Kill 'em all!

[cmdr_zoom]

One of the specific reasons I don't care for Curtis Saxton's (excuse me, Dr. Curtis Saxton's) Star Wars Technical Commentaries - besides my general feeling that trying to apply logical analysis to make-believe is often a misguided and futile endeavor, though one I've been known to engage in myself - is his enthusiastic advocacy of the Endor Holocaust theory: to wit, that the pieces of the destroyed second Death Star would rain down on the forest moon, causing mass extinctions. "Facts" aside, I believe he has a very personal agenda here.

Fans of my generation, those who saw Star Wars (Episode IV, A New Hope) in theaters as children and teenagers, often have a special hate for the Ewoks. Empire took a turn for the dark and complex, and we could persuade ourselves that the franchise was growing up with us. The presence of the Ewoks in Jedi, however, was an unwelcome reminder that this was not cool adult entertainment - it was space opera fluff, made to entertain kids and sell toys. This we could not abide. And so we blamed the Ewoks for Jedi being what it was, instead of what we wanted it to be. Even today, jokes about violence to Ewoks persist in the fandom.

(Twenty years later, the same arguments would play themselves out over Jar Jar and other aspects of the prequel trilogy that unabashedly appealed to kids, not to now-adult fans.)

I believe that the Endor Holocaust, regardless of how much "real world" evidence Saxton can produce for it, is the petulant effort of a bitter fan to "undo" Lucas' "mistake", or at least see that they get what they "deserve" for offending his adolescent self. He may claim it's just how the numbers come out, but frankly, I don't believe him. Because I was there too, and I remember.

Comments

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

I like Star Wars.

Singular. The film released in 1977.

The rest of it is a complete mess. And Lucas is a moron.

I get the feeling that Saxton is a lot like me, overly logical. Yes, once the Death Star blows up most of it is going to rain down in an extinction level event. I always had the pleasant thought that the Alliance commanders realized they could get rid of Darth Vader's kids, that annoying smuggler, and downsize the now surplus army buy holding a BBQ and getting the important people out before the impact...

[cathaus.livejournal.com]

Never thought of the extinction thing. But Star Wars is one I generally stay away from analyzing.

I'll be in the unpopular minority and say that I liked Ewoks as a kid and never disliked them later. But I was a little kid. In my 4th and 5th grade classes (same teacher), there were a couple of special classroom stuffed animals. One year it was Garfield characters, the other it was Ewoks. It was a special thing to be allowed to take one home at night. We also had "hug attacks" like some kind of serial tag but with hugging until everyone had been hugged by someone else in the room once. These are the sorts of thing I'm supposed to think of as cheesy as an adult, but frankly, home life was bad at that point and hugs, the cat we got from that teacher, Odie, and Ewoks were a sort of lifeline. I can't hate Ewoks.

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

The thing is that there were things in Jedi,/i> I liked. It just couldn't be as good as the two that came before. I am no ewok fan, but I think blaming them is a kind of scapegoating for the uneven script as a whole. Yes, most of us wanted something else. Yes the Ewoks were vaguely annoying, but Jedi</i. is still watchable. 1-3 aren't.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Exactly (especially the scapegoat part).