Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Wil Wheaton’s now reviewing the first season Next Generation.  (Thanks to GundamPilotSpaz for the info!)  It’s moderately funny stuff in places, but I like it because he really articulates all of the things that stink about the series in a such a loving way.  It’s an impressive feat.  (Also, Wil Wheaton played Car Wars… and was probably designing cars between scenes during the filming of the show.  You’d know this stuff if you’d read Dancing Barefoot.)

It’s somewhat depressing to me how this guy’s career has turned out.  I get the impression that he sorta left Next Generation because he was a hot property at the time… but then ended up going nowhere.  Now he’s married a divorcé, plays poker competitively, and blogs about his geekiness and how great life was when he was a teenager.  According to Wikipedia, his column in Dungeon magazine died, his column for the Onion has stalled, his book sales tanked, and he’s even had to post a huge online apology to his parents after going ballistic on some random topic.

I’d love to see Wil turn things around… but the whole wistful melancholy bit wears thin after a while.  I mean… I’m an aging nostalgic geek blogger… if life sucks for Wil Wheaton, then what’s it gotta be like for me?  I don’t want to think about that!

If you want to see someone that can pull this sort of thing off in a much more positive way… cruise on over to Dave’s Long Box.  This guy is insanely funny.  You have to be careful where you read his stuff because you will bust out laughing.  (I think so much of the guy, I even tried in vain to imitate him a couple of times.  I don’t come close, but I figure I get some leeway if I’m picking on George Lucas.)  I’m glad to hear that he’s going to be posting more regularly again.

Luke wasn’t the only one to get mugged.  It all started when a lone Ice Creature discovered what he thought was a Snack-Warmer.  It sure was hot inside the base, but the Taun Tauns were quite a delicacy:

He evidently went back to his buddies and let slip the news.  Soon, other Ice Creatures began to drop in:

When the Imperial fleet jumped in, a whole party of Monsters were trapped.  The Rebel leaders simply looked the other way when R2-D2 mercillessly taunted them:

These scenes were obviously cut from the film because they so clearly establish a moral equivalency between the Empire and the Rebellion.  It’s sad, really…. 

Well… okay… maybe it had more to do with the fact that these scenes do absolutely nothing to propel Luke, Han, and Leia further into the action.  Even worse, the ice monster sequence that did make it into the film was probably the worst special effect in the entire series.  All you see is this big arm at first.  (Woah!)  Then when he’s coming to eat Luke in the cave, he looks like this stupid unmoving maniquin that’s just being rolled along the passageway.  Barf.

No, but Luke, Han, and Leia are really what its about.  But just sitting back and watching the films again, I have to say that the plot is really lacking something there.  You know… the films really need an epic prelude that undermines the centrality of those three… and that establishes R2-D2 and Chewbacca as being the chief spys and the key movers and shakers of the entire Rebel movement.

No… no….  Nevermind.  That’s a really dumb idea.  Forget I mentioned it.

The movie originally opened up with Luke observing the space battle above Tatooine, but the scene was cut because the hat he was wearing was just too embarrassing– even for the man who would later create Jar-Jar Binks!

We also would have gotten to see the “Toshi station” where Luke oh so wanted to go pick up power converters… but that scene was cut because Luke’s nickname was so irritating and also because Lucas later decided that a crystal ball did not fit so well with his vision of the Star Wars ethos: 

I had the Star Wars storybook as a kid and it also contained images of the following scene that hit the cutting room floor.  Man, I thought Biggs was cool.  I could not figure out why they cut him, but then in the nineties Lucas reinserted some of his scenes when he released the altered version of the film.  Oh!  The pain!  If only we lived in a world where Lucas had someone near him to tell him he was out of his mind….

You remember that scene with the shiny black miniature Death Star looking floating droid thing with a syringe?  I never could figure it out as a kid….  I mean here we are in this high tech supernatural universe and Vader can’t pull a Jedi Mind Trick while using some kind of high tech brain imaging.  No… we’ve got a floating death star with a syringe!  It just doesn’t fit.  Well, you should have seen what Lucas originally had in mind: a black droid with a mohawk and an earring!  “I pity the fool that don’t tell me the location of the hidden rebel base!”

He’s another lousy scene that should of stayed on the cutting room floor but that Lucas had to dig back up for his re-envisioning of the film.  At least you get to check out the frightening pre-slug Jabba:

And check out this rendition of the famous Remote and Blast Shield.  This image upset me even as a kinder-gardener with only a dim memory of the movie.  I guess the Marvel Comics artist lacked the necessary stills to pull this one off and had to make it up based mostly on the script?

And here’s the scene where Frodo is entering the Mines of Moria… oh wait… wrong movie.  You remember the scene where Chewbacca gets frightened and Han just randomly shoots his blaster down an empty hall?  It never did make any sense to me.  Apparently, Lucas originally had something different in mind there as we see below.  Hmm… maybe he was running out of special effects $$?

But if I was slightly confused by Han shooting down an empty hallway, I was quite perturbed by Obiwan Kenobi’s light-saber duel.  He just gives up!  He holds his light-saber straight up and lets Vader kill him.  Right.  (Luke, did Ben forget to tell you that not only do Jedi Knights venerate lying, but they are also heavy into ritual suicide.)  The comic book adaption of that fight is much better; Kenobi talks a little more smack and appears to go down fighting.  Here’s line that got cut from the film that puts one of Ben’s more cryptic remarks in context:

Here’s a particular juicy bit… in the earliest cuts of the film, Luke’s father was well known and well thought of.  Personally, I’d like to live in a universe where Ben’s not a liar, Luke didn’t kiss his sister, and where Vader was not Luke’s daddy.  This scene provides some evidence for those that think that things really were intended to be that way as the first film came together:

Here’s a scene that demonstrates how Lucas’s revisionism truly knows no bounds.  You can tell this is the revised adaption from 2006 because Lucas had Dark Horse comics remove the part where Luke screams “Carrie!!!”  instead he makes them put in some lame line about ‘Technicos.’  Right.  You’re not fooling anyone, George.  It’s bad enough that you’ve altered the movies, but could you at least stay out of the comic adaption and leave things be?