“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
The Kessel Run being measured in distance rather than time could have been solved with a closeup shot instead of wide angle.
The way it’s scripted, Han thinks he’s got two local yokels and is feeding them a line. Obi-Wan, of course, is not a yokel, and reacts to that info with a “come on, dude” kind of look. Alec Guinness does do it, but not in a noticeable way. If there was a closeup shot, it would have worked. The wider shot that went into the film makes his reaction barely noticeable.
This leads to decades of treating Han’s line as actual truth and trying to figure out what he meant. Legends and Disney canon provided basically the same answer. Kessel is surrounded by black holes, and skimming closer to the event horizon would mean taking a shorter distance. Wasn’t supposed to work that way, though.
It mostly always just bothered me that a parsec is a unit of distance that relies on the Earth’s specific orbital distance around the sun. The Faraway Galaxy of Star Wars would have no way to measure how far a parsec is.
Star Wars does that. Han mentions “I’ll see you in hell” just before running off to find Luke on Hoth, and now there’s a whole Wookiepedia entry on what “hell” is in that galaxy.
“If we can’t get the shield generator fixed, we’ll be sitting ducks.”
And now there’s a Wookieepedia entry for “duck”.
In the Phasma book there’s a stormtrooper with red armor named Cardinal “like the bird”. I wanted to throw the book across the room when I read that but I was reading it on my tablet so I restrained myself.
There was a Star Wars novel where the author liked using the phrase “Soandso looked at Sosandso like he’d turned into a huge spider.”
I can track that though. Almost every culture on Earth has a concept of “The Bad Place” that it’s possible to go after you die. I have always been meaning to check and see if the race that Luke Skywalker is, is referred to as human in canon, and if Canon has anything to say about why they look exactly like us. I suppose I could look for myself on Wookiepedia, but I know as soon as I open that website, I’m not getting anything else done today.
Han sarcastically calls Jabba “a wonderful human being” in the special editions of ANH
That’s right. I forgot about that.
The fact that the character he said it to originally was a human makes it even better.
They’re human. I don’t think it’s been fully covered how this happened, but there was one interesting piece that didn’t get published.
It combines Lucas’ various other movies like THX-1138 and Indiana Jones. Earth is overrun with an AI-driven society in THX, and a group of humans get on a ship to escape. They fall through a wormhole and end up in the Star Wars universe, becoming the first humans there. Han and Chewie travel back through this wormhole, and crash land on Earth in a forest. Chewie survives, and him walking around starts a bunch of stories about Big Foot. Indiana Jones investigates, finds the remains of the Falcon and Han, and wonders why this guy looks familiar.
I think American Gothic was in there somehow, too.
Even if it did get published, I can’t imagine it being taken seriously as Legends canon. Chewie was already killed off in the Yuuzhan Vong stuff with Han surviving. But that’s the closest to an answer we ever got.
As it stands, Courscant is often believed to be the original human homeworld in-universe, and whatever the truth is has been lost to time. Star Wars is interesting with how old the universe feels–which is more of a Tolkein-like property than traditional science fiction–and this is a pretty good example.
That’s cool. Thanks. I haven’t read almost any of the expanded universe stuff, but at some point I’m going to have to delve into it. My favorite part though, is the fact that a large percentage of Star wars fans, are also both professional and casual science nerds, so there are officially accepted orbital periods, and gravitational constants for basically every single planet.
Chewie died?
Yup. Chewie died in the novels, but Han did in the movies. Go figure.
So what you’re saying is variant Star wars characters is going to be a thing?
Disney owned the property now so it’s totally possible for the TVA to show up at some point. They may as well, It might actually make Star wars good again.
They made the whole novel timeline non-canon, so we won’t be seeing it unless they choose to pick characters from it like Pellaeon and Thrawn.
I’m pretty sure they’ll have to diverge the timeline if they want to make Ashoka s02 and Thrawn matter.
The silly thing is that they feel a need to justify it. They’re speaking English, every single word they say carries an incredible history of the world we live in from Rome to the speakers of Old Norse and otherwise. The simplest solution is a handwave: the creators translated everything out of Galactic Basic for you.
but speaking English is fine …
I had a friend who was really annoyed that there was a Scottish accent in Force Awakens. I said that none of the characters are speaking English in-universe, so any and all accents are just analogies for how each character is heard. Nope. He was still annoyed because there’s no Scotland in the star wars galaxy.
Extra weird hang-up to have, because the films have always had English and American accents side-by-side, even though there’s clearly no England or America!
Anyway, it’s really no different to them calling their ships X-wings and Y-wings, even though they don’t use our alphabet.
Shit that x-wing thing is really gonna bug me now.
Sorry!
In the original cut they did use the Latin alphabet, so this is, incredibly, yet another thing George Lucas did to make the first film retroactively annoying.
Nah dw about it, it is quite funny.
I never considered the X and Y thing! Yirt looks kind of like a V, but Vev looks like a Y, so the shape at least exists, but Xesh looks like a triangle, so no go there!
Since the franchise is not afraid to sometimes have other languages spoken instead of absolutely everyone speaking English, it’s reasonable to assume that the Basic they’re speaking does indeed sound exactly as we hear it, accents and all.
There are plenty of films where the language is translated to English for the audience, and then a third language is spoken by characters to show that the characters using the primary language wouldn’t understand them.
I think basic would sound different from english, and then when we see characters speak in a different language it’s to show that they are multi lingual and can speak in a way that other characters wouldn’t be able to understand.
True, but since the Aurabesh seen in the background is just a different alphabet used to write English, it’s a given that Basic is English.
Again, plenty of films/TV just use substitution ciphers for alien languages that are definitely not english in canon. Stargate Atlantis has Ancient text that can be deciphered into english letters, but that’s just an easter egg for the fans.
If the story is translating the spoken language for the benefit of the audience, there’s no reason text can’t have the same justification.
Is the ancient language ever spoken in Stargate Atlantis? I haven’t seen it. It reeeeeally stretches credulity to say that Basic isn’t English when we’ve heard them say “spaceport” and can see a sign that says “spaceport” letter for letter while using a different alphabet. If everything’s being translated for our benefit, wouldn’t the signs be in the Latin alphabet as well?
But of course, you can use any interpretation you like. It seems like Lucas went out of his way to make it hard to claim that a language that actually sounds different than English is being used, though.
No, no, they’re speaking Basic!
Yes it does. I’m given to understand that they also translate the film into the primary language of the region when it is shown in other countries as well. Why do you ask?
Maybe the same but Coruscant?