Star Wars prequel questions

[gban007]

One EU concept that I'm glad Disney has left in the dustbin is the idea that Palpatine did everything out of the goodness of his heart in order to protect the galaxy from the Yuuzhan Vong, whose coming extragalactic invasion he had foreseen through the Force.

Not sure if i read Outbound Flight, and some time since reading any of the EU, but impression I had was that Palpatine didn't care about the Vong, just used it as a way of getting Thrawn (who worried a lot about the Vong) on his side, and a convenient excuse for getting rid of a number of Jedi, without making it apparent to Thrawn etc that he was looking to eliminate Jedi.

 

[jian]

One EU concept that I'm glad Disney has left in the dustbin is the idea that Palpatine did everything out of the goodness of his heart in order to protect the galaxy from the Yuuzhan Vong, whose coming extragalactic invasion he had foreseen through the Force.

That was pretty much the backstory to our Star Wars campaign 30 years ago (except we didn’t know about the Vong then and so the threat was actually from Thrawn’s people, he was a scout and infiltrator). Also, my version of Palpatine wasn’t a Force user (he just let people think so; his Vader equivalent was a bishonen idiot who got ganked by the PCs in the second session) and turned out to be the father* of one of the PCs, who took this very seriously and made herself Empress after Thrawn killed her dad.

*Her mum was Mon Mothma.

 

[Dioltach]

That's when the lightsabers come out and the Jedi switch to what Anakin calls "aggressive negotiations".

 

[Zardnaar]

That was pretty much the backstory to our Star Wars campaign 30 years ago (except we didn’t know about the Vong then and so the threat was actually from Thrawn’s people, he was a scout and infiltrator). Also, my version of Palpatine wasn’t a Force user (he just let people think so; his Vader equivalent was a bishonen idiot who got ganked by the PCs in the second session) and turned out to be the father* of one of the PCs, who took this very seriously and made herself Empress after Thrawn killed her dad.

*Her mum was Mon Mothma.

I'm tempted to do a legends game. Make it infinitely and Thrawns the big bad and its PCs who get to deal with him.

Store here has some WEG D6 minis and a comic store has half dozen WEG D6 SWRPG books.

 

[Morrus]

There's no standing centralized army. But we see the army Naboo has. If even 10% of the planets shown in the Senate are packing that level of heat, it stands to reason there's an awful lot of distributed firepower that could be organized on short notice.

I may be misremembering but I don't recall seeing a Naboo army. They had a handful of starfighters and some security at the palace, but that's about it. There's the Gungans, I suppose, but they don't even have starships. Useful if the enemy comes to you and fights on the Windows XP desktop (and even then they lose!)

 

[pukunui]

Not sure if i read Outbound Flight, and some time since reading any of the EU, but impression I had was that Palpatine didn't care about the Vong, just used it as a way of getting Thrawn (who worried a lot about the Vong) on his side, and a convenient excuse for getting rid of a number of Jedi, without making it apparent to Thrawn etc that he was looking to eliminate Jedi.

It's been years since I read Outbound Flight, so I could be misremembering. I don't really have any desire to read it again!

 

[Willie the Duck]

Which I get -- they need as much familiar stuff as possible to tie back to the original 3 movies. However, there's Luke's RotJ outfit right there -- have that be the Jedi uniform instead. Sure, the all-black thing might wear thin on every jedi in the movies, but that of all things could be addressed (maybe even make them color coded by role, like Star Trek).

I think it’d have been better to develop some new robes that shout “space Shaolin” that don’t look like desert hermit clothes. Luke’s outfit is cool but it wouldn’t really do that, it’s more Logan’s Run than anything else. Just changing the colour of the robes would probably have been fine, honestly.

I would agree... except. Except that this movie (The Phantom Menace specifically, where the Jedi desert robes were introduced) was in the position of having to sell this new proposed trilogy* as a continuation of the original three movies. A movie trilogy that was at that time very much a completed work, with previous attempts at keeping the momentum going** being relatively moderated successes and over a decade of jokes about how Lucas was going to finish the (supposedly planned all-along) 9-part series 'someday.' There was incentive to prove to people that this was, indeed, Star Wars.
*and all other potential accessory media tie-ins, action figures, comic books, Halloween costumes, sleeping bags, lunchboxes, breakfast cereals, happy meal toys...
**Ewok and Droid cartoons, made-for-tv movies with Wilford Brimley

Not, I suppose, unlike how all these phase 4+ MCU movies keep referencing back to Infinity War characters and plot points, to make sure you know they are part of the same thing/have the same pedigree (feel free to disagree that they do, but that's the same place the prequels found themselves in when this first one was being designed).

So 9-year-old Anakin gets to make C3PO and uses Padme's repair droid R2D2 when he (kids adventure style) gets to fly a star fighter. And there's a landspeeder pod racer race on tatooine. And Obi-wan and Qui-Gon Jinn get to/have to evoke original trilogy Obi-wan and Luke. Not space Shaolin, not other-Kurosawa-reference, not an established Expanded Universe notion or Dark Horse comics depiction of republic jedi -- Luke (either Tatooine Teenager or Emo Logan’s Run mode) and Old Ben (Sand Hermit, since that's all we saw).

I mean, obviously it didn't have to happen that way, and they could have coded the jedi as the same old jedi you rooted for last time in some other way. However, I think that if they were going to have the jedi have uniforms at all, it was going to be to our actual former heroes/friends/childhood plastic playmates.

It's wild that we're going to rip off Akira Kurosawa, but when it would be really useful, everyone just forgets about all of his films.

No one forgets. We've had 49 years (22 at the time, I guess, wow) years of fellow nerds and cinema nerds making sure everyone knows that they know that Star Wars was hugely inspired by Kurosawa films (and through him, John Ford westerns), telling Campbell's Heroes' Journey, with a Flash Gordon overlay, and a Dambusters remake at the end. Everyone knows. Even Harrison Ford and your friend that proudly* proclaims that they've never seen a Star Wars movie knows.
*for some reason

The issue is that this movie wasn't trying to tie these new* jedi to the work that inspired the original trilogy (nor for derivative work like the EU, comics, etc.). They were trying to tie them to the blessed works themselves -- the things that 90%+ of the audience actually had investment in.
*yes, the younger of which is actually the older of the two in the original work. But emotionally tie, not just narratively tie.

 

[trappedslider]

View attachment 427171

the comic that gave us "Jar-Jar you're a genius"

 

[Deset Gled]

I may be misremembering but I don't recall seeing a Naboo army. They had a handful of starfighters and some security at the palace, but that's about it. There's the Gungans, I suppose, but they don't even have starships. Useful if the enemy comes to you and fights on the Windows XP desktop (and even then they lose!)

Naboo's standing forces were a big enough organization to have both an air force and organized ground troops. They had their own custom designed and built starfighters that were kept on call. With enough fighters to take on the Trade Federation fleet in space and succeed. I think we see at least a dozen fighters in the movie, and they had enough that they could afford to let one go missing without it being a problem. On the ground, the Trade Federation had at least a dozen tanks and a dozen troop carriers that probably held about a thousand battle droids each. The Gungan's weren't winning against them, but they also weren't overwhelmed. They had nearly matching manpower and enough firepower available on instant call to hold their own against them.

IMNSHO, having that kind force available on-call assumes some level of standing military. Especially when you remember that they were under a trade embargo. All of that is just what they had available at their fingertips.

OTOH, maybe I'm imposing too much real world logic.

 

[jian]

I think it’s fair to guess that many systems would have had some sort of military during the Republic era but would have varied greatly in purpose. A Core system like Alderaan or Chandrila which had been at peace for generations would maintain one mostly to meet Republic requirements for peacekeeping, since they were basically never going to get invaded and their worst local problem would probably be pirates who’d got lost. A Rim world like Naboo, however pleasant, would sensibly maintain a decent military to warn of larger groups of criminals or even invasion. Others would depend on what had happened in recent history, whether they were feuding with their neighbours, and so on.

If Palpatine had two large armies at his disposal he would therefore find conquering most Core worlds to be relatively trivial, but the further you got out and the later he arrived, the more prepared the other systems would be for either or both armies. So he would probably end up conquering only about half of Republic territory and have to contend with alliances forming against him etc over time, new independent states that claimed to carry the spirit of the Old Republic, and of course all those pesky Jedi hanging out on those worlds and being irritatingly heroic. If that’s what he wants, fine, but I suppose I can see why his grand plan might have worked better if he wanted to corrupt/crush the Jedi and control most of Republic territory at the same time.

It’s an interesting AU, though.