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Post by ArchdukeOfNaboo on Jun 13, 2022 16:16:32 GMT
The character must have at least one line of dialogue (can be translated) and appear in at least one instalment of the Lucas Saga, Episodes I-VI.
The Clone Wars doesn't count here. We're only going on the 6 films for simplicity sake. If we were to include it, we're run into a list of hundreds of characters, and I think the one I've made here is long enough.
If I'm missing your character, feel free to point it out. I don't suspect I'm missing any notable ones though.
Counting Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader separately, a controversial decision perhaps, but I'm sticking with it.
You can select 3 characters. |
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Post by nickromancer on Jun 13, 2022 16:50:23 GMT
I'm unable to select more than one character in the poll so i'll write in here.
1. Anakin Skywalker. The character the galaxy revolves around. I'm considering his entire life including as Darth Vader as one choice. His inner turmoil represents the entire story.
2. Sheev Palpatine. The emperor of the universe who sets up everything happening in the galaxy so that it mirrors Anakin's state. And mysteriously set up Anakin in the first place?
3. Jar Jar Binks. The strangest character in the saga. A digital gungan who was a totally new element to the outline of episodes I, II, and III. he's key to the prequels because he breathed a new creative impulse into them, which is why they don't feel like backtracking.
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Post by Cryogenic on Jun 13, 2022 16:59:20 GMT
It's only letting me pick one. Here are my choices:
Qui-Gon Jinn: Top or almost top. Liam Neeson adds so much class, authority, and warmth to Episode I. It is hard to imagine the picture without him. And his character is one of the most important characters in what I'm increasingly inclined to call "Lucas Star Wars". That is: Qui-Gon is an "ambassador" for many of the themes concerning Anakin and his relationship with the Jedi Order and also for esoteric issues concerning the nature of the Force and what a Jedi's relationship to it is meant to be. He perfectly fits into the mysterious, recondite epoch of the Galactic Republic, "before the Dark Times, before the Empire".
Jar Jar Binks: Jar Jar is that radical wonder tissue that makes the whole meta-play of Star Wars work and do its elaborate fantasy dance. Star Wars is kind of ritual theatre or a missionary text. It is all the "x"-es. It is also all the "y"-es. Jar Jar speaks to all the known, unknown, and unknowable qualities of the multifarious morality play that is The Star Wars Saga. For everything you can say about Jar Jar, there is much more that you can't say. He's simple enough of a character and presence for kids to grasp, yet nuanced and weird enough to leave the adults reeling. If ever there was a character in Star Wars that lived up to their name, it's Jar Jar. Ahmed Best brought everything to this role and I'll appreciate him forever for it. The animators at ILM did a phenomenally underrated job, too. Seeing him fight back the Trade Federation with all his Gungan brothers and sisters on gorgeous green fields in Episode I is supremely satisfying: have-a-go heroism in playful Technicolor. While his sad, mournful expression at the end of Episode III speaks volumes.
Bail Organa: Okay, this really should be Anakin or Amidala, or Yoda or Palpatine, but I'm picking a side character because the Obi-Wan series (sorry for the Disney plug) has reminded me what a fantastically important and underrated character Bail Organa is. Without this guy, there would essentially be no Rebel Alliance. Padme may constitute the spirit of it, but Bail is more its essence and idealism in practice. Jimmy Smits embodies the character perfectly: the strong yet graceful masculine build, the dignified ways he carries himself. One could actually make a case that Bail is the patient father figure filling the void left by Qui-Gon. Only, where Qui-Gon strongly believes in prophecy and stakes it all on a little slave boy, Bail gratefully embraces the dream of adopting a baby girl and takes Leia in, despite the threat to himself, his wife, and his planet, no questions asked. Seeing Bail at the end of ROTS in his final "big scene" with Yoda and Obi-Wan, and in the gleaming-white beauty of the Tantive IV, really helps link the trilogies together for me. Our own world needs more Bail Organas and fewer Dookus and Palpatines.
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Post by ArchdukeOfNaboo on Jun 13, 2022 17:03:52 GMT
Poll fixed. Please vote again  |
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Post by Darkslayer on Jun 13, 2022 18:05:07 GMT
The character must have at least one line of dialogue (can be translated) and appear in at least one instalment of the Lucas Saga, Episodes I-VI.
The Clone Wars doesn't count here. We're only going on the 6 films for simplicity sake. If we were to include it, we're run into a list of hundreds of characters, and I think the one I've made here is long enough.
If I'm missing your character, feel free to point it out. I don't suspect I'm missing any notable ones though.
Counting Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader separately, a controversial decision perhaps, but I'm sticking with it.
You can select 3 characters. Does Clone Wars count? |
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Post by ArchdukeOfNaboo on Jun 13, 2022 19:48:02 GMT
No, you have to go on the 6 live-action films for the poll. That said, if TCW makes a big adjustment in assessing your favourite characters, feel free to write it down in your post, 6 films vs 6 films + TCW.
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Post by jppiper on Jun 13, 2022 20:21:24 GMT
No Nien Numb?
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Post by Darkslayer on Jun 13, 2022 20:43:13 GMT
No, you have to go on the 6 live-action films for the poll. That said, if TCW makes a big adjustment in assessing your favourite characters, feel free to write it down in your post, 6 films vs 6 films + TCW.
Well, Maul was enhanced significantly by the show, and I also loved the Mortis beings George brought into play through the show. |
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Post by Alexrd on Jun 13, 2022 20:48:47 GMT
 My favourite is Obi-Wan Kenobi. Always has been and always will be. Then it's probably Yoda and Qui-Gon. Although Luke is probably tied with Qui-Gon. |
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Post by ArchdukeOfNaboo on Jun 13, 2022 22:19:03 GMT
Whenever I see that image:
Only a Master of evil, Darth
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Post by Cryogenic on Jun 14, 2022 0:22:53 GMT
Whenever I see that image:
Only a Master of evil, Darth
It somehow screams Star Wars like very little else. It's such a classic image. And Obi-Wan has been blessed to have two very good actors in the role (in the movies). |
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jtn90
Ambassador
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Post by jtn90 on Jun 14, 2022 7:54:18 GMT
My favourite is Obi-Wan Kenobi. Always has been and always will be. Then it's probably Yoda and Qui-Gon. Although Luke is probably tied with Qui-Gon. Now we are two whose favourite character is Obi Wan:  My other two is difficult to say, I love all of the character you listed, Anakin and Han Solo are god level contenders too. One of the best things of Star Wars is the many characters to love, even one scene extras or cameos are charismatic enought to have a story in the Expanded Universe. |
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Post by Alexrd on Jun 14, 2022 10:21:37 GMT
Even as a kid, I've always been partial to the wise, seasoned old mentor in many stories, not just Star Wars. As for Luke, even though I liked him as a character, he only became one of my favourites in ROTJ.
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Post by ArchdukeOfNaboo on Jun 14, 2022 12:43:34 GMT
You'll have to excuse me for forgetting him. I'm not an OT fanboy, so I'm prone to the odd lapse in these films.
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Post by Ingram on Jun 14, 2022 21:17:13 GMT
Counting Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader separately, a controversial decision perhaps... No, it's logical.
I'm gonna make like a Jedi and Force-cheat a chance cube toss by listing six total, my official Top 3 (for which I voted) followed not by second place rankings but rather three dark horses in their own right. Top 3:
Luke Skywalker
Clarity of storytelling transition; no other genre hero in pop-cinema better encapsulates. Luke is it. He's three acts of an old fable. Yeah, yeah, Star Wars is "Campbellian myth & fairy tale" blah, blah, blah... it's all long since been reduced to a prosaic filmmaking truism that opens every other commemorative article or Youtube video analysis, and everyone nods habitually like it's just medicine to be taken before moving on. Except, Luke is its constant. He's the spirit, the central resonating chamber, of everything 'oral traditions' that elevated Lucas' space movies above the disposable. Mark Hamill's perpetual boyish stature at the same time grows with creases of pain and wisdom, his gate both figurative and literal throughout the trilogy evolving from sophomoric to stoic. The way he throws himself into a scene gradually becomes the way he holds himself; watch intently on this point, it can almost be graphed. And yet that which caps this heroic journey is perhaps its real measure of genius, with Luke's clear progression counterintuitively yielding an element of the unknown. In Return of the Jedi he embodies the neo Jedi, a version never before considered. Light and dark, light informed by the dark. Balance, yes, but moreover something free-style. The black he wears symbolizes not the hazard of darkness but the latitude that comes with maturity: impossible to see his future his, because he hasn't yet decided it, because it's the Man himself who decides his own future, not fate or destiny. Luke Skywalker isn't the chosen one. He's the one who learns to chose for himself. He's also just kinda rad.
Darth Vader Darth Vader is audiovisual incarnate. I think he's a villain who achieves for the audience supreme cognitive dissonance as a murderous tyrant (i.e., bad) transmuted from screen either onto the brain triggering an autonomous sensory meridian response (i.e., nice). The Grim Reaper reimagined as a Space Race astronaut motorcycle man Wehrmacht-samurai cyborg, Vader for self-evident reasons looks cool, to such a degree that one could argue threatens with superficial favoritism. Perhaps. But Vader in a similar context is also a universal id thing—power personified, he is both the dream and the nightmare, immortal but damned. I also dig his place in the grand scheme as not the Devil but the Devil's bogeyman sent upon the Empire to strongarm results, to make examples, and in general to ferry across the Galaxy Styx anyone caught in the path of "progress". Lastly, Vader is absolution...with a caveat. He is together, inward, the unstoppable force and the unmovable object right up until one or the other is slanted ever so slightly by humanist circumstance aforesaid Devil either cannot control or is too arrogant to heed; unmovable mass then converted into unstoppable energy being the only thing that can destroy the Devil. In turn you might say that if Anakin is a cautionary tale for Good then Darth Vader is a cautionary tale for Evil.
R2-D2
In Lucas' Star Wars droids are the effectively silent observer. Silent film. Yet film is likewise inherently technological, dependent on spools and reels, magnetic or digital storage, soundtracks and light projection etc. With the ambition of merging campfire folklore into a cinematic medium Lucas the Tinkerer seemed to intuit the latter as a character in and of itself, as droids are the first inhabitants we see in A New Hope and with R2-D2 foregrounded; he remains their delegate throughout the entire saga. He is the menial mechanism by which this saga is told, but also with his own consciousness that drifts indefinitely between that of Hermes and a 4-yearold. This makes him a play on the absurd without ever undermining the sincerity of the drama. His unquestioning fidelity to Luke, Anakin, Padme and Leia is nodal to the Skywalker arc. Visually, he's little more than a stupid can who beeps. So why is he so personable? Maybe because we project onto him our two-sided coin of knowing and naïveté as much as he projects holograms at intervals throughout his storied universe. If he can easily record images and speech then why does Bail only wipe C-3P0's memory? Maybe because Bail instinctively, metaphysically, understands that wiping R2 means turning out the lights, turning off the movie, forever; that while the Skywalker twins must remain hidden, the greater story must continue being told. R2 fixes shit at the last minute, talks to strange computers, zaps little critters but, honestly, I even love him in idle closeups, rotating his dome left to right then back again, looking around at stuff. Observing. Such frames in Star Wars are where Lucas reduces the whole enterprise to a technological hieroglyph.
Sorry for not electing any characters exclusive to the Prequels. That's just the way it worked out.
Dark Horse picks:
Jango Fett
Moff Tarkin
Mon Mothma
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Post by Cryogenic on Jun 15, 2022 16:20:50 GMT
LOL @ Ingram 's post. I'm not talking of a normal LOL. I'm talking of something far more precious. It's the rare sort of LOL that comes spontaneously from a place of awe. A giddy release when you know you've just encountered something awesome and been put in your place. That post, my friend, is not merely incisive or eloquent, but damn near numinous in its prosaic magnificence and intellectual beauty. Holy shit. What a triad. A dyad of triads. Gorgeously argued and presented. You articulate layers and depths to Star Wars that we all "know" exist, but struggle to give shape and voice to. Not you, however, Ingram. For you, your mind is on fire; or Star Wars itself is on fire (Poe: "It's on fire. Whole thing's on fire. All of it, it's on fire."). Star Wars is nothing less, perhaps, than the Burning Bush of cinematic storytelling: a true-blue, honest-to-goodness cinematic happening par excellence; a miracle in the ocean of human-divine creativity: an event that has shaken and startled (and continues to shake and startle) our senses. There is some interesting structure here, too: Luke Skywalker isn't the chosen one. He's the one who learns to chose for himself. He's also just kinda rad. Luke and Vader, the Son and the Father, receive summation sentences. Artoo, on the other hand, as befits his ineffable, rapscallion nature, his being the Holy Spirit of Star Wars, gets a tangential yet perfect "love letter" rambling as punctuating finish. Because there is no true beginning or end to Artoo himself. He just is. The true sui generis within the sui generis of Star Wars itself. Panaka naming R2 in Episode I is like Adam naming the animals. He spontaneously enters the picture fully formed: fully R2. Name or no name. C-3PO, on the other hand, is very much a work-in-progress: intact but inchoate, and already the target of impish curiosity and insults from R2 himself. The perpetual duo, complete even when incomplete, never to be questioned or broken. This is also my own compressed way of saying I could have picked Threepio. I really, really could have. He's just so Star Wars to me. What does that even mean? Does anybody know? GL himself said it when Threepio appeared on the set of ROTS for the first time ( "Now Star Wars has arrived"). Just something about these droids. The Saga narrative, in fact, goes a little something like this: Jedi (in the PT) to droids (in the OT). The badass duo of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan arrive to fuck shit up, diplomatically and then a little less so, in Episode I, escaping to a garden paradise to rescue a queen. In Episodes IV and VI, it's R2 and 3PO ducking and diving, or heading squarely and patiently to a grand palace, ready (albeit somewhat unwittingly) to enact chaos and set a princess and her paramour free. So much dank shit in Star Wars. Dagobah cave dank. Next level dank. Come to think of it, Star Wars is kind of like a giant spliff. 1960s art-house spiritualism on overdrive, caked behind layers of poised, venerable formalism. The tone poem of tone poems. A glowing codex. The penetrating phallus of the Silver Screen. Playful and irreverent, yet vast and sincere. Engorged fully in myth and lore. Steeped in grandeur, yet ablaze with mirth. Star Wars, man. The best thing ever created. |
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Post by Ingram on Jun 15, 2022 20:08:37 GMT
LOL @ Ingram 's post. I'm not talking of a normal LOL. I'm talking of something far more precious. It's the rare sort of LOL that comes spontaneously from a place of awe. A giddy release when you know you've just encountered something awesome and been put in your place. That post, my friend, is not merely incisive or eloquent, but damn near numinous in its prosaic magnificence and intellectual beauty. Holy shit. What a triad. A dyad of triads. Gorgeously argued and presented. You articulate layers and depths to Star Wars that we all "know" exist, but struggle to give shape and voice to. Not you, however, Ingram. For you, your mind is on fire; or Star Wars itself is on fire (Poe: "It's on fire. Whole thing's on fire. All of it, it's on fire."). Star Wars is nothing less, perhaps, than the Burning Bush of cinematic storytelling: a true-blue, honest-to-goodness cinematic happening par excellence; a miracle in the ocean of human-divine creativity: an event that has shaken and startled (and continues to shake and startle) our senses. I had just finished two cups of coffee I got from my neighbor. He makes swords in his garage.
Panaka naming R2 in Episode I is like Adam naming the animals. He spontaneously enters the picture fully formed: fully R2. Name or no name. C-3PO, on the other hand, is very much a work-in-progress: intact but inchoate, and already the target of impish curiosity and insults from R2 himself. The perpetual duo, complete even when incomplete, never to be questioned or broken. Keen observation, one I never consciously picked-up on until now. Just how many other trilogies has R2-D2 been through before Episode I anyhow? Who is this little guy? C-3PO on the other hand...
"Isn't he great?! He's not finished yet." i.e., Lucas, with Star Wars up to that point. "He's a protocol droid to help Mom" i.e., us.
The penetrating phallus of the Silver Screen...
*leaves*
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Post by stampidhd280pro on Jun 15, 2022 20:21:04 GMT
Cryogenic said: "He's just so Star Wars to me. What does that even mean?"
Gold-plated?
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Post by ArchdukeOfNaboo on Jun 15, 2022 22:24:23 GMT
My favourite characters shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. I'm somewhat of an inverse of Ingram in that two out of three of my favourite SW films are in the OT, yet my favourite characters all hail from the PT. Notwithstanding the fact that Anakin is in VI, and Obi-Wan in IV, I think many of us will say that it's Lucas' second trilogy where he really fleshed them out.
1. Anakin 2. Obi-Wan 3. Padmé
Special mentions: Palpatine. While I was tempted to put the man named after the hill of the real world emperors into 3rd position, I thought it more fitting to have the PT trio all together. Padmé is an crucial part of 3 very important films. Now If you were to ask me the best performance of the whole saga, however, McDiarmuid in III would easily grab top prize.
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Post by Darkslayer on Jun 16, 2022 19:22:51 GMT
From the films, my favorites are the side characters. They are pretty one-note, but each of these prequel characters have that one note explored in an extremely exciting and satisfying manner that leaves me wanting more.
1) Mace Windu - Sam Jackson was just superb. The purple lightsaber exploded my mind as a kid. And he beat Sidious by himself. I mean, come on!
2) Maul - Maul would not be this high without The Clone Wars, where he really became a 3-dimensional character
3) Darth Tyranus - It's Christopher Lee!
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