General grievances (random fan rants)

Cryogenic
They didn't even get Silas Carson to reprise his role

That would have been nice, indeed.

I can't see the comments. I've never had a Twitter account.

There are two problems with my earlier sentence (as quoted):

i) I should have said, at a minimum, "...has often been considered an inferior sequel". Because opinions shift over time, and even in this very thread, just recently, I presented examples (based on a link jppiper supplied) of a bunch of Redditors scoffing at the idea that "The Empire Strikes Back" is the pinnacle of the saga and that the Original Trilogy would have been unsullied if it had ended there.

ii) As you just indicated, it depends which cohort you're talking about. It is not an uncommon opinion that TESB is superior to ROTJ, even in the days of Lucas owning Lucasfilm and materials from Lucasfilm itself, but it's certainly not the only opinion. And yes, back in January 2019, I produced research on Naboo News that painted a different picture to the one often promulgated by fanboys and geek media outlets in the past, regarding the ratings/rankings of the prequels closer to their original time of release. 

I regret, at the least, not wording my sentence a bit more carefully with regard to the first point. I could easily have done that without the flow being disrupted. The general idea I was trying to convey was that Matt Walsh either alighted on the wrong film in his tweet (he was alluding to ROTJ but he might have intended to imply TESB), or he was trying to say that things were better in the 1980s (and that Lucas lost his touch after that). It's just a bit funny to see him indirectly praising a film like ROTJ, given the underlying tone of his tweet and the general bulk of content he puts out -- and who his general audience is.


Well, since the turn of the last century, using this Wikipedia page as my reference, there have been thirteen Republican presidents and nine Democratic ones. Counting from POTUS #25 (William McKinley) all the way to POTUS #46 (Joe Biden), Republican presidents have served for a total of 24,836 days in office, while Democratic presidents have served a slightly lower total of 21,658 days.

Far and away, however, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democratic president, served the longest term at 4,422 days. But this was also before ratification of the Twenty-second Amendment in 1951, which forbids any president from being elected to more than two terms.

FDR was also the serving U.S. President for most of the 1930s and until the mid-1940s, and it was in the middle of his incumbency that the Hollywood studio system reached its apogee. The Wikipedia page on Classical Hollywood cinema suggests that 1939 may have been its peak year, with many classics such as "The Wizard Of Oz", "Gone With The Wind", "Stagecoach", "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington", "Young Mr. Lincoln", "Wuthering Heights", "Only Angels Have Wings", "Gunga Din", "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", et al. appearing. According to the same page, it was also in the late 1930s, in the opinion of many film historians and critics, that films of the sound era began to match the former quality of silent movies. 

So, if we re-do the calculations and count from FDR to Biden, then there have been seven Republican presidents and eight Democratic ones. On this slightly more compressed timescale, Republican presidents have served for a total of 14,610 days in office, while Democratic presidents have served a somewhat higher total of 18,736 days.

It is more or less impossible to say, absent further data, what effect any given administration had on trends within American filmmaking, let alone the quality of films within a given period (which is, in any case, subjective). One would have to perform a far more comprehensive study to come up with persuasive results.   

All that said, a right-winger might actually argue that their ideas of how society ought to be structured, and their notions of right and wrong, would create the necessary levels of "adversity" required for decent art to appear. Many conservatives, of course, believe in some form of deregulation and a sort of free-market meritocracy, wherein becoming self-sufficient is supposedly the answer to life's woes (and is somehow possible within a predatory capitalist system), instead of an egalitarian society with -- in their view -- forced outcomes (a common battle-cry these days from the right: "equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome"). 

Yet, again, FDR was the President who enacted the New Deal: a major program of government intervention after the Great Depression. American cinema was clearly coming of age in that time period. That's not to say that FDR or his administration necessarily deserve credit for that, but it does kinda deflate Matt Walsh's ideological taunt that cinema and pop culture were somehow better when Ronald Reagan was the incumbent President, or that the Reagan/Thatcher era is an era that ought to be be repeated or emulated. 

Pathetic tweet.

Not playing this game anymore, Joe. Sorry.

Well, if there's an interesting, considered take on the franchise, sure -- I'm up for that. We ourselves on Naberrie Fields not only have threads, as you just indicated, essentially circling around the same basic premise (i.e., that a big piece of Star Wars died on October 30 2012), but our boards are so arranged that the so-called "George Lucas" and "Disney" eras are recognised and accordingly divided-up as their own sections. So no issues there.

My problems with the graphic basically come down to the following:

i) Apparently holding some kind of "funeral" for a franchise, or even using that word, I think, are a bit melodramatic. We all accept that Star Wars is different now, and we're all dealing with that in our own ways, but on casual glance, this is just more Twitter flamebait. Maybe there's more to it, of course, but there's already a thousand different videos bashing Disney on YouTube as it is. At some point, you get to that proverbial moment of the straw breaking the kaadu's back.

ii) Plenty of people giving Disney the middle finger do so from the rhetorical position of defending Lucas' legacy and/or lamenting the sale to Disney. However, this sometimes strikes a disingenuous note, because as you yourself have said before, a lot of these people were either gleefully bashing the prequels back in the day or using standard bashing talking points in any discussion of them, and we shouldn't just mindlessly let them off.

Obviously, there are exceptions, but out-and-out support for Lucas and the prequels was very thin on the ground some twenty years ago. What was then an act of genuine defiance against a tyrannical majority is now some ridiculous purity shibboleth -- it's almost expected of you now. The Overton window has shifted and now it's not only safer to back Lucas in some imagined David vs. Goliath contest (mythologist vs. corporation), but a very easy lever to pull to indicate you're one of the "in"-crowd who understands real cinematic art vs. a dog's dinner of streamed content and a variety of focus group-approved pissing contests.

I'm dying...

 

That was exactly my suspicion and why I was so brief in my initial response. It's one thing if Matt Walsh wants to bang a silly drum that "good" Star Wars ended with ROTJ. It's quite another if someone like Chris Gore wants to pretend that Star Wars ended in 2012, with the sale to Disney, but was never a fan of anything much beyond the OT anyway.  

ArchdukeOfNaboo
This is getting Tiresome
x.com/AtAngelsEnd/status/1550613616700825600