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OBI-WAN KENOBI (Disney+ series)


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1 hour ago, Docteur Qui said:

It's conversations like these that make me glad that I keep Star Wars at arms-length. Doctor Who is more built for this kind of thing. Loose canon, bizarre continuity, wild variations in quality? That's my bread and butter. If it's a rip-roaring adventure then it's Doctor Who. If it's a sluggishly-paced piece of hot garbage, you'd better believe it's also Doctor Who. It's all gloriously inconsistent, and best of all, if you really don't like something then you can just pretend it never happened. Chances are the next writer will do the same!


Doctor Who also gets away with a lot by having time travel be its central conceit, so a lot of outright contradictions can literally be justified by time being re-written

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The show is certainly a ratings success though, despite competition with Stranger Things.

 

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Obi-Wan, with shorter and fewer episodes, had a more subdued launch with about 1 billion minutes. Even so, its debut was the biggest ever for Disney+ and it also made history as the first non-film title to hit 1 billion minutes of viewing in its first week. (Marvel series Loki reached that threshold but only after a handful of episodes were in circulation.)

The full report can be found here:

 

https://deadline.com/2022/06/stranger-things-netflix-obi-wan-kenobi-star-wars-disney-plus-nielsen-streaming-1235038981/

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4 hours ago, Romão said:

I don't particularly care about canon or continuity and I think it often restrains and contracts the storytelling

 

Well, I’d say it’s mainly a problem for prequels.

 

The problem with ignoring continuity is, well, these are universes which exist only in the imagination, so it helps to be able to imagine them.

 

5 hours ago, mstrox said:

I’m on record that continuity is a death cult and that much like the major comics companies were before it (and will be again), Star Wars was well served by a continuity reboot.

 

I’m all for reboots, because they say, go ahead and compartmentalize this.

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23 minutes ago, Pellaeon said:

 

Well, I’d say it’s mainly a problem for prequels.

 

The problem with ignoring continuity is, well, these are universes which exist only in the imagination, so it helps to be able to imagine them.

 

 

I’m all for reboots, because they say, go ahead and compartmentalize this.


I'm not for a reboot that stops all stories and kills all projects that were in the works for the previous universe in favor of a new one that manages to tangle itself up faster and prevents inferior versions of what was in the previous one

If it was allowed to still continue parallel to the new stuff I'd have zero issues, but the fact it was replaced with something worse in every way is maddening. A lot of talent was lost in the transition too

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16 minutes ago, Holko said:

I don't understand this continuity and canon talk. Why even do stories about characters in universes and timelines we know if you're just going to actively contradict preestablished things that happened or will happen, things we and they know, ways they did or will act?


Some people genuinely don’t know how incredibly beneficial cohesiveness and consistency can be for storytelling, especially in these side stories that brush extremely closely to the main pillars of the franchise story

 

Genuinely, when is the last time you heard someone say ‘man I just don’t like how this fits with what was previously established, it’s too consistent’

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And if the excuse will be that otherwise you can't give the character the emotional arc you want - first off, so far we're not seeing a well done arc, secondly, why not do something else with someone else sometime else then?

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1 hour ago, Holko said:

And if the excuse will be that otherwise you can't give the character the emotional arc you want - first off, so far we're not seeing a well done arc, secondly, why not do something else with someone else sometime else then?


Oh god, so much this. There's a ridiculous amount of cases of productions trying to fit a round peg in a square hole and it's like no wonder everything is a mess

1 hour ago, Chen G. said:

 

This.

 

From their dialogue its not even clear that their parting involving a clash of swords. The idea of a duel and certainly the idea of Vader being a burn victim were both later additions in and of themselves.

 

 

My favourite thus far is Leia and Obi Wan talking about the Force. "Luke, you have a power I don't understand". Quite.


Directly in the movies yes, but I wouldn't be so sure about those ideas not being in mind during the making of A New Hope. Take a look at this excerpt from an interview George Lucas did for Rolling Stone in 1977:

 

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It was a nice touch, because it adds to the bogyman quality of the character.
GL: Ben had a lot of work in that too. He did about 18 different kinds of breathing, through aqualungs and through tubes, trying to find the one that had the right sort of mechanical sound, and then decide whether it would be totally rhythmical and like an iron lung. That’s the idea. It was a whole part of the plot that essentially got cut out. It may be in one of the sequels.

What’s the story?
GL: It’s about Ben and Luke’s father and Vader when they are young Jedi knights. But Vader kills Luke’s father, then Ben and Vader have a confrontation, just like they have in Star Wars, and Ben almost kills Vader. As a matter of fact, he falls into a volcanic pit and gets fried and is one destroyed being. That’s why he has to wear the suit with a mask, because it’s a breathing mask. It’s like a walking iron lung. His face is all horrible inside. I was going to shoot a close-up of Vader where you could see the inside of his face, but then we said, no, no, it would destroy the mystique of the whole thing.


Highly recommend people check out that whole article, some incredibly fascinating stuff that directly challenges a lot of the ideas that seem to be commonplace these days about how Star Wars was always meant to be camp and not take itself seriously:
 

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Some of Mark Hamill’s lines are pretty corny.
GL: There is some very strong stuff in there. In the end, when you know better, it sort of takes a lot of guts to do it because it’s the same thing with the whole movie – doing a children’s film. I didn’t want to play it down and make it a camp movie, I wanted to make it a very good movie. And it wasn’t camp, it was not making fun of itself. I wanted it to be real.

Even though Harrison Ford’s character, Han Solo, is right up to the edge of camp, very John Wayne-ish.
GL: He goes as far as I let anybody go.

“I been from one end of this galaxy to the other, kid..” But he did pull it off.
GL: [Laughs] It fits in his character. Harrison is an extremely intelligent actor and we balanced on a lot of thin threads when we went through this movie. And when you’re doing it you never know when you are going to jump off the other side, which is one of the things like with the score. There were a lot of little discussions about if this or that would make it go too far, would it be too much. I decided just to do it all the way down the line, one end to the other, complete. Everything is on that same level, which is sort of old-fashioned and fun but going for the most dramatic and emotional elements that I can get.


Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20201109030120/https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/george-lucas-the-wizard-of-star-wars-2-232011/

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35 minutes ago, DarthDementous said:

Take a look at this excerpt from an interview George Lucas did for Rolling Stone in 1977:

 

which is an interview from after the film was completed.

 

Goes in the same pile with all the Joseph Campbell talk, for me.

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7 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

 

which is an interview from after the film was completed.

 

Goes in the same pile with all the Joseph Campbell talk, for me.


The interview came out August 25th 1977. Why does it matter if it was 3 months after the film released?

Are you saying that Lucas was lying that he had this backstory in his mind when shooting the film and had thought about shooting a close-up of Vader's ruined face? Why on earth would he do that?

Be honest, when you said 'later additions' you weren't referring to as early as 3 months after the first film came out.

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9 hours ago, DarthDementous said:

Are you saying that Lucas was lying that he had this backstory in his mind when shooting the film

 

That's exactly what I'm saying, yes. Lucas is the absolute master of bending the truth. I don't believe a word he says.

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22 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

 

That's exactly what I'm saying, yes. Lucas is the absolute master of bending the truth.

He has literally no motivation to bend the truth at the time this quote was given. What are you even saying?

Shall I ignore the part in the article that actually supports one of your arguments too?

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57 minutes ago, Van_Etten said:

The bit about Vader fighting with Kenobi and falling into a volcanic pit was already included in the fourth draft of "The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars".


I had a feeling it made it into one of the earlier drafts knowing Lucas’ penchance for including A LOT and then having to trim it down dramatically

 

@Chen G. Still think Lucas is lying now? 

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Late to the party as only just managed to watch the first three episodes over the weekend... can't say I disagree with most of the comments, but my brief thoughts for everyone to ignore:

 

  • Yeah the music choices are disappointing, but they feel more producer/director led than composer led. It's almost like they're doing a Rick Berman to Star Wars but unlike Star Trek, Star Wars has a strong musical tone and continuity. Why they would choose not to use the Force theme or Imperial March at a few key moments is utterly baffling. Sure, avoid overusing them, but don't avoid them totally. I was watching that scene with Leia running in the forest in the first episode and was composing a playful, scherzo type arrangement of Leia's theme in my head. It didn't necessarily quote the whole melody, but just enough to give a nod as to who it was (and would have been a way of presenting the theme in a new way too).
  • The music outside of the moments that clearly call for a throwback to JW's material I actually didn't mind. Sure, a lot of it is fairly standard TV music, but a few bits stood out; the underscoring of their arrival on the mining planet in the third episode was pretty effective, as was the Alderaan music from the first (I think) episode. Not startlingly amazing, but effective enough. A strong theme for the Inquisitors wouldn't have gone amiss though, even if it was more akin to Kylo Renn's motif than a full on theme.
  • I can more or less forgive them retconning when Vader and Obi-Wan last met prior to the original film, but what's super weird is that we're meant (presumably) to believe that 10 y/o Leia doesn't remember being rescued by Obi-Wan in ANH?! I guess the only possible caveat is that she's deliberately trying to sound aloof given the risk of the message she's placed into R2, but even so, there's nothing in the original film to suggest they'd ever met. I know kids forget things, but I don't imagine you'd forget someone who saved you from kidnappers, especially give how bright and inquisitive she is. Oh and I think the kid playing Leia is doing a great job, I don't get the detractors here.
  • They should have got Seth McFarland on this... even if just to produce the score. He'd have picked great composers, who wouldn't want Joel McNeely, Kevin Kaska, John Debney...?! OK, it would be pastiche JW in a lot of places but would that be so bad?!
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@Van_Etten I looked into the fourth original Star Wars script draft, the fourth and the revised fourth version, but I couldn’t see any mention about what you said

 

However, that information does seem to be in the annotated script drafts (Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays) which is probably where you got that idea from

 

Additionally I also found this quote from Mark Hamill in 1980 from Starlog that corroborates this:

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"I remember very early on asking who my parents were and being told that my father and Obi Wan met Vader on the edge of a volcano and they had a duel. My father and Darth Vader fell into the crater and my father was instantly killed. Vader crawled out horribly scarred, and at that point the Emperor landed and Obi Wan ran into the forest, never to be seen again."

 

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49 minutes ago, Tom Guernsey said:

OK, it would be pastiche JW in a lot of places but would that be so bad?!

No! What we got now is pastiche... garbage. Sorry to say that. I see neither a strong musical identity behind what we are hearing now in the series nor something really related to the romantic classical music that is the foundation for Williams' Star Wars score.

 

I said it before, even if Holt mixed the force melody into her generic score or the imperial march melody, it would hardly sound like an actual Star Wars score. Rather like that funny quote of the imperial march by Powel in Solo for the imperial advertisement.

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1 hour ago, DarthDementous said:

@Van_Etten I looked into the fourth original Star Wars script draft, the fourth and the revised fourth version, but I couldn’t see any mention about what you said

 

However, that information does seem to be in the annotated script drafts (Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays) which is probably where you got that idea from

 

Additionally I also found this quote from Mark Hamill in 1980 from Starlog that corroborates this:

 

Got the info from here
http://www.audiori.net/starwars/timeline1976.html
which seems to correlate with this source https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/55187
it should be the draft dated January 1st 1976, which right now is tough to find in its original form

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11 hours ago, DarthDementous said:

I'm not for a reboot that stops all stories and kills all projects that were in the works for the previous universe in favor of a new one that manages to tangle itself up faster and prevents inferior versions of what was in the previous one

If it was allowed to still continue parallel to the new stuff I'd have zero issues, but the fact it was replaced with something worse in every way is maddening. A lot of talent was lost in the transition too

 

I do think this particular reboot was completely inept and alienating. They should have let the EU wind down with dignity and even celebration, rather than throw it in the trash bin with a sneer and a laugh. They mocked it and then proceeded to rip it off, poorly.

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7 hours ago, Van_Etten said:

The bit about Vader fighting with Kenobi and falling into a volcanic pit was already included in the fourth draft of "The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars".

 

No it wasn't.

 

5 hours ago, DarthDementous said:

Additionally I also found this quote from Mark Hamill in 1980 from Starlog that corroborates this:

 

Mark Hamill also remembered that the film was going to be framed as a Wookie fairytale. I don't trust his memory as far as I can throw it.

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8 hours ago, Van_Etten said:

Got the info from here
http://www.audiori.net/starwars/timeline1976.html
which seems to correlate with this source https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/55187
it should be the draft dated January 1st 1976, which right now is tough to find in its original form


Odd, I found that draft but I couldn’t find the relevant section. Maybe you’ll have better luck: https://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/star-wars-the-adventures-of-luke-starkiller-as-taken-from-the-journal-of-the-whills/

 

4 hours ago, Chen G. said:

 

No it wasn't.

 

 

Mark Hamill also remembered that the film was going to be framed as a Wookie fairytale. I don't trust his memory as far as I can throw it.


You do realise that actually corroborates what Lucas talked about in the Rolling Stone article about his original plans for the Wookiees to assist the Rebellion against the Death Star, right? Which then was repurposed into Return of the Jedi but replaced with Ewoks due to budget issues with the full-sized Wookiee costumes

 

Your bias is amazingly apparent when we have multiple points of evidence that all say the same thing yet you have nothing and can only say ‘their memory is bad despite their account lining up with other sources’ and ‘he bended the truth for no reason that I can give’

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Yes, the writing is shameful but so is the direction. So far, the worst moment of the series has to be when Vader is looking for Obi-Wan, dragging innocent people out of their hiding places with the force, and then (drum roll ... we arrived at the worst moment)... that shot when Vader suddenly stands still and quickly, in a nanosecond, turns his head towards the place Ben is hiding. They way it is filmed and edited ... OMG! That's something they did 50 years ago in a bad B-movie. I didn't expect a lot from this show but I expected something better than this. Whoever is behind this show, they don't have any feel with Star Wars. 

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I expected this show to look and feel and use the language of either Sith or Star Wars but it is neither

 

I imagine the production has been a disaster in the inside

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10 hours ago, DarthDementous said:

You do realise that actually corroborates what Lucas talked about in the Rolling Stone article about his original plans for the Wookiees to assist the Rebellion against the Death Star, right? Which then was repurposed into Return of the Jedi but replaced with Ewoks due to budget issues with the full-sized Wookiee costumes

 

Early scripts for Star Wars do have Wookies fighting the Empire.

 

But no script has the framing device Mark Hamil describes. Memory is suspect and, as far as the production history of Star Wars is concerned, if I don't see it in a script draft, or a storyboard, or concept art or footage, than it didn't happen. There's just way too much misinformation going on from Lucas' end, and faulty memories on the part of others.

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3 hours ago, Chen G. said:

 

Early scripts for Star Wars do have Wookies fighting the Empire.

 

But no script has the framing device Mark Hamil describes. Memory is suspect and, as far as the production history of Star Wars is concerned, if I don't see it in a script draft, or a storyboard, or concept art or footage, than it didn't happen. There's just way too much misinformation going on from Lucas' end, and faulty memories on the part of others.


What is the framing device you’re talking about and what is the actual quote from Mark Hamill?

 

I could understand the skepticism if this was years later but this was Lucas saying it 3 months after the movie came out and before he even knew he was going to make a sequel. I don’t see what the motivation for misinformation would be here and you don’t seem to want to provide one

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Lucas was already reconcieving aspects of the film's backstory within months of its premiere: there's absolutely no indication that when Lucas filmed and shot the piece, that Vader had a duel with Obi Wan and certainly no indication that he was a burn victim.

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44 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

Lucas was already reconcieving aspects of the film's backstory within months of its premiere: there's absolutely no indication that when Lucas filmed and shot the piece, that Vader had a duel with Obi Wan and certainly no indication that he was a burn victim.

 

If what happened in episode 3 really happened then Vader in A New Hope would have said: "The last time we met, the force was weak in you, now I will deal with you once and for all."

 

Luke: "Ben? Nooooooooo ... "

 

Williams: "Ta Taaa Ta Ta Taaa  ....Ta Taaa Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Taaa"

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This episode only proves that Vader not handling the fire in the previous one makes no sense. A week ago, one could speculate Vader maybe changed his mind, but now he's full on rage, because guess what, Kenobi escaped... again.
And we're losing those prescious minutes to another needless Leia capture-rescue story, considering otherwise Reva wouldn't have the means to track Kenobi back to Jabiim.
More so, the show feels less like a Kenobi story, in the sense we get deeper into the character. Just action for the sake of action, switching from planet to planet to planet.

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This was pure filler, another 10-minute setpiece blown up to a full episode with dumbness just like ep2. Same thing happens in it too.

 

What surprised me most was I liked the Leia/Rea stuff, they were both better than before and had good moments. Too bad it was all pointless dumb forced tension to pad the episode out - why the hell would Leia know where the other hideouts are? Reva was in that room too, she probably gathered mord information in 2 minutes than Leia in the, what, 5 minutes she spent there being more interested in the droid.

 

Oh and 5 minutes in it already seemed like even Ewan couldn't keep up the pretense by then.

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Episode four wasn't as bad as the others. The underwater section of the base was visually interesting. There were some good cues, especially the one with Obi-Wan swimming. But the cat-and-mouse trope (not sure if it exists, but it's where the all-powerful cat hunts the underdog mouse) in the SW universe has already been beaten to death. That's more of a personal criticism, though; maybe I'd like it if I hadn't seen it play out on so many other shows before. But it's in every SW movie other than 1, 2, and most of 3

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10 hours ago, Chen G. said:

Lucas was already reconcieving aspects of the film's backstory within months of its premiere: there's absolutely no indication that when Lucas filmed and shot the piece, that Vader had a duel with Obi Wan and certainly no indication that he was a burn victim.


Do you have proof of that? Again I have to keep asking because you keep ignoring it, why would Lucas lie about him thinking about shooting a close-up of Vader's face all horribly-burned during filming?

I'm not even saying that Lucas was consciously putting in hints for that kind of backstory, especially when he removed the unmasking scene just to keep it ambiguous, just that this idea was very clearly already in his mind and may have informed some of his decisions subconsciously. That's why I think the idea that he conceived of this backstory of burn victim as a result of a duel for Vader much later has no ground because there's two accounts of people who would know this that corroborate the veracity of this that I was able to find, George Lucas's and Mark Hamill's. It's very common for actors to be given this awareness of extended backstory that never actually makes it directly into the film but is used to subtly influence the performance

Obviously the backstory of Vader eventually changed in Lucas' mind around the time of working on ESB, instead of him killing Anakin on Mustafar he became Anakin that was scarred by Obi Wan. The idea of a duel and falling in lava remain consistent throughout for Lucas however. I think in the original Leigh Brackett script Vader's malformities were caused by some kind of radiation cancer, but I'm honestly unsure how much of that came from Lucas and it ended up ultimately not being in the film

If you have any evidence for Lucas not seeing Vader as a burn victim as the result of a duel then please let me know. In order to have reconceived of this backstory there needs to be proof that there was a backstory originally planned that is contrary to that idea
 

2 hours ago, Bespin said:

What I love with this series is that we see that Obi-Wan is struggling very hard...

 

And Vader too.


Obi-Wan is struggling very hard?

In this episode his third degree burns are reversed in a matter of minutes, the informant he met happens to have access to resources that allow him to infiltrate the base of the Sith Inquisitors, Ben then easily infiltrates said base and accomplishes his objective with relatively minimal resistance. He doesn't even have to confront an Inquisitor, let alone Vader. Just hallways of useless stormtroopers including a class of them that is meant to be specifically trained to deal with Jedi that achieve the same amount of effectiveness as the mooks

Where is the struggle here? I wish Obi-Wan was struggling a lot because then it would mean the enemy were actually competent in some way, instead they make such amazing tactical decisions as to not have shields on their base because 'no one would think to attack it' even though it has been attacked already in canon

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