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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.

Yes, I'm surprised when people are surprised that new Star Wars stuff is rubbish. There hasn't be a truly great Star Wars film for 40 years (arguably longer) and the heyday of Star Wars franchised stuff was the 1990s, I think, with some great Lucas Arts games from that period.

Creative success is one of those highly unpredictable evolutionary processes whose outputs look better on average than they are, because we tend to forget the detritus.

There has been a bunch good EU content though. My assumption was that similar to marvel Disney would try to pick through the material and more or less loosely adopt the good stuff.

This seemed like such an easy (and already proven within the company) recipe for success that I couldn't really imagine massive failure. The property isn't super complex and the fans are not very needy. And yet..

I think that it's at least 10 years too late to create a fun expanded universe. Too much PC, too much safety-first writing. Even the Marvel stuff doesn't interest me, except at the margins where some really vivacious creativity sneaks in e.g. the Guardians of the Galaxy films.

I think I would have to go back at least 20 years to find any Star Wars creativity that I thought wasn't just good, but great. I mean, there are still good Bond films, but I haven't seen a great one since Goldeneye nearly 30 years ago.

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