen, she has to do something else, otherwise Frozen 2 would not be about empowerment, it would be about the day to day drudgery of ruling a kingdom, who wants to spend hours seeing Elsa haggling a trade deal or settling a dispute between the other ice carriers and her future brother in law.  We can get that in our normal lives.

I dunno, I think Disney could've had a real good time with her as an evil queen the way she was originally intended to be... but they don't have the balls to write a face-heel turn for a popular character like that.

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, Chronocidal said:

Or, she could have just as easily have said "Hell no", let them shoot her, and sacrifice herself to save the base she was charged with protecting.

Generally that's what military service involves.  What she did was called high treason.

They didn't force her to do anything.  She chose to betray her oath of service to the First Order, and Starkiller Base was destroyed due to her betrayal.  The fact that she survived to the second movie at all is just one more testament to the overwhelming ineptitude of every single character with any sort of authority in these new movies.

I'd say to remind me NEVER to join a military that you are in charge of - but I wouldn't need any reminder.  

[pengbuzz]

If they had wanted to do the sequels right, hey should have set this a millennium after the originals, and just began again. Let the Galaxy have peace until the lessons learned wore away; have the OG characters in flashbacks towards the ends of their lives establishing the setting that is now crumbling under a new threat, and a generation that knew nothing about the troubles start learning the hard way. Much like how the Republic was first formed.

Since it's too late for any of that: I think it is time to let this franchise die.

[azrael]

11 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

If they had wanted to do the sequels right, hey should have set this a millennium after the originals, and just began again. Let the Galaxy have peace until the lessons learned wore away; have the OG characters in flashbacks towards the ends of their lives establishing the setting that is now crumbling under a new threat, and a generation that knew nothing about the troubles start learning the hard way. Much like how the Republic was first formed.

Since it's too late for any of that: I think it is time to let this franchise die.

Could’ve. Would’ve. Didn’t.

This is a problem I have with modern Western cinematic storytelling. The idea that we have to follow a character from cradle to grave. This is one reason why Solo was such a bad idea. 

[kalvasflam]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I dunno, I think Disney could've had a real good time with her as an evil queen the way she was originally intended to be... but they don't have the balls to write a face-heel turn for a popular character like that.

 

You mean it'll be too much like professional wrestling, until Anna stabs Elsa with an icicle?  Hey, the cold may not bother her, but she never said anything about object in the shape of ice.

The interesting thing if you think about how a shared universe works out well is not always going back to the well with the characters.  Consider this, the fault of the movies was that they try to recapture the nostalgia of the original by throwing around the name Skywalker, or sticking a Solo here and there.  It doesn't work, because it never lives up to expectations, I think in a lot of ways, the shared universes in Japanese animation series has worked well when they expand and don't push too hard on the forerunner characters. 

Two examples of this are obviously Macross and Gundam.  Now, Gundam does have a tendency of keep trying to bring back Char, regular Char, grown up Char, fat Char, kid Char, but I do admit they flush out the stories pretty well, but I have to say, they were smart to have build up the history of the story, and slapped in all of these little pieces that made it interesting.  From the original MSG, they went to Zeta (probably the best Gundam series of all time), and then they stuck in pieces over time, Gundam 0080, Gundam 0083, 08th MS team, each of these were strong shows in their own line, and they didn't try to bring in Char or Amuro.  Zeta was the best because they pulled in old characters, and balanced the story arc carefully enough that the main character was always Camille, but they grounded it in the reality of the Gryps war, and enhanced it with a good number of your favorites like Char, and Amuro, but didn't make them the main focus.

Macross is another fairly successful storyline in terms of pulling up stories of varying types, the main difference is they built it up around the idea of story and variable fighter with the shared universe being gradually expanded.  Plus and Zero were both fairly successful there.  Mac 7 was a bit disappointing because... well, because of Basara and all of this protodevlin hero crap.  Frontier I think was a spiritual successor to the original SDF Macross, yeah, they all go through the same general variation, but a Michel, a Luca, and a Ranka, they all stood on their own, even though you could easily substitute Jenius, Kakizaki, and Minmay into their place.  The backstory was interesting.  Delta for some reason screwed things up, up till episode 13, it wasn't bad, then somehow it took a dump, and we ended up with the super  robot show.

I think if Disney carefully thought about the SW universe, there were so many places to go, because they don't have to involve the original character, Mandolorian from the looks of it is excellent as a series.  I liked Rogue One because it flushed out the original SW.  But what they need to do is to have no more Skywalkers, no more Solos, the trip down nostalgia lane has to end.  I personally think they would've done fine without the old cast in the new trilogy, and if they went through three movies, and did an eventual reveal of Ren as the son of Solo, and by the way, Snoke was only a Force meat puppet for Palpatine the ghost, it might have been great.  But instead, we got the abortion from RJ, and JJ now has to rescue the series by an even higher jump of the shark.  I'm glad they put SW on hiatus, give the Mandolorian time to work itself out, then do something else in the universe, no Jedi or Sith needed.

 

Edited November 30, 2019 by kalvasflam