The Big Picture: That's No Moon

[ExtraDebit]

I have nothing to say except: I love you bob and I see eye to eye with you.

 

[XavierPrice]

Dear Mr. Robert "MovieBob" Chipman,
I agree with everything you said this episode. That almost never happens. Good job.

 

[jaketaz]

quite enjoyed this video. though I was hoping to see a movie version of the "Thrawn Trilogy" - I always thought those books rose above the level of "assembly-line fan fiction" and treated the material with respect while expanding on it.

 

[Zer_]

The whole secret things can't stay as secret for long, really? If that's the case wouldn't we have leak info on Half Life Episode 3 by now (I'm pretty sure Valve employees are tight lip about that game).

Anyway, the only time I would start to doubt or be against the whole thing is once we actually seen development of the upcoming film.

There's a MASSIVE difference between Valve keeping Half-Life 3 under wraps and The whole Disney LucasArts fiasco. Let's face it, Valve is a relatively small company with some of the most dedicated employees I can think of. Disney is a huge company, and I mean huge.

 

[TheAIOverlord]

Leia is a Disney princess now.
That's not a good thing.

 

[maximara]

Re: the Expanded Universe being garbage, didn't the Thrawn trilogy sell pretty well and wasn't it well regarded? "The Secret History of Star Wars" credits it with rekindling interest in the Star Wars franchise in the 90s (don't know how reliable that book is though). On the other hand this led to the prequels, so.. Anyway, adapting the Thrawn trilogy seems like a possibility since the story has been proven to work once and it's neatly divided into three parts. But I hope they will go with a completely new story and blow us away.

The thing is even Lucas has said the books are NOT part of the movie canon--at least twice

"There are two worlds here," explained Lucas. "There?s my world, which is the movies, and there?s this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe ? the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They don?t intrude on my world, which is a select period of time, [but] they do intrude in between the movies. I don?t get too involved in the parallel universe." (''Cinescape'' July 2001)

Lucas reiterated this in ''Starlog'' #337 (August 2005): "I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one."

So I have no idea where the idea the the movies and the EU are somehow related is coming from other then fans trying to make some sense out the prequel films as is sure is NOT coming from Lucas.

In fact, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Expanded_Universe#Official_levels_of_canon) there seems to be no less then FIVE _different_ Star Wars universes:
G (George Lucas)-canon (movies only)
T (Television)-canon (Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the yet unaired Star Wars live-action TV series)
C (continuity)-canon (main EU material)
S (secondary)-canon (older EU that doesn't quite fit into G or C canons)
N (non-canon)-canon (everything else)

Lucas holds to G-canon and perhaps some of the T canon stuff (Lucas has stated regarding the Holiday Special "If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it." so he puts that in N if he has to deal with it at all.)

 

[Flatron W2241S]

The thing is even Lucas has said the books are NOT part of the movie canon--at least twice

Well, my post was a response to Movie Bob saying that all the Expanded Universe material was bad, and therefore the new Star Wars movies wouldn't/shouldn't be adapted from EU material. The Thrawn trilogy (haven't read it myself yet) sold well, piqued the interest of the public in Star Wars, so it seems that it at least possible that the series could be adapted into film. (A Big Picture episode on the Thrawn trilogy would be interesting to see, usually I find Bob's videos to be good even if I disagree with his opinions.) I know the basics of the Star Wars canon system, but I don't see how this is relevant, if Disney decides to adapt the books they shoot up to film-level canon anyway. Whoever writes the new scripts are not bound to slavishly follow the source material, so it can be jiggled to fit with the rest of the films if they want (I guess a Star Trek style reboot is also a possibility).