Posted on 11/30/2014 3:13:07 PM PST by EveningStar
Now that the trailer for the seventh "Star Wars" movie is out, you can imagine the anticipation among the millions of fans of the film franchise. And why not? The six "Star Wars" films have been enormous successes: they have grossed over $2 billion domestically at the box office, spawned scores of books, comic books and merchandise (how many kids have their own light saber?) and made household names of characters like Darth Vader, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.
They've also been the worst thing ever for the science fiction genre.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
The first three (uh, 4, 5, and 6) were worthwhile, although I plan never to watch any of them again (that may change; I may be in a nursing home someday, unable to reach the tv remote); the next three (1, 2, and 3) sucked beyond endurance. I will NEVER watch any of those again.
Yeah, I don’t even know of any really good recent fantasy books, if fantasy is going to mean swords and sorcery stuff. I like some of the Terry Pratchett Disc World ones. I’m sure they are out there but I guess I have happened to come across good sci-fi books more easily.
Freegards
Couldn’t “science fiction” include the fictional treatments of developments in the history of science ? You know, Newton at Cambridge ... Heisenberg and Bohr at Göttingen ... that sort of thing. Of course, you could embellish such stories with fantastical elements, as has been done more than once with Mark Twain, as in e.g. STTNG.
You could go nuts with Galileo! In fact, that’s my fantasy ... my Galileo movie.
Star Wars isn’t science fiction. It’s romantic fantasy set in space.
It is not really science fiction, but without it we would not have Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and, most importantly, the Star Trek movies may never have been made, nor the Star Trek series’ spawned from the original.
I own This Island Earth, When Worlds Collide and Forbidden Planet.
I’ll leave it at that.
I think a book I’d like to see made into a movie, would be AC Clarke’s
Rendezvous With Rama
I will add that I’ like to see Varney’s Red Lightning and Red Thunder as well as Nivin’s Ringworld turned into movies.
But then I wanted to see Dune turned into a movie. Be careful what you wish for. ;-)
When you look at Star Wars, you shouldn’t expect science fiction. Unfortunately, people have confused it with science fiction and once they some folks see a true example of the genre, they either get turned off by it or confuse the two.
The best example of pure science fiction I’ve ever seen on TV — Star Trek TOS’ “City on the Edge of Forever” — asks the classic questions of what would you do if you could change the past, and how would those actions change the future? Harlan Ellison’s story is genius.
Star Wars, by contrast, is a shoot-em-up. Good theater and good for sales of action figures, but the Star Trek version shows nothing that explodes, nothing that makes a good video game, but makes you THINK.
More significantly they could tell a story WITH car chases, dazzling[well, hardly] special effects, or constant beautiful faces! That is : they told a story first.
Speaking of beautiful faces I recently watched “to serve man” and was astounded to see Susan Cummings straining her blouse in a major role- I didn’t remember that at all LOL!
But, of course, fathers were a target audience back then unlike today.
“A face-changing mold”... now what kid wouldn’t love that concept!
I have “Forbidden Planet” on VHS. I probably should watch it again before it eventually goes bad.
If you have an old VHS copy of “E.T. The Extraterrestrial”, you’ll notice cops with shotguns as they begin flying on the bicycle. In all subsequent versions, the cops are waving walkie talkies.
Dead serious.
Maybe my expectations were too high but I thought “E.T.” was flat out awful.
It’s sometimes hard to pin Star Wars down due to the many different genres Lucas took his inspiration from. From the westerns of John Ford to the Japanese Films of Akira Kurosawa. There’s a couple of scenes in the original Star Wars that are lifted almost verbatim trom Kurosawa’s films “Sanjuro and “The Hidden Fortress”.
CC
What, no “Forbidden Planet? From a visual and set design standpoint “Star Trek” owes a lot to “Forbidden Planet”.
CC
I have no idea what the original “Star Trek’s” budget was but I saw about a fifteen minute interview with their prop man. He said their budget for props was small and they had to do a lot with a little.
They showed one scene where they had used paper coffee cup holders as a design on one wall. He said they had one big advantage in that no one knew what a star ship really looked like.
He also said their favorite source of props was the Paramount dumpster. They found all kinds of things they could use there.
It’s funny you should mention Alan Ladd. His son, Alan Jr. was the studio exec. at 20th Century Fox who approved production on”Star Wars”.
CC
Forbidden Planet is one of my all time favorite sci fi movies.
I usually watch it about once a year.
I'm always amazed at the cast in that movie. The number who went on to become fairly well known stars.
WOW!!! Was Anne Francis a hotty.
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