Oddly, it made me nostalgic, curmudgeon though I am. At the time I discovered them, I promised to post them as a sort of anniversary of my arrival. I'm a little late now, but I don't welch.
Background: I was working as Script Supervisor/ad hoc AD on a short film being shot in the sand dunes of Richmond, the place where they filmed a lot of MISSION TO MARS. It was very hot, but we worked like crazy people. During one of our breaks I got talking to this gal who was working as a Grip/PA/Go-to Gal. She had been reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in her life, and cackling with glee at all the juicy homoeroticism you gals all seem to love post-Jackson. Naturally we ended up chatting.
We got on to STAR WARS and I started in on what I hated about TPM and how I hadn't even seen AOTC (I loved saying it back then even more than I love saying it now); she mentioned something about a list one of her professors had seen and we swapped emails.
She sent me something, so I sent this back:
>
> Here's something for you that I banged out long ago:
>
> 1) Qui-Gon Jin finds this boy on a planet. The boy has incredible force sensitivity (now flimsily attributed to genetic predestination a la Adolf Hitler). What with one thing and another, Qui-Gon takes this boy to the largest city in the galaxy.
> 2) As it happens, Q-G has to leave the city to go to a war-torn planet. Rather than find a decent babysitter, he takes the boy with him. Presumably, when you're in a city the size of a fucking planet, you have limited options.
>
> 3) Arriving on the planet, Q-G has the option of hiding the boy anywhere. Remember, this is a planet with Eath-like gravity, so naturally it would have about two hundred million square miles of surface area. Even discounting the water-covered surface, there would be many places to hide a vulnerable eight - year-old. Q-G takes him to the centre of the war zone (an area of roughly five square miles).
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> 4) Inside a hangar filled with enemy attack robots, Q-G deserts the boy to go off and start a two-on-one swordfight with a mean-looking but otherwise completely uninteresting bad guy. He tells the boy to hide inside a fighter plane. Seriously.
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> 5) The boy, desperate to protect himself, hits several butons at random, and surprisingly, the plane makes a perfect take-off, entirely by accident.
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> 6) For some reason, the plane has been programmed, by "auto-pilot," to fly right into the centre of a nearby space battle. It even lands, of its own accord, on board an enemy spacecraft.
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> 7) This spacecraft has, within its hangar, a huge-ass gun that can take out a rully loaded small transport. We've seen it work; it destroyed Qui-Gon's ship earlier in te movie. It should have no trouble dealing with a fighter plane. For some reason, it doesn't target this intruding fighter plane. And we can see it, sitting inert, in the frame as the boy sits desperately fighting with his plane's controls. Screenwriter/Producer/Director/Madman George Lucas doesn't have the integrity even to show a close-up of it coming to bear. He has quite simply forgotten it's there.
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> 8) The boy starts pressing random buttons on his dashboard, and his fighter craft is suddenly back on manual control. He could not get this to happen before. Anyway, now his little plane is spinning about and shooting everything in the hangar of this carrier. Not one of the enemy attack robots can hit his awkwardly-spinning little plane.
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> 9) For whatever reason, this carrier is burdened with the same weakness common to all Star Wars enemy behemoths: if you shoot it in the right place, the whole thing blows up. Sadly, the right place happens to be right in the very hangar that Mr George Lucas has no right expecting us to believe this one unescorted fighter plane should ever have managed to reach.
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> 10) As it happens, there is a war taking place on the surface of the nearby planet. With no possible explanations, the robots who are winning are busy rounding up the surrendering Gun-Guns, despite having been given very unambiguous orders to "kill them all." Well anyway, this one spaceship that this boy just blew up happened to be controlling all of the robots. So now they all just shut down. One robot gets so shut down that his head flies right off!
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> 11) Everone celebrates and spends lots of money on toys and George Lucas goes on to say that the critics never had a good word to say about his movies, so he wasn't going to start worrying about them now (STAR WARS was on virtually every top ten list in 1977 and was even nominated for Best Picture, so again, he's full of shit).
And that's why Liam Neeson is the worst babysitter in the history of the universe, and further why George Lucas is ruining the memories of my childhood.
Mike.
PS: don't even get me started on the pod race.
She sent this back:
http://www.lanceande...78reasons.shtml
That was the beginning ...