Friday, March 4, 2011

Star Wars - How I learned to love you again (Part One)

The year was 2007. I was a stock guy working at a retail clothing store, and was pretty lonely during my work days. Music, while I LOVE it, tends to get old after a while, and I needed to feel as though I were listening to friends. I got heavy into listening to podcasts, and immediately found podcasts that tied in with my interests. Disneyland, comedy, and hrm..."what else do I like. Well, I USED to like Star Wars a lot...." I searched for Star Wars and went with the most legit looking podcast on iTunes. It was called "The ForceCast". It's a podcast hosted by theforce.net - which has always been the single source for any Star Wars news whenever I needed it.

(drawn by Dave Filoni, Director of The Clone Wars, and friend to the ForceCast)


I tuned in and found myself pleasantly surprised to hear what I heard. People making fun of Star Wars, but only in the way that fans could. There were obscure references being made - and while pop culture finds ways to place Star Wars jokes, it's never subtle and is usually ALWAYS accessible to the non-Star Wars die hards. Needless to say, I loved it. Pretty soon they announced that George Lucas was going to be bringing an animated show to tv called The Clone Wars. I was a little confused at first. Didn't they already do a short run of cartoons called The Clone Wars? Those ran in the days leading up to Revenge of the Sith and were brilliantly over-the-top hand drawn animated shorts, and they were EPIC.

(Nothing witty to say. This show was awesome)


While I really enjoyed those, I was a little disappointed to hear that the new Clone Wars show was going to be a 3D animated show. I've always loved the hand drawn animation more...but maybe it won't be so bad?

THEN they released what was probably inevitable - news of a Star Wars animated feature film hitting theaters around the world. "Ok Michael...don't panic," I thought. I knew it was technically going to be the lead in to the animated series, and would pretty much be the first 3 episodes. I did something that I never thought I would do though, and chose to not see it during it's debut. I also didn't see it in theaters a week later, or even two weeks after that. Reviews were horrible, and I lowered my head in shame. I felt as though Mr. Lucas was milking the series, and continuing to shift me as far away from it as possible. I heard the ForceCast's positive reviews, but stayed away.

(Why?)


I agreed with many fans on a series of points. Why does Anakin have a padawan? Why does the trailer show a burping little baby Hutt? Why does the animation not look "theater worthy"? And what's all this talk about a gay Hutt who speaks in English? I decided to see The Clone Wars about a month after it's theatrical release, and if I can recall correctly, my girlfriend and I were the ONLY two people in the theater. The movie began and I was surprised. "A long time ago..." was replaced with a quote, and gone was the opening crawl, instead replaced with a scrolling "Clone Wars" logo. Despite this, the intial Lucasfilm logo brought back fond memories and goosebumps, so the surprise was less jarring than it could have been.

The story was different from what I had expected, but it did have it's moments. To quickly sum it up, I was a little blown away. I wasn't too fond of Anakin's apprentice, but everything else seemed to feel, in a way, more Star Wars than the prequels. WHAT? Maybe I was wrong, but by the end of it I was very hyped for the tv show. The only difference between the Clone Wars film and any Star Wars film is that to this day I still have not had a repeat viewing of it. Maybe someday when the series wraps up?

Skipping ahead a little, I started watching the original Star Trek - as the build for the new movie in 2009 grew closer. I'll someday delve into my feelings about Star Trek, but I never really liked it. Once the movie came out, I said, "THIS was better than the Star Wars prequels!." In fact, it was just that it felt more like Star Wars than those did, but didn't feel like Trek - so I felt like the movie was a sell-out to the Trek franchise. I continued on and watched every Trek episode of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Eventually, I tired out midway through Voyager, which I've heard many others have as well. I was realizing that maybe I was wrong all along. Maybe Star Trek WAS the better of the two franchises?

(Oh...now I see why it was so successful)


Throughout this time, I had seen half of the first season of the Clone Wars, but stopped so that I could watch Star Trek. The Clone Wars had begun very well, but then turned into a very formulaic show where nobody really seemed in danger. There also weren't characters that really grabbed me. This all changed at the E3 show of 2009 in which they announced Mandalorians, showed a picture of an animated Bossk, mentioned Boba Fett, and introduced a rad bounty hunter named Cad Bane. I believed that this might finally be what the show was missing, and decided to play catch up on all of the shows I had missed.

("If this guy is as cool as he looks, then George is back on the right track." -Michael)


The characters were cool as hell, but the show still didn't deliver in the way that I had hoped - that is, not until half way through season 2. It was then that I said to my girlfriend that I HAVE to watch this show every week, and since then I haven't missed an episode. The show continued, and I kept watching. It was fun, though not enough to bring me back to fandom. Season 3 was a chore to get through though. It was plagued by many non-interesting episodes dealing with Padme and politics. Not really my favorite aspect of the Star Wars universe.

Then the day hit. It was the day of George Lucas's interview at the Star Wars Celebration convention in 2010. George took to the stage, interviewed by Jon Stewart. Part way through, George did something he really wasn't known to do...he dropped a few secrets for the fans. He announced that Darth Maul had a brother who would appear in the Clone Wars. WHAT?

But even bigger than that, was the biggest thing to hit Star Wars in the last several years (in my opinion it was the biggest thing since Revenge of the Sith). George Lucas announced that Star Wars would be hitting BluRay. He ALSO revealed the following clip - a clip of Luke Skywalker assembling his lightsaber at the beginning of Return of the Jedi.


(When I first watched this, I said, "OH MY GOD!", got up and jumped around. Then I sat back down and continued to rewatch it for the next 2 hours.)


It was a clip that no fan had ever seen, and got us excited for other things that might be in store for us. Wait, I said "us"? Am I back in?

(continued in Part Two)

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