If there’s one thing that baffles me about 99% of my generation (which used to be called “Gen X,” but you never really hear that anymore, so let’s say “children of the ’80s”), it’s the unending fascination with Star Wars. Now, I’m not gonna pretend I never had any use for Star Wars (although I was always more of a Trekkist), but for me it’s a movie I liked as a kid, sorta like (as I’ve already confessed hereabouts) Herbie Rides Again or The Return of the Pink Panther. After Return of the Jedi (most of which had been spoiled for me by my asshole biology teacher, whose untimely demise I plotted for weeks afterward), Star Wars and I went our separate ways. I never even saw The Phantom Menace until three years after it was released, when I was assigned to review Attack of the Clones and figured I should get up to speed on all the important trade route issues.
I mention this not to paint myself as being somehow above movie geekdom – I certainly have my own obsessions that are probably much more embarrassing than Star Wars in the grand scheme of things – but merely as a warning to those of you who may not want to read anything negative about your beloved Lucasverse. For I have seen The Clone Wars and it is what the Greeks call “not so good.” To wit:
1. The animation sucks. This shouldn’t surprise, since the feature film version of The Clone Wars is basically an afterthought cobbled together in advance of a new cartoon series debuting this fall. Yet it did surprise me a little, since the last couple of Star Wars movies were 95% CGI anyway – you’d think they would have perfected it by now. It’s not like I was expecting Pixar here, but the human-types onscreen are so stiff, expressionless and generally carved-looking, they appear to be posing for their own action figures. The robots and other critters fare somewhat better, but the Lucasfolk could do the big battles and dogfights in their sleep by now, and it appears that they did. Which brings us to…
2. The Playstation factor. I enjoy playing videogames. What I don’t particularly enjoy is watching somebody else play a videogame. For nearly two hours. That’s the experience of watching The Clone Wars, however. It’s an endless series of suspense-free space battles, light saber duels, shootouts and narrow escapes connected by plot interludes that look and play like cut scenes from a Grand Theft Auto game, minus the wit and character development.
3. The “tween” Jedi. “Y’know, the Star Wars audience just isn’t big enough,” George Lucas muses, scratching his big blobby neck-thing. “I’ve gotta put something in there that appeals to the Hannah Montana crowd.” Enter Ahsoka Tano, the orange-hued tween introduced as Anakin Skywalker’s “padawan.” She’s spunky and sassy! And is there something just a little creepy about her following “Skyguy” around and calling him “Master”? I think there is.
4. “Stinky the Hutt.” The mission assigned to Anakin, Ahsoka and Obi-Wan Kenobi is to rescue the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt. (There are strategic reasons for this, but I won’t bore us all to death attempting to explain them.) The offspring in question – called “Rotta the Huttlet” in the credits, but referred to onscreen as “Stinky” – is such a cute widdle critter, I’m sure the dolls are already flying off the shelves at Toys R Us. Attention, geeks: Lucas didn’t care that you hated Jar Jar Binks and he won’t care if you hate Stinky the Hutt. He’s a toymaker and he’s just doing his job.
5. The Clone Wars. This epic intergalactic battle is so integral to the Star Wars mythos that most of it took place offscreen between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. That’s the setting for this movie, and the upcoming cartoon series as well. So hooray, we get more of Anakin Skywalker before he turns into Darth Vader! I mean, seriously, you’re George Lucas, you’re making an animated Star Wars movie, you can do whatever the fuck you want. So why do you pick the least interesting part of the story imaginable? Wouldn’t it be more fun to pick up the adventures of Luke Skywalker and crew after Return of the Jedi? You know, like that third trilogy Lucas used to talk about before he decided he really only meant to do two all along? Mark Hamill has been making a living doing cartoon voices for years now – I’m sure he could spare a few hours lending his pipes to that.
Just to let you know that I’m not a complete curmudgeon, there is one part of The Clone Wars I sort of enjoyed. It was a brief interlude in the seedy side of the Star Wars universe (which we haven’t seen much since the cantina sequence from the original movie) involving Jabba’s uncle, Ziro the Hutt. For whatever inexplicable reason, Ziro is a hookah-smoking drag queen who sounds like Truman Capote on a Bourbon Street bender. If Lucas came up with this, I can only imagine he’s gotten so bored with his own creation that he finally snapped. If that’s the case, maybe I’ll check out the cartoon series after all.
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George Lucas and the License to Print Money
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