LogFAQs > #924326613

Zeus posted...

Yes, but Thrawn was re-canonized in the terribly-animated Rebels and Kylo is not only awful, but we also don't have a true budget Jayna... unless they're going with a super-obvious major twist that they kept insisting they aren't doing. (aka Rocksteady's Arkham Knight gambit)

Yeah, but like I said, that's less about killing the EU and more about doing a poor job of replacing it. If they'd just firebombed the EU into ash and then replaced it with awesome alternative plot and characters, that's a 100% positive. But if you throw out the trash and then replace it with an equal amount of trash, you really haven't accomplished anything.

Honestly, if I was Disney, I probably would have kept most of the backstory and setting details from the Thrawn books (some of the only solidly good material in the EU... except for the clone-y bits), then lifted Jacen and Jaina and dropped Kylo and Rey directly into their roles. But they might actually have been unwilling to do that for two reasons - 1) using that framework locks the future screenwriters into a lot of dead ends they can't write their way out of , like having Luke's life plotted out for him if you keep Mara Jade (which you should, because she's cool - though admittedly troublesome as a post-insert character), and 2) it might require paying Timothy Zahn a lot of money for licensing rights using his characters in cinematic form.

I occasionally get the urge to just sit down and "re-write" the prequels the way I would have done them if Lucas had hired me to screenwrite a first draft of their plots back in 1998 (though I wouldn't do much more than outline them - I definitely wouldn't go so granular that I'm scripting dialogue or storyboarding scenes), but I usually resist it. Maybe I should do a similar write-up on how I'd brainstorm the sequels as well.

(I'd probably do it for these topics, though I'm self-aware enough to know almost no one would care, and most of you probably wouldn't bother reading it. I'm not sure I'd be able to read anyone else's treatment along those lines if someone else did it either, so I can see why others might feel the same way about my ideas.)

And whether Rey turns out to be the secret love-child of Han/Leia or not, I think there were absolutely shades of that in the original intent. Either that, or she's the gender-swapped Ben Skywalker. I see the whole "Oh no, your parents were nobodies" as more Rian Johnson bullshit. She was almost certainly influenced to at least some degree by Jaina, imo.



Zeus posted...

tbh, I'm kinda looking forward to that film even though I know it's going to suck especially since it's going with the magic book gimmick that Goosebumps used.

I never had the nostalgia for those books that some people did (the scary books I had as a kid were the Tales for the Midnight Hour series - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_for_the_Midnight_Hour ), but my understanding is that 90% of the appeal was the batshit crazy art that was borderline terrifying.

So I guess if you make a movie like that with Guillermo Del Toro involved you might be able to capture some of that aesthetic... but the more G-rated and "kid friendly" you make it, the worse it would be. A large part of the appeal of those sorts of stories and books was that they weren't entirely kid friendly, and it scared kids in ways we don't necessarily consider acceptable in these overprotective times. But it seems like they rated it PG-13 and clearly made it for teens, which sort of defeats the entire point of it.

And I don't mind a "magic book" motif if they use it as a framing device for short stories (like Yuzna's Necronomicon film). But this doesn't seem to be that, so I assume it's going to suck.


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