Star Wars General Discussion Thread

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Arthur Frayn said:
So funny that the cantina scene is held up as like, the gold standard of "Welcome to a weird and wild world of alien adventure!" and in reality they were just grabbing random fucking halloween masks and shit from the prop closet.
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I think that's kind of why it happened, though.

SW ended up with this bizarre combination of 'generic' aliens with big eyes and big heads (bith, duro, rodians), 'fantasy' races like werewolves and devils and yeti (shistavanen, devaronian, wookiees and talz and wampas); little guys that the kids on set could play (jawas). Then you got a mini-godzilla wearing a flight suit stolen from Doctor Who, a gnome, and a titanic space slug. Then there was all the weird shit at Jabba's hangout (including but not limited to a cackling lizard, a three-eyed goat dude, a bunch of axe-wielding p'orcs, and a giant pug-dog reptile King Kong), a bunch of fish dudes, a bunch of fuzzy short guys, and Lando's copilot, the reverse Chewbacca (he's still an alien that doesn't speak english but now he's short and hairless).

The PT had a shift where it largely categorized aliens into two groups: 1) humanoids, often elongated, with star trek-style bits added and inhuman coloration, like the togruta, zabrak, nemoidians, kaminoans, Palpatine's advisor pair, the banking clan guy, and the stripey aliens from the planet where Obi fights Grievous and 2) for want of a better word, "kid" aliens with cartoony features and exaggerated bearing like jarjar, sebulba, watto, the podracers used for comic beats, the two-headed announcer, dexter the line chef, the geonosian leader. It still had a few standouts like plo koon and grievous.

The ST kind of pushes that even further. Most of the aliens with speaking roles are beings with elephantine skin and squashed or warped facial features like an overenthusiastic aunt grabbed their cheeks too hard at a family reunion, sprinkled through with a few more comedic aliens like the little gambling guy, or babu, or live slug reaction dude. I don't think it helps that Star Wars by the time of the ST was fully into its "helms and cloaks" aesthetic and there's times it's hard to tell if someone in body armor is supposed to be an alien or just a dude.

EDIT: it didn't hurt that the OT dropped in the late 70s/early 80s where it was able to just clobber people with this eclectic mix to contrast itself with earlier 50s and 60s scifi movies, regardless of later alien designs it was never gonna have that impact again.
 
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Strategos' Risk said:
I think almost all of the sequel trilogy aliens, at least the ones in that image, look too snout-y. I don't even know they have big snouts. Some of them are flat-nostrilled. But they're nearly all proportioned in some sort of circular, maybe tubular way that draws attention to their alien nose-and-mouth regions. It's uncanny. How they give off the same vibe like that.

This different observation about them being more like Men in Black style aliens feels spot-on to me.


View: https://twitter.com/ShawtyBrothers/status/1782148578309501255
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Hm guess one could start trying to figure out what makes the also-snouty Greedo *not* look like Men in Black?
 
Wreckage Hothead said:
Hm guess one could start trying to figure out what makes the also-snouty Greedo *not* look like Men in Black?
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Because he predates Men in Black so he's excepted via grandfather clause. Also his clothes looks authentically '70s American Graffiti retro instead of '90s-'00s smooth white line spa aesthetic. Tom Spina Designs was unknowingly tapping into this mood even beyond the physical features of that alien.

 
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Idk yeah, the only creatures in the ST that I thought "felt like franchise foreigners" along with the setting they were in, were some of the ones from Canto Bight - probably more of a tone/presentation kinda thing than any sort of "what is SW's approach to creature/alien designs" which, as "Kuja"'s breakdown above highlights, can hardly be boiled down to any kinda simple straightforward formula.

Difficult to put a finger on these things idk


Based on the trailer it initially looked like the Porgs (not to be confused with p'orcs obviously) were gonna be annoying and stick out like a sore thumb, however other than maybe not sure if they should've stuck around on the Falcon, they were just really cool space birds that blended in fine.
 
Strategos' Risk said:
Because he predates Men in Black so he's excepted via grandfather clause. Also his clothes looks authentically '70s American Graffiti retro instead of '90s-'00s smooth white line spa aesthetic. Tom Spina Designs was unknowingly tapping into this mood even beyond the physical features of that alien.

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Ah hm don't quite get this, the look of the MiB HQ here obviously doesn't have much in common with that snouty alien monster from the opening scene, and that one's whole thing was that he had been disguised as a human, a beardy hobo that is - and then after that's taken off he doesn't have any fashion attire on:



Hm so you're saying if he appeared in SW dressed like Greedo or someone from a Western salon or whatnot, he wouldn't look "out of place like a MiB alien not an SW alien"?

But yeah maybe it is all about tone presentation and context after all, and not the creature design specifically. Who knows


EDIT: And of course Sly Snoodles is a fitting comparison here as well.

Half the designs from both series are obviously meant to be jokes, only question is whether the "humor vibes" are different I suppose? hm dk
 
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Kuja said:
little guys that the kids on set could play (jawas)
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More specifically they look like mini-Nazguls (think in some original versions they're supposed to have shining light eyes while otherwise being invisible, if you pull off their hoods? completely invisible in the movies obviously);
and when they're "slaughtered by the Stormtroopers" all that's left of them is their robes, with seemingly nothing inside them - just like Obi-Wan at the end.

For all anyone knows they very well might be casual normal desert merchants who just happen to be disembodied ghosts with spirit eyes - unspoken rule is their hoods never get taken off (at least in the live-action stuff I've seen), so you just don't really know.
They're introduced as these fake-out ghost monsters and then it's never addressed.

Maybe the EU has some kinda boring "they're sensitive to light night creatures" explanation that misses the point, idk?
 
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Macbeth said:
I actually watched a video about this specific chart by a channel called Empire-wreckers:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu8N134f-DU&ab_channel=EmpireWreckers

Turns out the Sequels' section of the chart cheated a bit and had a couple aliens of the same species show up twice.

It's a really informative video and also provides some pretty fair and even handed commentary on what "works and doesn't work" in Star Wars.
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Just watched it to the end, and yeah really good video;


slightly disagree with some statements here and there though - for instance during the "let's go back and go through some lesser OT designs", around 47:00 he shows that bts group photo of some of the Cantina creatures and particularly highlights that smaller pair in the front as "so underwhelming they didn't even get merch toys", and it's like hey those looked really cool? And some of the others in that picture as well.

Also got zero problems with those barge guards being kinda no-nonsense looking lizard-orcs, always worked in that scene imo - kinda thinking about this rn, since their main role is to push Luke onto the plank, maybe it's even better for them to just look rough and sinister without drawing extra attention to their ultra-memorable, funny or unsettling designs? Those are for other scenes, other creatures in other roles, these are just the grim executioner guards and the main threat comes their weapons and what's waiting on the ground.


Anyway yeah, also seems to have a bit of a cognitive dissonance about the various "almost-human ones":

On the one hand he doesn't criticize the way Bib Fortuna went from more alien looking to kind of pretty much "monster face human with tentacle head" (which btw, side note here, I always kinda thought he was supposed to be there to foreshadow the Emperor a bit, and was maybe supposed to be Jabba's occult priest-sorcerer soothsayer or something - certainly looks the part? and probably wouldn't've as much with those initial design ideas) and seems to understand why it made sense to make Oola as human-looking as they did - but then later he bashes Paul Bettany for "the laziest alien design ever" and it's like, I watched Solo once and I didn't even get he was supposed to be alien? Thought he was just a human with some face scars or something?
But I guess he is, just very slightly. And how is that a problem then?

Obviously the situation here is somewhat similar to Trek - when that one's got the "almost human looking forehead-bump races", they're there for a reason. Replacing the Klingons or Romulans or esp. Vulcans with some ultra-weird creature designs (even all the "low budget"s aside), or even sth like those weird-talking cyber-"binaries"(?) from that holodeck-Minuet episode, would make them less relatable and accessible and prevent them from being the effective stand-ins for / amalgams of modern/historical Earth nations that they are.
If Trek wants some really exotic creature or monster on some planet, or to showcase how "really strange looking species can still just be no-nonsense members of the Federation" or whatever, then it'll do just that - however if it wants acting scenes with Kirk, Spock or Worf, then it won't lol.

So here yeah, why would you wanna put craaaaazy additional prosthetics on Paul Bettany, he seemed to be great the way he was?
And while Evazan looked more unusual obviously, compared to his partner he was still pretty much an extreme version of a "rough-faced Western saloon thug", which was of course the whole point of that contrast pairing lol.

But then yeah he doesn't bash them all the time, and elsewhere he says "they just all kinda blend in with the humans / as slightly exotic looking humans, so it's fine". Just a bit of confused cognitive dissonance from the looks of it, maybe just didn't stop to think about this for a bit more?



All in all though looks like a really great and reasonable breakdown, makes sense.
 
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Nothing you can could possibly say could be so interesting as to be worth posting four times in a row, three times within two hours of each other.
 
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While the tenth anniversary of Legends getting the curtain is in discussion, I'm jolly glad that those ham-fisted Jedi Atrocity events have been left behind.

Apart from anything else, it just always felt implausible that the Jedi played with others worse than the guys who were modelled on Nazi occultists and had an ideology explicitly built around their own lust for absolute supreme power. "
 
bluntblade said:
While the tenth anniversary of Legends getting the curtain is in discussion, I'm jolly glad that those ham-fisted Jedi Atrocity events have been left behind.

Apart from anything else, it just always felt implausible that the Jedi played with others worse than the guys who were modelled on Nazi occultists and had an ideology explicitly built around their own lust for absolute supreme power. "
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I mean most of them are in fluff eras without stories, so they'll likely occupy a matter of uncertainty until the next fluff book considers the eras. It's also worth keeping in mind that one of the more infamous ones, the Mandalorian Excision, was specifically created as background for TCW. and more than that, there's a lot of creative carryover behind the scenes from the EU to Disneyverse, which has a lot of positives, but also pings up the likelihood that the impulsive Jedi genocide tendencies will crop up sooner or later.

It's also worth remembering that Disneyverse kept TCW's shitty Chamber of Judgement with a straight face. The mentality is there; it's just not had the opportunity due to the small amount of avenues.
 
The Englanderish said:
I mean most of them are in fluff eras without stories, so they'll likely occupy a matter of uncertainty until the next fluff book considers the eras. It's also worth keeping in mind that one of the more infamous ones, the Mandalorian Excision, was specifically created as background for TCW. and more than that, there's a lot of creative carryover behind the scenes from the EU to Disneyverse, which has a lot of positives, but also pings up the likelihood that the impulsive Jedi genocide tendencies will crop up sooner or later.

It's also worth remembering that Disneyverse kept TCW's shitty Chamber of Judgement with a straight face. The mentality is there; it's just not had the opportunity due to the small amount of avenues.
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Let me hope, damnit. At least the Jedi being pals with everyone in the Conclave of Jedha, being buds with the Guardians of the Whills and giving the Path of the Open flipping Hand a fair hearing points in the right direction.

I have some additional thoughts because I just finished Ashes of the Sun, which in spirit if not tone feels rather like a Watchmen or The Boys for Star Wars. It's free to play with "what if the Jedi were really ethically questionable?" without bumping up against everything else (and also to go to realms of horniness to which Star Wars can never venture outside Ao3 or Wattpad).
 
bluntblade said:
Let me hope, damnit. At least the Jedi being pals with everyone in the Conclave of Jedha, being buds with the Guardians of the Whills and giving the Path of the Open flipping Hand a fair hearing points in the right direction.
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There was plenty of Jedi positive stuff in the EU too, but it's just worth bearing in mind for something of this scale. You're probably gonna get a bit of both in the long run, and the cleansings are usually outside of main stories. Probably because it's a lot easier to fire off a background offscreen atrocity than to actually engage with what that would look like or how it would play out.
 
The Englanderish said:
There was plenty of Jedi positive stuff in the EU too, but it's just worth bearing in mind for something of this scale. You're probably gonna get a bit of both in the long run, and the cleansings are usually outside of main stories. Probably because it's a lot easier to fire off a background offscreen atrocity than to actually engage with what that would look like or how it would play out.
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Tbh that's also the thing which leaves me inclined to junk these. Like, if a Jedi Lord authored a purge and that had fallout in the Galaxy at large, caused some among the Order to question, that's potentially something to engage with. Instead the Order just trundles on, guardians of peace and justice who sometimes do genocide and never have an internal conflict over it.
 
bluntblade said:
Tbh that's also the thing which leaves me inclined to junk these. Like, if a Jedi Lord authored a purge and that had fallout in the Galaxy at large, caused some among the Order to question, that's potentially something to engage with. Instead the Order just trundles on, guardians of peace and justice who sometimes do genocide and never have an internal conflict over it.
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I'm not sure how much this is actually supported by the text, but my sense is that one of the reasons the Hundred-Year Darkness (and the New Sith Wars more generally) were considered such a nightmarish period for the galaxy was that the Jedi—who were supposed to be the guardians of peace and justice protecting people from Sith atrocities—actually did do a fair amount of that stuff as Jedi Lords, and the reason they're so tied at the hip to the Republic in the prequel and even High Republic eras is that the Ruusan Reformation represented a major reckoning for the surviving Jedi as well, where they looked at everything the Lords had done to try to cling to power and collectively went, "Never again."
 
Kirook said:
I'm not sure how much this is actually supported by the text, but my sense is that one of the reasons the Hundred-Year Darkness (and the New Sith Wars more generally) were considered such a nightmarish period for the galaxy was that the Jedi—who were supposed to be the guardians of peace and justice protecting people from Sith atrocities—actually did do a fair amount of that stuff as Jedi Lords, and the reason they're so tied at the hip to the Republic in the prequel and even High Republic eras is that the Ruusan Reformation represented a major reckoning for the surviving Jedi as well, where they looked at everything the Lords had done to try to cling to power and collectively went, "Never again."
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Now, that's something which could potentially be interesting and validate this sort of thing. If the Jedi are repeatedly dragged close to the abyss (and really leaning hard in He Who Fights Monsters, as the darkness of war consumes the souls of some Jedi). But often it functions as "did you know the Jedi did Nazi shit sometimes and carried out forced conversions?" without anything to say beyond "really makes you think".
 
bluntblade said:
Tbh that's also the thing which leaves me inclined to junk these. Like, if a Jedi Lord authored a purge and that had fallout in the Galaxy at large, caused some among the Order to question, that's potentially something to engage with. Instead the Order just trundles on, guardians of peace and justice who sometimes do genocide and never have an internal conflict over it.
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Yes my point was illustrating that generally when Jedi cleansings come up it's lazy writing to force drama or otherwise grim up a time period.
 
bluntblade said:
Tbh that's also the thing which leaves me inclined to junk these. Like, if a Jedi Lord authored a purge and that had fallout in the Galaxy at large, caused some among the Order to question, that's potentially something to engage with. Instead the Order just trundles on, guardians of peace and justice who sometimes do genocide and never have an internal conflict over it.
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For a semi-good reason, usually when you have an inter-order conflict, you usually get schisms that lead to Dark Jedi and/or lead to the cause of the Sith being turned into a specifically anti-Jedi force vis a vis the Dark Jedi Exiles. Other than that what you do with an organization whose power structures that vary from era to era, or aren't really fleshed out.

bluntblade said:
But often it functions as "did you know the Jedi did Nazi shit sometimes and carried out forced conversions?" without anything to say beyond "really makes you think".
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When has a work ever done that? What is used for the background of TOR, is never used to excuse the then Sith Empire's actions who do plenty of terrible things if not the same things that were done to them. And KOTOR 2 and maybe Tales of the Jedi, give stripping people of the Force precedent. The Padawan Massacre was group of idiots taking the worst possible route, and the Mandalorian Excision you could have justified with prior prejudices, and possibly the era, it never really struck me as being outright out of the blue terrible.

Mind you Jedi doing or being apart of bad things is more a rarity than a rule, assuming its not because of the fact they've been almost always attacked the hip to the Republic.
 
I'd think ray shields would probably stop a transporter, given it's some sort of transmitted energy IIRC?
 
If I recall correctly a big issue towards the end of the new Sith wars and the latter days of the old republic wasn't the jedi running around committing war crimes, it was that the main Jedi order withdrew along with the republic to the republic core worlds and left most of what had been the republic to the tender mercies of the Sith.

The Jedi Lords were the ones who refused to withdraw or ultimately made choice to defy the order to venture out to oppose the Sith with the penultimate Jedi Lord being Lord Hoth who ended up creating the army of light and led it to the apparent supposed destruction of the Sith. The Jedi Lords apparently even had their own rival central council.

Outside of that I recall the big, long running internal conflicts within the Jedi order was over the increasing authority of the Jedi high council over individual jedi, other jedi councils and the general authority of the central temple over other jedi temples and enclaves with the republic eventually backing the increasing power of the High Council as a means of control.
 
Hah, those take me back to the days of early youtube/ maybe Newgrounds early fan films and cartoons, that's something I honestly think seems to be missing from modern Star Wars.
 
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