George Lucas Blames 'Star Wars' Critics for Killing Series

[El Mahdi]

Mmmmmm...bacon..

 

[frankthedm]

Lucas- you want to know who killed the franchise? Look in the mirror while you're washing the blood off your hands.

must spread XP around...

 

[Zaukrie]

I admit to being a white guy....but how are accents that aren't midwestern white guys talking racist? Maybe that's too much for this board, if so, I apologize in advance, but many of the people complaining about the racism were really just saying "this guy has an accent, and he's a bad guy, so it must be racist".

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not necessarily racist, but playing into stereotypes. And not creatively.

Watto was the worst and most obvious- follow the link above and you'll see a picture of him with all kinds of links listing the stereotypes he plays into.

The closing bit of the Wiki on him also catalogs some of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watto

There were similar issues with the Neimoidians who had accents that would be characteristic of Japanese speakers of English from the Tokyo area. I'm not plucking that out of the air, that was how specific my Japanese teacher was about it. Personally, I thought they sounded more like a Hollywood Chinese stereotype. And they're aggressively expansionist masters of trade. If, as some analysts say, the Empire is roughly an analog for the Axis in WW2, this makes the Neimoidians...?

Gungans- a "backwoods", laid back culture with a mock-Caribbean accent...represented by a fairly meek, annoying and virtually incompetent Jar-Jar Binks.

 

[Jhaelen]

Lucas's insistence on his vision is the death of the Star Wars series. Watto you talking about?

Which reminds me of a famous quote of Helmut Schmidt (a German Politican): "Wer Visionen hat, soll zum Arzt gehen." (roughly translates to "Someone who's having visions should go see a doctor.")

 

[krunchyfrogg]

On second thought, I won't have to retire the pic. I saw a commercial last night for "The Phantom Menace" (in 3D -- Only in theaters!!)

Ugh.

I think recycing crap is even worse than churning out new crap.

 

[Zelda Themelin]

I won't be missing series. Lucas is weird person, has too much money, can't live with woman and doesn't mentally live in planet earth. This is based on his interviews and my peronal opinion naturally.

New series might have been made for his motherless kids, but for normal family movie I think it's pretty rotten message to say wanting to save your mum that lives in slavery and even loving her leads to evil. Whole rewritten relationship with princess was very bad relationship full of abuse and strange age-cap for romance.

Generally speaking Lucas is not good director of people. He doesn't get feelings, really. He is rather talented with special effects and I think all 3 newer movies had quite adventurous fun beginning but soon after that movies start to have strangely acting people with strange wooden dialogue.

I am afraid once Lucas either feels his re-cycling and toys aren't selling enough he puts out new star wars related stuff, starring jar-jar-binks and ewoks maybe. Or does the trilogy or new indiana jones movie. With son of Indiana Jones maybe.

Never underestimate call of money.

 

[Janx]

Wow! Talk about Hubris!

The Fans didn't like his "prequels", so it's the Fans fault the series is dead.

It absolutely has nothing at all to do with him making movies his fans didn't like...

As some other article I'd read about "who got credit", apparently Lucas did not write any of the original Star Wars. He only directed A New Hope. Most would agree that Empire and Return were the best of all of them (which he neither wrote nor directed).

So, I deduce that Lucas is not the ingredient for sucess. He might in fact be the ingredient for failure.

I'm sure the levels of hate heaped against him affect him. And it is irrational to have such feelings towards the man.

But technically, he made crap. Unless something improves, he will likely produce more crap. Therefore, him not making more stuff = more good.

 

[Zelda Themelin]

He wasn't the one, you invented that story, really, well part of it, but most ideas he contributed were the bad ones. New trilogy is more of his. Like was his contribution to Indiana Jones meets UFO crystal new age skull.

Yes, I am being way too sarcastic, but thing is he really is special effect guy and owns rights for Star Wars, not a great storyteller or actually artist loving the mythology. It's business to him.

I never believed he would make whole saga. Future of Star Wars universe is already sold for books and computer games. He would counter lot of ideas, and maybe his business consultants have told him making more movies woudn't bring enough money. And yeh, maybe he would like people to love his movies too.

I think it's also the age, old men tend to do some things differently.

Remains me of Michael Moorcock, guy who wrote Elric and other Champion Eternal stories. They used to be dark, cynical and good books. Then he took lik 29 year pause and wrote some additional Elric stories. Edge was gone, books were some watered hallf-assed romantic crap. Well, at least if you were expecting similar thing than younger version of him wrote.

This kinda change is rampart in literature. I know pretty many writers whose stories were great... but not the newer stuff. Musicians too. Some can hold to the spark of creativity but others loose it. Or go soft.

 

[NewJeffCT]

As some other article I'd read about "who got credit", apparently Lucas did not write any of the original Star Wars. He only directed A New Hope. Most would agree that Empire and Return were the best of all of them (which he neither wrote nor directed).

So, I deduce that Lucas is not the ingredient for sucess. He might in fact be the ingredient for failure.

I'm sure the levels of hate heaped against him affect him. And it is irrational to have such feelings towards the man.

But technically, he made crap. Unless something improves, he will likely produce more crap. Therefore, him not making more stuff = more good.

I had thought most people considered Empire & A New Hope as the best of the series, with Return being a weak finale to the trilogy (Ewoks with rocks & sticks defeating stormtroopers, a neutered Han Solo, too many rubbery looking aliens inserted for merchandising, Ewoks, etc)?