Sdtrk: ‘Emaciator’ by Ramleh
Just watched the trailer for ‘Star wars: Episode Three’. My reaction? I don’t know what the hell’s going on! No, seriously, I don’t. Do I care? No! No, seriously, I don’t.
Picture a young, guileless, and innocent Davecat, seeing ‘Star wars’ (‘Episode Four’, for you rabid purists) for the very first time, back in 1977, at what was known back then as the Northland Theatre. My excitement level was, like most kids at that time, running desperately into the red. Robots! Spaceships! Aliens! Laser guns! Etc! That excitement level went up a little higher with ‘The Empire strikes back’, cos everyone likes ‘The Empire strikes back’, and leveled off with the third movie with the Ewoks, whose title, for the life of me, I cannot honestly recall.
Years passed, and not only did I get older, I got wiser, and various avenues opened up. Around the early Eighties, I started watching this quirky British scifi show called Doctor Who, and suddenly, straightforward American-made scifi seemed less and less ‘cool’. Sure, I saw the Star trek movies in the theatres like everyone else, but they were holding less of my interest with each passing year. (Except for ‘Wrath of Khan’. Everyone likes ‘Wrath of Khan‘.) Every weekday, I’d sit goggle-eyed watching the latest installment of Doctor Who, and of course, the coolest thing in the world would be to be a Timelord, tumbling headlong through Time and Space with a TARDIS (and a sexy companion) of my own. And when I wasn’t watching that, I was watching Ultraman.
I don’t know when it really dawned on me, but I think what drew me to such shows is yes, they had a high kitsch factor, but the writers got as much as they could with the limited special effects they had available. Sure, the special effects in ‘Star wars’ looked great at the time, but to me, the story was just boring. And Star trek was just very bleh straightforward. Part of the charm of the Doctor was his eccentricities — the viewers sometimes had no idea what he’d do next, not to mention his enemies or his companions. That alone was so much more fascinating to me than what was more or less a Western in space.
Then in 1987, the local channel that had been previously showing Ultraman started airing this brand-new show that was animated in Japan, and had these really sweet jet fighters that transformed into robots!!1! That show was called Robotech, and it was the Silver Key to the Gateway of New and Different Television Entertainment, or Something. I could go on about how Carl Macek, the producer, Frankensteined together three almost-totally unrelated shows in order to create Robotech, but that’s another post altogether. In any event, Star wars, Star trek and the like were completely dead to me from that point on.
But yeah, back to Lucas and his excretions! I saw Episodes One and Two, and my brain has such a resistance to anything bearing the conjunction of the words ‘Star’ and ‘Wars’, that both films were almost completely unmemorable. Here’s what I recall:
+ Darth Maul looked like a badass, but actually wasn’t a badass
+ Episode One contained Space Negroes (Jar-jar and his race), Space Arabs (that flying bug guy), and Space Chinese (the aliens in that giant round space station thing)
+ Yoda knew kung-fu
+ That Clone trooper battle at the end of Episode two was probably the best part of both movies
+ One of my old coworkers at Quest used to go out of his way to pronounce it ‘Palapaptine’, cos it was funnier
+ Ewan McGregor, Christopher Lee and Samuel L. Jackson stuck in a shitty franchise
+ Jango Fett is a really stupid fucking name
+ Not enough naked Natalie Portman
I’m sorry, I have no respect for a film director who can barely direct his actors, and insists on constantly sodomising his own back catalogue, for the sake of ‘perfection’. I gave both Lucas and his goiter money for the ‘THX 1138’ DVD, and that was only reluctantly, as it was a new version with unnecessary CG scenes shoehorned in. Unless he starts a fund to request money to publically kill himself, that’s the last cent he’ll ever see from me.
Having said that, however, I would like to see what I hope is the final Star wars movie, and I intend on seeing it in much the same fashion as I saw Episode One: sitting over at Mike‘s, watching a second-gen VHS copy that someone filmed with a videocamera at the back of a theatre. That way, I’ll be paying exactly what it’s worth!
