So the big rumors going around this month through Jeremy from Geeks&Gamers, Doomcock from Overlord DVD, and others Star Wars gossip mills among the Fandom Menace is that Kathleen Kennedy is being pushed aside at Lucasfilm in favor of Jon Favreau. Has "woke" Disney finally gotten sick of how Kennedy has flushed Star Wars down the toilet? Fans have been clamoring for her to be fired, and really anyone who has screwed up a business to the point that Star Wars has been really should be fired. Bernie Stolar really screwed up Sega of America and he was eventually removed. While the Sega Saturn was wildly popular in Japan, Stolar's attitude ruined Sega of America's reputation and he was forced to resign just before the launch of the Sega Dreamcast. In the same way, Kennedy really should be fired for what she did, but that's not likely to happen because she's so entrenched in identifying as a woman rather than identifying as someone who can be responsible for the creation of decent entertainment.
In case you have forgotten: Kathleen Kennedy was the villain at Lucasfilm who told fans in a company press release that it is not possible for them to release the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD because somehow those had been somehow destroyed in the process of creating the 1997 Special Editions. This is completley absurd and nobody with a brain believed this crap.
Just look at the list of movies that Kennedy was either a producer, associate producer, or executive producer for and you are sure to find movies that you love: Goonies, Back to the Future, E.T., Gremlins, Jurrasic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense... the list is incredible. (Well, except for some movies like The Last Airbender which aren't much to brag about.) For someone with such a long list of movie involvement as Kennedy, one would assume that she would have the brains to put together a team of good talents to make decent Star Wars movies happen. Heck, I wouldn't even mind it if JJ Abrams directed the trilogy as long as he was not the one coming up with the story. I knew from the moment Disney announced that they would make a new sequel trilogy that it was just a cynical cash grab. It still could have been decent. We could have had Lawrence Kasdan working on a script with Timothy Zahn, Michael Stackpole, and Kevin J. Anderson to come together and revamp the established EU that Star Wars fans had loved over the past 20 years (at that time). Just like how the Marvel cinematic universe did not completely destroy the comic books' established lore, they could have taken the plots from several of the better books and such to create new stories involving Grand Admiral Thrawn, Mara Jade, Corran Horn, and other characters. They could have taken aspects from the stories from the EU books, keeping plenty from the Heir to the Empire and X-Wing novels while ditching the crappier books like The Courtship of Princess Leia and Children of the Jedi that we'd prefer to forget about. Or that Crystal Star book which was originally a plot for a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode that was repurposed for the Star Wars universe. One of the most common complaints about the EU books is how the Empire kept coming up with new weapons of mass destruction for the New Republic to foil, calling them names like the Sun Crusher and such. It got a bit tiresome. So when The Force Awakens came out and featured the stupid Starkiller Base, it was really more of the same, but unfortunately it went way over the top and made it MOAR BIGGERER and MOAR BETTERER by making it an entire hollowed-out planet and giving it the ability to destroy several planets at once.
Instead, we got a mess of a trilogy with a lack of coherent vision and weak characters. Finn was one character who had potential to be the most intriguing character, yet woke Disney ended up making him the token "funny black guy in the movie" by the end of the first movie. The first movie was fun yet derivative, and my appreciation of it really hinged on what they did with the second movie. JJ had plans, but Ruin Johnson threw them in the trash. He crash landed his movie at the end by painting the plot into a corner, and the third movie was just damage control. And we fans who wanted to see Mara Jade were sneered at and accused of hating "strong women protagonists" because we didn't care for Rey when in reality we just wanted believable characters without a forced, politicized agenda. No we do not hate women nor are we "afraid" of powerful women. Female protagonists who have gone on the hero's journey like Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor had their characters evolve from weakness to strength by their second movies. I figured that there would be an explanation as to why Rey could suddenly control the Force like she did, and expected by the second movie that it would be explained that she had been trained as a Jedi or something and having her memories erased before being stranded on Jakku. It would have made sense, but then again the movie still had to stand on its own. There was a real easy way to make Star Wars movies just for the sake of making Star Wars movies and still have them turn out fine with minimal effort---if only Kennedy had the brains to do so. But at last it seems like she will be reassigned and her role taken over by Favreau.
If any of this is true, then I think LucasFilm's "first order" of business should be to announce that Lucasfilm appreciates its fans and will dedicate themselves to doing the best they can to deliver what fans want. I'm tired of them pandering to the crowd of angry teenagers on Twitter, people wanting to topple statues of abolitionists, and people who draw lesbian furry pictures on Tumblr. None of them will fork out the money for a half-size remote control R2-D2. These are not the people who will keep the merchandising going. Even though I hate the prequels and the Disney movies (save for Rogue One), even I have a hard time not buying Star Wars crap. These angry, perpetually unhappy minions who have nothing better to do than to sniff out social "injustice" are not the ones discussing the mechanics of locking S-foils into attack position and whether or not A-Wing fighters are better off without astromech sockets. Do those miscreants spend hours building Echo Base hangar dioramas? No, these people would rather spend their money on blue and purple hair coloring. And listening to them griping, it's obvious that they really don't pay attention. "Finally a strong female character who takes charge!" Uh, what about Leia? "Finally, a black character!" Uh, what about Lando? These are the idiots that Kennedy/Lucasfilm/Disney panders to! They don't know shit about crap.
The Mandalorian proved that good Star Wars stories could be made. I've only had the opportunity to watch the first season. Yes, I didn't care for the freezing people in carbonite, the Nth visit to Tattooine yet again, or the Yoda baby being 50 years old despite the fact that even sea turtles which can easily outlive humans do not remain babies for very long. It was still enjoyable, and it really oozed the ROTJ ambience in a fantastic way.
But the one thing about these rumors that alarms me is that somehow George F'ing Lucas will be involved in Star Wars again. I do not agree with Jeremy and Doomcock is that George Lucas is some "chosen one" who will bring balance to the Force at Lucasfilm. Just because the sequel trilogy was a bigger trainwreck than the prequel trilogy doesn't excuse how bad the prequel trilogy was. I ended up with some Gen Z kid arguing with me in the comments section of Doomcock's video because I had said that the younger generation who grew up with Greedo shooting first thinks that JJ and Rian Johnson were the first to ruin characters in SW. No, George did that in '97.
Ignoring whether or not the Neimoidians and Gungans were blatant racial stereotypes (that's not my hill to die on), it's obvious that Lucas needed a collaborative process and people challenging his ideas to make something good. He needed his wife Marcia to completely hack the first movie to pieces and re-edit it to get it to work. It came out great, except the one valuable scene that had been cut that was restored into the Special Edition was when Luke encounters Biggs in the hangar before the fighters launched.
It seems that between ROTJ and TPM, Lucas forgot a good number of things about his own story and forgot how to develop character motivation. It was established SW lore that Grand Moff Tarkin was instrumental in the development of the Death Star. With AOTC, it turns out hewasn't really that important to its development after all. No, it was designed by a bunch of flying termites living in mud castles. They showed Tarkin at the very end of ROTS, but that did not really make up for the stupid termite deal. At least Rogue One fixed this and helped us ingore the termite thing.
In ANH, Beb Kenobi says that when he met Anakin, he was already an accomplished star pilot, and that he was a good friend. That went out the window with the prequels. All they ever did was bicker, and it was obvious that Anakin hated him. In ROTJ, Ben mentioned about how the Emperor knew as well as he did that if Anakin had a child, the child would be a threat to him. Oh really? When was this established in the movie?
In TPM, Kenobi's motivation to train Anakin is extremely weak! This is one of many things that didn't sit well with me after first watching TPM. Kenobi even told his master Jinn, "The boy is dangerous. They all sense it, why can't you?" This of course is foreshadowing the eventual murder of the Jedi by Vader, but why put that in there and ruin the character's motivation? If Kenobi knew that his master was a stubborn fool and that training Anakin would have severely dangerous consequences, why does he so readily agree to train him just because it was Jinn's final dying wish? Kenobi is suddenly so stubbornly adamant for training Anakin after this. WHY?
It boils down to a problem of character motivation. In the OT, there is no question as to why Luke would join Ben Kenobi. There's no question as to why Ben and Yoda would train Luke to become a Jedi. There's no question as to why Ben sacrificed himself to Vader's lightsaber. There's no question as to why Lando had no choice but to betray his friends in order to spare his citizens, nor was it unclear why he helped them in the end. There's no question as to why Vader chose to save his son at the end and defeat the Emperor. But the question of motive comes up all the time in the prequels, because Lucas felt the need to make everything far more convoluted than it really needed to be. And unfortunately, the issue of motive plagues too many movies these days as Hollywood tries to make movies more and more convoluted.
Like a 17 syllable haiku forces a poet to make every word deliberate and succinct to convey a message, it was the technical limitations which forced Lucas to convey a sense of vastness of the galaxy he had created without truly showing everything. Up until his movie, science fiction always appeared so flashy and modern. With Star Wars, he wanted to make everything seemed weathered, worn, and "lived-in." Before Star Wars, movies would be like, "Oh look, we have a ROBOT because we have stuff like that... IN THE FUTURE!" Contrast that with the scene inside the Sandcrawler. Here we have a trivial, barely habitable planet on the outer rim of the galaxy, yet droids are so commonplace in this universe that a race of Jawas can make a living off of scavenging by finding (or stealing) random droids wandering about in the desert wastes. Inside the filthy sandcrawler, half-operational droids tossed on top of piles of broken droid parts strewn everywhere. We'd never seen anything like that before 1977. Trying to explain this to younger fans seems pointless. We didn't need to see the rest of the galaxy to understand how vast this universe is. Just seeing how this mostly forgotten planet treats robots like recycled trash was enough to show us how big it is.
So in the time between the Original Trilogy and the Prequels, Lucas lost sight of the "show, don't tell" simplicity of storytelling. Seeing the Blockade Runner fleeing from the gigantic, menacing Star Destroyer spoke volumes as to the power struggle in just a few seconds rather than countless minutes of people in the prequels sitting around on sofas in front of green screens, droning on about politics. The scenes in the Mos Eisley cantina on the "ass end of space" planet of Tattooine conveyed the sense of establishing the vastness of this galaxy just as well as the frantic, visual overload of Coruscant.
It reminds me of about 15 years ago, when there was a manga reboot of Dirty Pair. The original two women of the anime were sexy, but this manga looked hideous and the artist drew their tits too huge. Lucas was kind of like that in the Prequels. "Now that I have the technology, I want to make things MOAR BIGGERER and MOAR BETTERER" and he forgot what made SW special to us. He inflated his universe like a balloon.
The visuals in the prequels are just a spazfest. Everything is so shiny and new. This reflects Lucas's idea of how the old times were, an unrealistic portrayal of America's silver age. He made movies like American Graffiti and Tucker because he loves the cars of his childhood. But have you ever noticed that whenever you see a period drama of the '50s or '60s, the cars always look so brand new and shiny? They're all beautiful, immaculately restored cars from auto clubs and such. Not everybody in the '50s drove a brand new, shiny car. But this sort of misinformed view of how things were greatly affected the SW prequels, with shiny space ships and everything looked so new. The Republic had lasted forever, but apparently everyone was flying in brand new space ships. I think the yellow Naboo fighters were an homage to a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers design, but what separates Star Wars from those old cheesy shows is that the stuff is supposed to look real. A part of what made Star Wars so real and believable was lost on Lucas himself, apparently.
Then the Plinkett Prequel reviews came along and exposed how truly awful the Prequels were, and up until then I was trying to continually re-watch the Prequels to convince myself that I liked those movies and forced myself to watch them, thinking that if I just watched them more that they'd grow on me. I remember even abstaining from the original trilogy just to punish myself to watch those horrible Prequels, hoping that I'd somehow expand my appreciation for them. But since the Plinkett videos showed everyone that it's okay not to like those movies, as well as what a spastic, child-minded person Lucas was and how addicted he was to technology driving the films rather than the creativity of artistic compromises made to cover for technological limitations, Lucas's plans for the sequel trilogy would have made the story more of a teen drama. That works for an after school special, but not for SW.
So no, I think Favreau and Faloni can probably come up with better SW than Lucas can at this point. Let's also not forget that Lucas has gone on record saying that his idea for the Sequel trilogy was to have it focused on teen drama issues. That might be fine for an after school special, but that's not what I want to see in Star Wars. So if it is true that Lucas will again be involved in Star Wars, there really is no hope. I don't think even having his Red Tails movie laughed out of the theaters could have helped Lucas learn his lesson that he needs to contribute ideas while simultaneously stepping back and allowing others to contribute.
Next is a trip to the JASDF museum in Hamamatsu
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