QUOTE (Just another wretched fan @ Apr 23 2005, 06:18 PM)
Example:
If 1999 GL made ANH instead of 1977 GL. He would have changes scenes from the bridge of Vader's Star Destroyer to a boring senate scene, where Palpatine disbands the senate. 1977 GL knew that viewers don't care about politics, so he never would include said scene, and just summed it up in one line of dialogue. (Paraphrasing) "The Galactic Senate will never stand for this" "The Emperor has disbanded the senate, the regional governors now have direct control...."
Think of how much better the PT would have been if all the political scenes were deleted and replaced in this manner.
So for the simple solution to "What are the Clone Wars" the answer is "We don't want to know." We didn't need to know the politics behind the rebellion and the empire to enjoy the OT, so we shouldn't need any knowledge about this Clone war either.
If 1999 GL made ANH instead of 1977 GL. He would have changes scenes from the bridge of Vader's Star Destroyer to a boring senate scene, where Palpatine disbands the senate. 1977 GL knew that viewers don't care about politics, so he never would include said scene, and just summed it up in one line of dialogue. (Paraphrasing) "The Galactic Senate will never stand for this" "The Emperor has disbanded the senate, the regional governors now have direct control...."
Think of how much better the PT would have been if all the political scenes were deleted and replaced in this manner.
So for the simple solution to "What are the Clone Wars" the answer is "We don't want to know." We didn't need to know the politics behind the rebellion and the empire to enjoy the OT, so we shouldn't need any knowledge about this Clone war either.
I agree on both points - Star Wars is effective at least partially because it's been stripped down to the absolute bone as far as detail goes. There's a fast-moving story and little time for anything else. Ben Kenobi goes from telling Luke about his father to asking him to become a Jedi in about ninety seconds.
But again, I think that by choosing to do "episodes I-III", Lucas was to a certain extent committing himself to exploring those generalities. We didn't need to know more after all, and instead we got three movies worth of the detail that had been cut from Star Wars.