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I played Link's Awakening with my wife and daughter. My wife was taken back at the ending (surprised, not disliking). I think she basically just assumed the whole time that it wouldn't end with everyone on Koholint basically dying, or vanishing from existence.
This got me thinking about how I played this, or watched my brother play it, when I was the same age as my daughter. None of the media she consumes challenges her with difficult endings. Everything HAS to return to the status quo at the end, because we can't risk anyone being unhappy. In Frozen, Anna is unfrozen. In Moana, even Maui gets his fucking hook back after it breaks. Fake out deaths and fake out status quo changes happen left and right, but it is really rare to see something that actually sticks.
I love downer endings, and I think it made me who I am. It makes me sad and disappointed and a little disgusted to see basically all of the media of my kids' day be bland and not challenging them to really feel something other than a vague blandly happy dance party ending. Dance party endings aren't new, but have been made ubiquitous in the past 20 years. Same with fake out deaths, and I blame Marvel for that. I guess I personally chalk this all up to the general trend towards never making anyone uncomfortable, which is tied in with the corporatization of media and corporate-memphization of media.
I too feel like I've see fake-out deaths happen more and more often, and I don't know if it's me growing up or if it's a real thing. But it just seems to keep happening in basically all major mainstream media works, like in the last couple seasons of Game of Thrones where, e.g. Jon Snow was saved from falling into an icy lake by his uncle coming out of nowhere, and then during the Battle of Winterfell, we kept seeing character after character get overwhelmed by zombies, only to cut away, and then later see that they somehow got out perfectly fine. Or the latest Star Wars films where we saw Kylo Ren walk out of a crashing spaceship unscathed without explanation, and then later come back from falling into a pit to save Rey, and then have Rey "die" only to get saved by him. Or recent Marvel films like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness where Wong fell down the side of a mountain, only to be revealed to have landed on a ledge to survive. I haven't watched the latest Jurassic World film, but I heard that there was a scene near the end where a major character says "go on without me" to do a last stand, only to show up 15 minutes later unscathed, to be rescued.
If there is indeed a trend, I feel like it has to do with the extension of childhood that's been happening all throughout the West at least since my millennial generation and possibly longer. The writers want the benefits without the costs, the power without the responsibility, to have their cake and eat it too, to have that emotional death moment without the death. Children get to enjoy some of that, because they (usually) have guardians to take care of the responsibility stuff while giving them the benefits. I also expect that this effect might be stronger among mainstream media writers, as, I'm guessing, they're more likely, due to nepotism, to come from more wealthy and well-connected families which can allow them to live as children for decades at adult age.
I was thinking about Star wars recently, and one conclusion I came to is that it's really strange that these are films that:
Like, I wouldn't trust my corporate self to write and produce the continuations of beloved franchises. When you're at work, if you're not a visionary, you just care about not getting fired and keeping people happy.
It's just bizarre. Of course they failed so hard.
One problem's that, at scale, it has to get handed over. Even in the height of George Lucas-era Star Wars, you had stuff like suits arguing spice wasn't a drug (one of the bizarre situations where Kevin J Anderson was the good guy!), just because it wasn't practical for some rando writing a weird one-off novel in the universe to talk to the chief, if the chief's doing anything else. And that's kinda the good ending: Star Trek was notorious for no one in corporate caring about anything but the tv shows (and eventually not even that), so you'd get this endless parade of original fiction recycled into EU fic, regardless of whether it fit the characters or setting in the slightest.
But you definitely do get some variation. For all golden age minecrafters complain about Dinnerbone (sometimes with reason: hidden lava one-blocks in the nether), the difference between beta-era design and 1.12+ is pretty obvious. And even then, you can tell people care about the game to some extent, at least compared to some of the more obvious slop.
Star Trek tie-in fiction was rigorously policed; no out-of-character actions for the main characters (from the TV shows), the main characters don't die, no original characters that steal the spotlight from the main characters, everything had to reset so the next writer churning out the next book started from a clean slate.
The very earliest novels got away with more, because (as Diane Duane says) "from Paramount’s point of view, Star Trek novels were merely another kind of merchandising, like plastic phasers and James T. Kirk action figures" so they weren't keeping a close eye on them. But then the tie-in novels became a valuable merchandising stream, and that meant looking for professional writers (rather than fan writers turned pro) to do them, and the drawing-up of guidelines as to what could and couldn't be done in the 80s and updated in the 90s.
I don't know what the current state of play is, given that we got ST: Disco and Starfleet High, so the tie-in novels might be wild and woolly again: yes we welcome trans pansexual non-binary differently abled neurodivergent body-positive multiracial folx of colour as main characters! your villains not only can, but must, be cis het old(er) conservative white guys!
That's fair: very few big intellectual property things are completely unpoliced by their owners. I was moving more from the early TOS works being hilariously off-kilter, but even TNG and some early Voyager stories were often very weird from a tonally and character look. Not even necessarily bad books: Children of Hamlin was reasonably good and even got the general TNG ethos, but it's just written like someone had a glance at a wikipedia summary of the series.
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IIRC, much of the strictness of the guideline enforcement in the tie-in novels was due to one guy (Gene Roddenberry's assistant Richard Arnold) who apparently saw himself as enforcing the Will of Gene on the unenlightened writerly horde. Though it's not clear how much of it was the Will of Gene as opposed to the Will of Richard Arnold; apparently on more than one occasion an author managed to do an end-run around Arnold and contact Roddenberry directly with his proposed novel which had attracted Arnold's ire for some reason or other, only to have Roddenberry say "looks fine to me, go ahead and publish it". In any event, Arnold and his influence on the tie-in novels went away shortly after Roddenberry's death, and the guidelines loosened significantly.
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This seems like an easily mostly-solved problem: if the suits are confidently unanimous you don't bug the chief; if not, you send a quick email, archive the response, and summarize it in the Show Bible.
Not a perfect solution, since the suits might be unanimously idiots or might have not seen some foreshadowing or planning that part of "established" canon was a lie, or the chief might still change his mind later and not care that a random novel gets invalidated by it, but still better than adjudicating canon by majority suit vote.
I don't think we're there yet, but this seems like the kind of thing LLMs could be used to handle. However, LLMs could also obviate the need for an actual coherent extended universe, as the sheer volume of fanfiction being generated could take away the meaning and value of official canon in the eyes of fans.
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Star Wars failed in the fan mind before it was handed over to corporations. Lucas had control of the prequels and they had problems.
Definitely agree, but it's very different. The prequels were not a problem of vision, but of execution (for the most part). They failed because Lucas was old and thought he was better then he was, not because he tried to please too many people.
And that failure mode was such that they kind of ended up really weird and quirky, though really bad. I kind of believe that if the prequels had a normal script revision process, and actual directors, they might not have been completely terrible. This is in contrast to the Disney ones which failed because they're bland and corporateized.
Lucas spent the better part of 20 years trying to get someone else on board to direct another Star Wars trilogy. He was lobbying Steven Spielberg especially hard in the mid-90s. Spielberg finally told him, in the nicest possible way, that if Lucas wanted it done so badly he should fuck off and do it himself. So he did. It’s not like he was overprotective of his baby, no one else wanted it.
That's interesting. I didn't know that either. I wonder why no one else wanted to do it? It seems like that would have been the dream project for a lot of up-and-coming young directors.
And yeah... I can't help but think that it would have been better off with someone else other than Lucas at the helm. Spielberg would have been amazing, I wonder why he was so against it? Maybe he was just scared that he couldn't do it justice.
I was not the most aware kid in the 90s, nor was I a Star Wars fan, but I recall that Star Wars held a near-sacred status among both scifi nerds and film enthusiasts in that time. IIRC, they were the highest grossing movies of all time until Titanic, and with about a decade having passed between the 3rd and then-latest installment, in the days of limited VHS or TV runs, its myth and legend grew. I imagine that the responsibility of handling such a holy franchise and the pressure that comes with it was probably too daunting for most directors, perhaps even Spielberg. Since Lucas was still alive, if the results were anything less than mindblowing and revolutionary like Star Wars was in 1977, whichever director was at the helm would surely get dragged through the mud (Lucas himself was dragged, of course, mostly deservedly so IMHO).
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Well you see what a thankless task it ended up being for Lucas. And it would have been even worse for an outside director if they fumbled it. It would have been worse than Kathleen Kennedy heat. It’s a lot of pressure.
Also IIRC there’s some union issues as well. Lucasfilm was bypassing SAG and the DGA and it would have been dicey for Spielberg to effectively cross the picket line. That’s why he didn’t direct Return of the Jedi, but I can’t remember if it was still a problem by ‘98.
Plenty of noob directors have been fumbling existing franchises with no problem recently, despite the risk of backlash. It beggars belief that nobody wanted to take a chance.
The union thing sounds more plausible. The other thing may be that Lucas probably aimed for directors of his generation/people he respected while Disney specifically sought out young, pliable talent. Those people would have more options and might not like to be caught between Lucas and the fans.
But Disney Star Wars was able to get Ron Howard though so maybe no one wanted to work under Lucas? He doesn't seem like a Tiger Mom Producer (he handed over ROTJ and ESB and they're widely considered good) but it is possible no one wanted to take over something he'd be storyboarding for years.
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I didn't know that, that's interesting.
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I think the problem is partly in the forst films Lucas had push back on his bad ideas from other talented people and partly Lucas had a blind spot about what fans liked about the series (the Jedi thing but also lots of things he changed about the originals in the special editions) and was further removed from the source material as he aged and viewed his past through increasingly nostalgia tinted memories.
Definitely. That's what I mean by saying that he thought he was better than he was, and that it would have been solved with a normal script revision process. By the 90s, he was untouchable, and no one would have dared give notes to the man who made Star wars, but that's exactly what it needed. Everyone needs an editor
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The basic idea of the prequels is fundamentally bad. The cool thing about the original movies is that the force (and jedis by extension) was mysterious it could do miracles but you didn't know if it could any specific thing. That only works if there are almost no jedis going around (which the original trilogy did, Luke wasn't even a real one), if you fill the setting with jedis it either becomes a fixed set of spells (the prequels), which only appeals to DnD nerds, or a deus ex machina that solves every problem (the sequels), which appeals to nobody.
Don't bring up the EU, nobody reads that.
The original trilogy really is a miraculous convergence where brilliance met technological limitations in the best possible way, and he was somehow lucky enough to remove all his bad ideas while keeping all his good ones. All of the missing stuff contributed to the magical, mysterious atmosphere, while he kept just enough details to make it seem realistic. The prequels were... the opposite.
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Yeah, but Lucas's vision for the original trilogy was similarly bad right from the start, with the "Whills" being conscious microbes living within the Force. This was in his earliest drafts for Star Wars. I don't know why he removed it before making Star Wars a reality, maybe a reader talked him off this idea but it saved the movie, and by the time he made the prequel trilogy, no one could talk him off bad ideas.
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The EU is widely read and beloved by Star Wars fans. Hardly "nobody".
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Not to the same extent as now, IMO. The prequels have their haters, but they have just as many fans. The sequels are so bad that even some prequel haters have softened their stance and talk about how at least Lucas had a vision, even if it was imperfect. The sequels do have fans, to be sure, but they are by far in the minority whereas opinion on the prequels was much more evenly split.
I'm an Old School Star Wars fan (I saw A New Hope in theaters when it was just a little SF flick starting to get buzz).
I think you're forgetting just how much fans loathed the prequels when they first came out. Well, loathed is a strong term. They still went to see them. Fans had been waiting for 16 years after Return of the Jedi, the hype was overwhelming, and while A Phantom Menace was of course a box office success, hardcore SW fans were trashing it and the rest of the prequels almost immediately. Today maybe the backlash against Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd's acting seems overdone, but at the time those prequels felt like a huge let-down, as pretty as they were. The plot went in weird directions, the characters weren't what people were expecting, and of course over a decade of EU content and fan speculation got blown away. The prequels were really... not good, and the consensus was that George Lucas was a good visual director but hugely overrated as a writer.
Of course, then the sequels came out and made the prequels look like golden age SF by comparison.
I'm old enough to remember watching the prequels in first run in cinemas, and the hatedom for the prequels at the time was worse than the hatedom the sequels got. The prequels are less hated now because of the passage of time. It doesn't help that the prequels recovered from a truly atrocious start (The Phantom Menace remains in my view comfortably the worst of the nine) meaning that Revenge of the Sith not sucking was something people ignored at the time, whereas the sequels got worse and worse (The Farce Awakens is a perfectly OK remake of A New Hope).
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I'm not forgetting that at all. But I think your argument is missing that there was not only the group of fans who loathed the prequels. There were also fans who enjoyed them quite a bit. I remember going to see Phantom Menace as a teenager with my friends, and we all came out of that movie stoked about how cool it was to see the Old Republic and the Jedi order at its peak, things we had only imagined before. I fully acknowledge that there were fans who very vocally and bitterly hated the prequels, but they were not even close to unanimous among the fan base.
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the prequels were (mostly) fine as movies, particularly The Phantom Menace. They weren't fine as Star Wars movies.
I think my take is best summed up by the midichlorian scene. In a different setting, this is a fine scene! Sure, you can measure the space magic capabilities of someone with a blood test. That's fine! If it was in Star Trek, sure, or if it was measuring for bionic strength in Mass Effect, for instance. It is, however, completely wrong for Star Wars and The Force.
Exactly. Star Trek is (or was) hard(ish) science, the technobabble was at least a pretence at 'based on current understanding of scientific principles'. Star Wars is space fantasy, so blood tests for midichlorians sits very uneasily alongside 'I got spontaneously pregnant without having sex'. Going back to the original movies, the Force and the Jedi etc. are regarded as 'hokey ancient religions' and mysticism, not Based On True Science.
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How much of this is just a function of people who saw the prequels as kids imprinting on the films at an early age, and enjoying them despite their uneven quality? Similar to all the people who love Disney direct-to-video sequels because they grew up with them.
If that's the true explanation, then just as the prequels started to be rehabilitated in the public eye as people who saw them as kids grew up and started making video essays about why the prequels were great, I wonder if we won't see the same thing happen as the kids who grew up with the sequels grow up?
I think some of that is "I thought the prequels were shit, then I saw what they did with the newer ones, man I didn't know when I had it good" (same as with Jackson's Hobbit movies against Rings of Power). Did anyone really want Kylo Ren, man-boy rebel without a clue? Or the 'mystery' around Rey: her parents abandoned her and ran away! No, they will come back for her one day! No, they were junkies who sold her and crashed their ship and died! No, she in fact has a secret destiny as the descendant of Palpatine which is why her parents hid her!
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This is an open question, and certainly it's nonzero, but my anecdotal experience is that, even among the younger viewers, respect for the prequels (mostly undeserved, IMHO) seems more driven by how much better they are than the sequels than by nostalgia. I've seen a number of completely new young fans who never watched the prequels or the sequels (or the originals) until recently express the opinion that the prequels are much better than the sequels.
We should be able to detect this pretty soon, if not now. The Force Awakens came out 11 years ago, which is less than the 16 years between The Phantom Menace and that film, but still plenty of time for then-10-year-olds to become influential in the social medias to shape the overall public view of it.
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Partly that.
But part of it may be that but a lot of it is just that the term "prequels hate" can mean the films or the setting.
A lot of people hated the films for the way they handled certain characters and plots or because they felt the CGI was overdone. But that is not the same as hating them as settings.
Many fans were willing to take the bit of the films they didn't like in exchange for a living Republic and Jedi Order and Republic and all the stories you could tell with them
So a lot of people have more fondness for the "prequel era" because that stuff also included Republic Commando, The Clone Wars, etc.
That audience is younger and so has gained more power and influence over time. Especially since the attempt to mainly cater to the OT-setting fans after the LucasArts sale was a huge disaster, partly because they confused Prequel Film Hate for New Worldbuilding Hate.
We might. The problem I see is that there's almost no consistent throughline in these movies and their setting is basically the OT setting but worse. But maybe the books are cool. I couldn't bring myself to check.
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The prequels were disappointing to fans because they weren't what we had been waiting all this time for, it barely "looked" like Star Wars but they were Lucas's new vision, something new cooked fresh with new base ingredients. Now it turns out I'm allergic to slapstick cartoon rabbits in my space operas, but that recipe can have its fans. The sequels were exactly what the fans had been waiting for, it looks like Star Wars from front to back, but they ultimately served us an old batch of og Star Wars that had been wasting in Lucasfilm's vault with moldy rotten ingredients; yes it's the original recipe but the quality and freshness isn't there anymore.
What would have satisfied fans is doing what Jon Favreau did with seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian. The original recipe for Star Wars is samurai/western + pulp sci-fi setting, The Mandalorian (seasons 1 and 2, it got bad after) was adapting new or different samurai/western stories in the setting. Same recipe, fresh ingredients.
Given that Disney owns both now, I've been thinking a spiritual successor to Firefly would fit well in the Star Wars universe. But I wouldn't trust the company blindly to produce a good show these days.
Andor was good, though. Same idea; new characters and setting.
I think they tried with the Han Solo movie? I mean, for things going full circle, Mal is clearly inspired by Solo to begin with, the rogue, wisecracking, charming smuggler flying an aging piece of junk that he can keep relevant against much fancier ships due to his perfect familiarity with it and its quirks. Haven't seen the Solo movie personally, the marketing for the movie and the troubled development killed any interest I could have had, but reading the synopsis gives me the impression that it's what they tried. Though looking at visuals, they seemed to have failed at capturing the frontier vibe (which, again, The Mandalorian captured perfectly).
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I don't think Firefly could be made in today's Hollywood - it is far too obviously the Lost Cause in space.
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Maybe... But the prequels seemed to succeed as children's movies and as vehicles for other media like animation and video games.
The sequels seem to have produced first anger and then apathy. Even the children don't care. Only the mega fans that seemingly can't get offended by anything seem excited. No media products seem to be set during or after the sequel trilogy, everything is just set way earlier or at most between the OT and ST.
Something has gone very wrong with the sequel trilogy in a way that they didn't with the prequel trilogy.
While I don't especially like the prequels, they do have a kind of child-like earnest charm that I enjoy.
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