Posted on 06/20/2015 11:05:05 AM PDT by rickmichaels
The Star Wars franchise has ruined things for non-franchise, non-superhero, quirky, offbeat movies. Well, just as long as you ignore all the successful non-franchise, non-superhero, quirky, offbeat movies since 1977.
I liked the first Star Wars movie. It was good but not great. All that came after sucked. Were boring. I am amazed the Star Wars series has always had so many hypnotized fan bois but then so does Apple. Probably a lot of overlap here
I love those reviews.
“a film with comic-book characters, an unbelievable story, no political or social commentary, lousy acting, preposterous dialogue, and a ridiculously simplistic morality. In other words, a bad movie.”
CAN'T WE JUST HAVE FUN!!! Does EVERYTHING have to shove liberal morality in our faces? These fools will laugh and impugn anything remotely Christian and moral but will celebrate the filthy anti-American lies from De Palma!
This is why the "top lists" from critics of the past are no better than those of today. There was and is praised heaped on some works (literary as well as film and tv) because of some political view someone held (especially among the Hollywood 10) or other agenda. Other works are suppressed or forgotten because of personal or political grudges.
Pauline Kael (who is often held up as the best critic ever) said that she didn't know how Nixon could've won. Nobody she knew voted for him. They are all myopic and it influences their judgment.
Homos, women, and socialists dominated film criticism for awhile so you got costume dramas, musicals, and "social realism" defined as "the best cinema had to offer". Now a new crowd are the tastemakers. Critics once upon a time hated rock and roll too. They still generally do so they have to find the atypical example to elevate it as "good".
2001 was "art" not sci-fi. REM and Radiohead are "above rock". Those who enjoy the real deal feel cheated.
Much of the merchandising of Star Trek was made in the 1970s. The tv show itself was short lived (3 seasons?). Merchandising can be very financially successful even if the movie/tv show is not.
Snoopy toys/clothes/greeting cards/etc. are probably purchased by many fold the number of people who actually reading the daily strip anymore or have even one paperback collection of them.
Jesus loves Stars. jusayin
If you go to a comic book convention today, you will find that the focus is on actors and actresses from Game of Thrones and Marvel Comics movies and tv shows. Very few of the fans read. The artists are considered an afterthought and authors are "boring". The fans have more fun dressing up in self-made or purchased costumes.
They far outnumber the attendees who are there to look at or discuss books (with or without illustrations).
Billy Dee Williams has been asked how did he prepare for playing Lando. What in his life experiences did be bring to it. He said that it would be nothing like his life, it’s a whole other world. His role model was Errol Flynn and other pirate actors. Black has nothing to do with it.
Hopefully his impression of Lando improved after the next episode. :-) I'll never know, since our lives parted company.
The original three movies were a blast. The prequels sucked. The upcoming sequels at least don't appear to be an attempt to reboot the franchise, like the execrable new Star Trek.
Easy Rider made some serious money in 1969, allowed Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Bill Hayward to be set for life if they invested their money right.
Anyway the big franchise pics are the rage right now and for the time being are paying off.
It isn't. It's a swashbuckler.
Problem is that I didn’t think the movies were fun.
Problem is that I didn’t think the movies were fun.
The best thing resulting from Star Wars was Space Balls.
Yeah, but I think Star Trek always had a very dedicated fan base, even if it wasn't quite large enough to keep it on the air. And I think Lucas took merchandising to a level that hadn't been done prior to Star Wars.
"George went to Fox with a proposition. He offered to keep his salary at $150,000 in exchange for two seemingly insignificant requests: 1) That he retain all merchandising rights, and 2) that he would retain the rights to any sequels...
"But the real money for George didn't come from box office receipts. Between 1977 and 1978, Star Wars sold $100 million worth of toys. 35 years later and Star Wars themed toys have generated $12 billion worth of revenue. Today, Star Wars licensed toys produce $3 billion a year in revenues."
Right.
I know in the 1970s there were "collectible" glasses in jelly jars that could be later reused as drinking cups. And a detergent company attached a series of Pogo plastic cups to sell their wares.
And some fast food burger joints would offer collectible glassware for sports teams. And 7-eleven went overboard with dozens and dozens of plastic slurpee cups in a year.
I seem to recall Happy Days glasses at some fast food joint but the Star Wars glasses (at Burger King?) really brought that trend into focus (at least for movie critics).
I think it was Roger Ebert who identified a class of movies that could have their plots summed up on 4 (or 6) glasses.
Now that I think of it, King Kong (1976?) also had such glasses.
It certainly became a standard for the Lucas films to come.
And while other movies might have a set of trading cards, I think the original film had 3 (or 4?) series of images from the film. At a time when there was no home video (and not even a telecast of the movie for years to come) it was one of several "home experience" ways of reliving a movie (there were also some sort of photonovels in the 1970s).
Ha! Many critics hate success. They have the insane idea that a popular movie is always bad. Yet they give 5 stars to foreign movies that they would totally pan if those movies were made in the USA. Star Wars, for all its faults brought the fun back to a movie industry that churned out depressing crap... movies called “auteur”. I remember very well what a breath of fresh air Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were. Yes, they changed movies and I thank them for it. Otherwise we’d see nothing but pretentious navel-gazers like “The Deer Hunter”.
This was made decades ago but is case in point. Someone recreated the first Star Wars movie using the different merchandising products (toys, book on record, etc.).
The Star Wars (1994)
"Throughout the late seventies and early eighties, plenty of kids used toys to make their own stop-motion animated versions of Lucas's space saga, but it was 'The Star Wars', made in 1994 by Pez D. Spencer (aka Troy Durrett), Lance Robson, and Jon Ramos, that took the concept of the action figure movie to the ultimate level -thanks to it's structure, which was dictated by the merchandise it exploited. The short was a collector's fever dream, an experiment in metastorttelling, a commentary on the commercialization of 'Star Wars' and an insular artistic conceit taken to the extreme-far more than the sum of its (plastic) parts." - Homemade Hollywood by Clive YoungThere apparently was an attempt to do the same with Empire Strikes Back but it does not seem to be complete.
Including Slings and Qam for nostalgic Ping list considerations.
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