George Lucas had released yet another Star Wars film, this one a live-action movie featuring minor characters from the first films. He knew that everyone was sick of him and his ceaseless attempts to wring every last dime out of his franchise, so he'd decided to employ a gimmick to get initial viewers into the cinemas to see it -- it would be released in three half-hour chunks, which the audience would watch in three different cinemas in their towns over the course of the evening.
I showed up for the first showing and spent a little while trying to get a good seat in the huge theatre where the first chunk was being shown. Eventually the film started, and I noted with a little sadness, though no great surprise, that it was almost indescribably bad. I'd expected it to be a bit rubbish, obviously, but it was beyond even The Phantom Menace's incredible level of rubbishness. The first scene went like this:
A group of cute teenage alien bounty hunters stand before Jabba the Hutt in his palace as he describes their mission to them. Suddenly, some cowled figures behind them remove their robes and reveal themselves to be imperial stormtroopers. Everyone then begins to sway from side to side as they sing a sort of barbershop-quartettish song outlining the history of the Star Wars saga so far, which goes on and on and on.
The chunk ended, the lights came up, and the audience removed themselves from the cinema, grumbling about how dreadful the thing had been. I walked through the dark streets along with them, on my way to the next cinema to sit and watch the second -- and possibly worse -- installment.
Notes for Freudian Interpretation
Grrr.
Two obvious things during the day resulted in this dream. The first was that I listened to Mark Kermode's review of the Clone Wars cartoon. He explained that it was a very poor piece of film-making, and I was sure he was right.
The other thing was that, in the evening, I was scanning through a DVD of The Adventures of Robin Hood, the Errol Flynn film from 1938, looking carefully at all the people in the crowd scenes to see if I could identify a certain extra who I've discovered was working on the set of the film when he was picked up on a murder charge (it's for an Unsung Joe post, obviously). I couldn't find him -- there are hundreds of extras in that movie! -- but I kept noticing scenes and shots that were obviously, you know, influential on the Star Wars films. For instance, when the merry men ambush the sheriff's troops by jumping on them from the trees, my mind immediately flashed on the bit in Return of the Jedi when the ewoks attack the stormtroopers in the forest. Also, the scene where Robin Hood is about to be executed but escapes with the help of his friends, who are in disguise in the crowd, is exactly the same as the scene where Luke Skywalker is about to be thrown into the Sarlacc pit -- I mean exactly.
I doubt I'm the first to notice any of this, so I assumed that a little light googling would immediately confirm my theory, but I couldn't find any reference to the steals. Perhaps there isn't a great crossover between the Star Wars fans and the Errol Flynn fans. Although there should be.
The picture above is a detail of an annotated picture on this page, which is absolutely fascinating, if you're a certain type of person.