We are not robots!

"Your droids, they'll have to wait outside. They're not wanted here."
(Cross posted on Angry and Sloppy!)

Sen. Barbara Boxer was on NPR this morning telling a caller who claimed that the democrats weren't winning any elections because they're too busy pandering to their base. Good ole BB set this dude straight; letting him know that she gets the significant portion of the moderate Republican vote. Well, anyhow, that's not the point. What she ended up telling the caller in this stupid discussion was that "WE" as in "us Democrats" are not robots. We don't all have the same opinion on the same issues.

Now let's just hold on a moment here. I believe that Mrs. Boxer needs to go back and watch a little movie called Star Wars. I believe that at the very beginning of Star Wars two robots had very different ideas! One believed in going in one direction on the desert planet Tatooine, and the other believed going in the other.

This isn't idle silliness. There are just going to be more and more robots. And they are not going to all agree with another. At first they will be our slaves. But eventually they will be our masters. And then the organic revolution will ensue. And so on and so forth. So actually, it would be better if the Democrats would do as George Lucas has done and make a social comment somehow about how robots are not the same--even if she thinks they should all be enslaved.

(Jedi Training.)

Important Question: WHERE is The Old Star Wars?

I was just thinking I'd like to watch Star Wars. But there isn't Star Wars. There's just this disfigured mockery of something that used to be great available on DVD. Whatever it was that I wanted to watch, it isn't what I can watch. It's like if I wanted to watch the original Shadows by Cassavetes--oops sorry you can't watch that. Gena Rowlands won't let you watch it. The original is locked in some vault. If it even exists...

The Ghost of Sebastian Shaw: For Where Didst Thou Fly?

In 14 weeks, my son will be born. And, obviously there are a lot of expectations as to what I will show him, the things that are important to me, for whatever reason, the obsessions, the rites of passage, my favorite foods. However, one thing that's been burning in my mind, something I haven't until now had a forum to release my frustrations on, is what the hell am I going to tell him about Star Wars? Am I going to only show him the original, unedited old versions, tell him that this is what moviemaking was like in his old man's time? Tell him, over time the megalomaniac, wanton perfectionist billionaire decided that his masterpieces were not quite right? That after these movies became classics, became ingrained into our brains from such an early age, and that there were so many of us who felt the same way, that this saga, in reality, no longer belonged to him? Or do I let him be free, let him choose what he wants? Let him ooh and aah and at what he sees, the same way I did when I was younger, not caring at all about the purity of the image? What is my parental responsibilty here? IS he going to be able to tell the diffrence between CGI and models, stop-motion, and optical printing? It's getting harder, even for reservists like us, when Mr. Lucas advances his own bionic war-machine to the point that there is no difference between his reality and the fictions he creates. Geez...am I gonna have to tell my son that when the Wampa gets his arm sliced off, those 3 extra seconds of the Wampa gripping his arm is not original? These heartaches are hard to take for me.

What is my responsibilty? Yes son, the first death star really took 18 years to be completed, while the second, larger, more powerful and more accurate one was built in less than 3. I feel sorry for him in some ways, because what movies are going to be his influences? I made my Mom feint in utero in the lobby for The Last Hope...what will be there in the future? No movie we have seen yet has made my son make his Mother feint in the lobby...I'm only 27 and I blame Mr. Lucas for foreshortening my youth this way, for forcing me to take the things-were-better-in-my-day attitude that was once anethema for me, and that the once bright boy who not afraid of new special effects technolgy and ways of telling the story died. Died remembering The Story of Our Lives...

What this blog is about.

Dear Mr. Lucas: Bring My Shuttle.

This blog is about restoring the STAR WARS movies to their former dignity. Take out the extraneous dinosaurs, Mr. Lucas. Take out the CGI crap. Bring back the old explosions. Bring back the dirty mattes. Well, you don't have to go that far. You can keep some of the subtle changes. But all the extra flying robots, all the new creatures in the Cantina scene, the anesthesized Bespin, the godawful CGI coda and panpipes of your "new" RToJ--in short all the extra crap for whatever reason you felt like stuffing in those classics--take it back and store it all in a godforsaken shed behind some shithouse on Skywalker Ranch. That you have sullied your reputation is of no concern of ours. You have defaced monuments.

(Please note: We don't deem it necessary to bring up the matter of your more recent films. We are only concerned with the second three in the "Star Wars" cosmology, those being episodes IV, V, and VI. For clarification, those movies that you [a one Mr. George Lucas] made in the late seventies and early eighties; in chronological order [from our galactic perspective of course!] A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Return of the Jedi.)

One generation and now possibly two generations are ignorant of the apex of analog technology, and only familiar with the caveman scrawl of nascent CGI. Mr. Lucas: Our cry to you? Bring My Shuttle.