The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► He says he joined.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Your weird avatar is not an apple guy.

00:00:04 ◼   ► You can pick which picture you want to like, vend to people, and the picture you've chosen

00:00:08 ◼   ► is the picture of you when you're 15.

00:00:10 ◼   ► I mean, my picture is old.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Hi John!

00:00:14 ◼   ► Nice to see you.

00:00:15 ◼   ► My picture is old, but your picture...

00:00:17 ◼   ► I love you too, man.

00:00:19 ◼   ► I really miss you, it's been a tough year.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Uh huh.

00:00:22 ◼   ► Uh huh, you gotta learn how to work all this apple stuff.

00:00:25 ◼   ► That's on apple.

00:00:26 ◼   ► It's not on apple, it's on you!

00:00:28 ◼   ► It's gonna be a long three hours, is what I'm...

00:00:32 ◼   ► A tight 60.

00:00:33 ◼   ► A tight 60.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Does dithering usually start on time, Mr. "Let's get on Skype in five minutes and take

00:00:41 ◼   ► eight minutes" show?

00:00:42 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:00:43 ◼   ► Dithering is the antithesis of what either of you are capable of, and it is a remarkable

00:00:49 ◼   ► show.

00:00:50 ◼   ► Dithering starts within a dithering of when it's supposed to start.

00:00:54 ◼   ► Great.

00:00:55 ◼   ► You're only ever off by 100%.

00:00:58 ◼   ► Right, so we're done recording within two days.

00:01:07 ◼   ► It works.

00:01:08 ◼   ► Hold on.

00:01:09 ◼   ► Something bizarre here.

00:01:11 ◼   ► Because I have not been podcasting over the break, I've got this old Catalina system,

00:01:17 ◼   ► and somehow I got an alert, like a notification, that said "Automatic updates have been turned

00:01:23 ◼   ► on", which I didn't think could happen.

00:01:27 ◼   ► I mean, if you turn them on, they turn it on.

00:01:28 ◼   ► I didn't turn them on.

00:01:29 ◼   ► Click a checkbox?

00:01:30 ◼   ► Yeah, no, but now they're all turned on in software update.

00:01:34 ◼   ► Hold on.

00:01:35 ◼   ► Now I'm just...

00:01:37 ◼   ► I don't believe...

00:01:38 ◼   ► Honestly, if that is a policy that apple has adopted, you've got to scoop, because that's

00:01:45 ◼   ► not right.

00:01:46 ◼   ► I don't want any of this.

00:01:49 ◼   ► Come on.

00:01:50 ◼   ► All right.

00:01:51 ◼   ► All right, I'm recording.

00:01:52 ◼   ► You guys are recording your end?

00:01:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:54 ◼   ► All right, this will be tight.

00:01:57 ◼   ► Let's...

00:01:58 ◼   ► Hey, do you know what?

00:02:03 ◼   ► Just to get it off the top.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Hey, Suki has said, "Happy Christmas.

00:02:09 ◼   ► Hope you guys are doing well."

00:02:11 ◼   ► Happy Christmas.

00:02:12 ◼   ► Is that in Canada too?

00:02:13 ◼   ► That's how they say it.

00:02:14 ◼   ► For crying out loud.

00:02:16 ◼   ► I think it's only in Quebec though.

00:02:19 ◼   ► In what?

00:02:20 ◼   ► You know what?

00:02:21 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:02:22 ◼   ► Never mind.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Take it back.

00:02:24 ◼   ► Merry Christmas to all.

00:02:25 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:02:26 ◼   ► To all a good night.

00:02:27 ◼   ► Well, and by the time we're done recording, it'll be your birthday.

00:02:30 ◼   ► Sure.

00:02:32 ◼   ► Happy New Year.

00:02:35 ◼   ► Happy birthday, my friend.

00:02:36 ◼   ► I thought we were saving that.

00:02:38 ◼   ► Just so you know, Jon, I had to...

00:02:41 ◼   ► Never mind.

00:02:42 ◼   ► Well, what are we saving it for?

00:02:44 ◼   ► Well, we're saving it for, I don't know, a surprise where I get to feel like the guy

00:02:48 ◼   ► that actually knew it and you got to be the guy that was surprised by it.

00:02:52 ◼   ► It's such a hard date to remember right now.

00:02:54 ◼   ► Well, do you know what?

00:02:56 ◼   ► I texted Jon earlier.

00:02:58 ◼   ► This should go in the show.

00:02:59 ◼   ► I hope this goes in the show.

00:03:01 ◼   ► I texted Jon earlier and I'm like, "Eh, my computer tells me that it's Jon's birthday

00:03:07 ◼   ► today or tomorrow, and I'm not sure I believe it because it could just be a date that got

00:03:14 ◼   ► rounded off to like..."

00:03:16 ◼   ► No, that would be... you get extra points now if you know the Mac epoch.

00:03:21 ◼   ► No looking it up.

00:03:22 ◼   ► Oh, 1970s.

00:03:23 ◼   ► Nope.

00:03:24 ◼   ► Nope.

00:03:25 ◼   ► January 1st, 2004.

00:03:26 ◼   ► January 1st, 2000.

00:03:27 ◼   ► Nope, 1904.

00:03:28 ◼   ► I think that's right.

00:03:31 ◼   ► I think it's right.

00:03:32 ◼   ► The 1904 part sounds right.

00:03:34 ◼   ► The January 1st, I'm not sure about.

00:03:36 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure it's January 1st, 1904.

00:03:37 ◼   ► Well, it has to be January 1st.

00:03:39 ◼   ► Honestly, I'm going to bet harder on January 1st than 1904.

00:03:44 ◼   ► Oh, you got it.

00:03:46 ◼   ► January 1st, 1904.

00:03:47 ◼   ► Yeah, and the reason I think...

00:03:49 ◼   ► I believe the backstory...

00:03:50 ◼   ► I can't believe I know this and it's not you.

00:03:52 ◼   ► I believe the reason they started at 1904 instead of 1900 was... which would be a lot

00:04:00 ◼   ► easier because then you could easily convert the... remember back when we used to do dates

00:04:05 ◼   ► years as two-digit numbers?

00:04:09 ◼   ► Just add 1900.

00:04:10 ◼   ► But they avoided 1900 because of the weird leap year rules around centuries.

00:04:17 ◼   ► And I know 2000 was like the super weird one where usually if it's a century, it doesn't

00:04:23 ◼   ► count as a leap year because it's like you only need 19 non-leap years out of a century

00:04:30 ◼   ► to keep the earth... you know what I mean?

00:04:33 ◼   ► It's like a weird thing where like 1900...

00:04:35 ◼   ► First of all, you don't keep the earth in anything.

00:04:38 ◼   ► You keep us aligned with the way that the earth is going.

00:04:43 ◼   ► But yeah, definitely.

00:04:45 ◼   ► That makes sense.

00:04:47 ◼   ► Also, I think it's a little bit of a flipping the bird at convention.

00:04:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:04:53 ◼   ► Well, you know, so you don't run out of...

00:04:55 ◼   ► UNIX runs out of years, you know.

00:04:57 ◼   ► Right.

00:04:58 ◼   ► Real shit.

00:04:59 ◼   ► Right.

00:05:00 ◼   ► And then this ran out when?

00:05:01 ◼   ► 2007-ish?

00:05:02 ◼   ► Yeah, something like that.

00:05:05 ◼   ► I forget.

00:05:06 ◼   ► The basic idea was that by starting the epoch at 1904, they could have fewer leap year rules

00:05:12 ◼   ► in the system and it wouldn't break until 2100.

00:05:17 ◼   ► They were ready for the year 2000, but were not ready for the year 1900.

00:05:23 ◼   ► Anyway, this is a Star Wars holiday spectacular.

00:05:29 ◼   ► The most erratic annual, semi-annual... what's the word for... there's bi...

00:05:35 ◼   ► Bi-annual, yeah.

00:05:37 ◼   ► Bi-annual is what?

00:05:38 ◼   ► Every other year?

00:05:41 ◼   ► Or twice a year?

00:05:43 ◼   ► Isn't bi-weekly one of those things?

00:05:45 ◼   ► Bi-weekly is the one that means both.

00:05:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:48 ◼   ► Let's just go with bi-annual.

00:05:50 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

00:05:52 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

00:05:53 ◼   ► Do you know what we didn't talk about?

00:05:55 ◼   ► What?

00:05:56 ◼   ► Uh, Vice of Skywalker.

00:06:00 ◼   ► Well, see, now I'm getting to that.

00:06:02 ◼   ► We just skipped it.

00:06:03 ◼   ► We just skipped it.

00:06:04 ◼   ► There was other opportunities...

00:06:05 ◼   ► As is appropriate, I think.

00:06:07 ◼   ► I think so too.

00:06:08 ◼   ► Let me get through the introduction.

00:06:11 ◼   ► Here's the way it goes.

00:06:12 ◼   ► Good luck.

00:06:14 ◼   ► So it's not every year, but it's most years, but there is no set schedule, so it's like

00:06:20 ◼   ► errata annual.

00:06:22 ◼   ► It's erratically annual.

00:06:25 ◼   ► During the break between Christmas and New Year's, there's a holiday Star Wars spectacular

00:06:30 ◼   ► episode of this podcast, and we talk about Star Wars, and we did it for The Rise of Skywalker.

00:06:40 ◼   ► Nope.

00:06:41 ◼   ► Nope.

00:06:42 ◼   ► Nope.

00:06:43 ◼   ► That's the only one we didn't do.

00:06:45 ◼   ► We did it for The Last Jedi.

00:06:50 ◼   ► You know 1904, but you don't know the name of the second most recent Star Wars movie.

00:06:56 ◼   ► I don't remember which one we did it for.

00:06:57 ◼   ► The Last Jedi?

00:06:58 ◼   ► I do love that he's got 1904 after Tafu's tongue.

00:07:04 ◼   ► That's pretty great.

00:07:06 ◼   ► You know, this brings me to a good point, though.

00:07:09 ◼   ► I think it's me getting older, but one of the points I want to talk about is that I

00:07:14 ◼   ► remember the obscure names of spaceships and characters, characters who had no lines or

00:07:20 ◼   ► no lines in English from the original trilogy, and there are major characters in The Mandalorian

00:07:27 ◼   ► and the new Star Wars movies whose names I'll never remember.

00:07:31 ◼   ► They're right in front of me, and then I can look away from the piece of paper and I'll

00:07:34 ◼   ► forget them.

00:07:35 ◼   ► So I think the 1904 thing qualifies as that.

00:07:38 ◼   ► That got seared into my young brain, which had great memory, and the new stuff home.

00:07:44 ◼   ► And they have the Mac Epoch action figure from Kenner, which really cemented that.

00:07:52 ◼   ► You know what?

00:07:53 ◼   ► I had to get the character names right because you had to make your Christmas list.

00:07:57 ◼   ► See, now this is where there's that massive overlap between the three of us.

00:08:04 ◼   ► There's a lot of things we all love, and then we're all different in our own ways.

00:08:07 ◼   ► But I feel like one way that all three of us would agree is that when you were asking

00:08:11 ◼   ► for Star Wars toys, I made a very precise list that was unambiguous and could not possibly

00:08:20 ◼   ► have generated any mistakes or errors in terms of, like, should the X-wing toy be the full-size

00:08:28 ◼   ► toy that you could put the action figure in or the smaller die-cast model?

00:08:33 ◼   ► Well, I didn't want to have any ambiguity.

00:08:35 ◼   ► I needed the one you could put the action figures in.

00:08:38 ◼   ► And so I put, like, you know, I forget how I clarified it.

00:08:41 ◼   ► You circled it in the catalogue is what you did.

00:08:43 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:08:44 ◼   ► Yes.

00:08:45 ◼   ► You did it out of attachments.

00:08:46 ◼   ► Right.

00:08:47 ◼   ► And that is something that I have never admitted, even to my mother, to anybody I've ever loved.

00:08:55 ◼   ► And since it's just the three of us here, I kind of want to get it off my chest.

00:09:00 ◼   ► When I was very young, I guess eight, seven or eight, I was living in an apartment that

00:09:07 ◼   ► we just moved in after we'd left England.

00:09:10 ◼   ► And I wanted an add-up.

00:09:12 ◼   ► I wanted an add-up.

00:09:14 ◼   ► That was no shame in that.

00:09:16 ◼   ► No, there's no shame in that.

00:09:20 ◼   ► But John, you know me.

00:09:23 ◼   ► The shame is coming.

00:09:27 ◼   ► I went looking for Christmas presents in my mother's closet.

00:09:34 ◼   ► And I found one.

00:09:37 ◼   ► And it was, I forget what it was.

00:09:41 ◼   ► It might as well have been a jigsaw puzzle of an add-at when I wanted the actual add-at.

00:09:50 ◼   ► And I addressed it to her after having discovered it without wanting to let her know that I'd

00:09:59 ◼   ► actually gone and found the present that I had to hope for.

00:10:05 ◼   ► And I was like, "Hey, Mom, just so you know what I want.

00:10:11 ◼   ► I want an actual add-at.

00:10:13 ◼   ► You know, not, let's say, a jigsaw puzzle of an add-at.

00:10:21 ◼   ► That's less fun.

00:10:23 ◼   ► I want an add-at."

00:10:25 ◼   ► And I was not as keenly James Bond-ish as I would have liked to have been at the age of seven.

00:10:37 ◼   ► You were not suave about it, in other words, you're saying?

00:10:40 ◼   ► No, no, not at all.

00:10:41 ◼   ► And I still remember that look on her face.

00:10:44 ◼   ► And I, "Mom, if you listen to this, I'm so sorry.

00:10:48 ◼   ► I did you poorly.

00:10:49 ◼   ► I really did.

00:10:50 ◼   ► I really did want that add-at, and you came through.

00:10:54 ◼   ► She really did come through.

00:10:55 ◼   ► Like I got an add-at for Christmas."

00:10:57 ◼   ► But your reward for this terrible act as you get the actual add-at, I never got the add-at.

00:11:02 ◼   ► I had to go over to my friend's house and play with his add-at.

00:11:03 ◼   ► I did not get the add-at.

00:11:05 ◼   ► I can tell you.

00:11:08 ◼   ► This was not a great contribution to me as a human being, but it worked out in that year

00:11:15 ◼   ► in a very small way.

00:11:16 ◼   ► I was never a present snooper.

00:11:20 ◼   ► I think it peaked around the age of 10, and I did find, I believe for my birthday, I found

00:11:27 ◼   ► the BMX bike that I was getting.

00:11:31 ◼   ► And I did go looking for it because I was so curious.

00:11:33 ◼   ► And I realized there was no way they could really, there was only one place they could

00:11:36 ◼   ► hide it.

00:11:37 ◼   ► It's sort of like a sub closet at the back of the basement.

00:11:42 ◼   ► And there it was.

00:11:43 ◼   ► Oh, and it was beautiful.

00:11:45 ◼   ► But the other one I found accidentally, and it was so jarring and shocking to me that

00:11:51 ◼   ► I don't quite remember if it was a birthday or Christmas, but I suspect it was a Christmas,

00:11:55 ◼   ► is I got the Millennium Falcon.

00:11:57 ◼   ► The big Kenner.

00:11:58 ◼   ► Oh, man.

00:11:59 ◼   ► Pop the top off, throw some characters in there.

00:12:02 ◼   ► And it was the greatest present I ever got.

00:12:04 ◼   ► And I kind of thought it was a stretch goal to ask for it because I don't know what it

00:12:08 ◼   ► cost, but it seemed like insanely expensive.

00:12:11 ◼   ► It was like, I don't know, 60 bucks.

00:12:13 ◼   ► And it was like, "What?"

00:12:14 ◼   ► And it was huge.

00:12:15 ◼   ► It's like, "Ah, there's no way I'm getting that."

00:12:18 ◼   ► But I got it, and it was the greatest thing ever.

00:12:19 ◼   ► Thanks, Mom.

00:12:20 ◼   ► Thanks, Dad.

00:12:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:12:22 ◼   ► I do feel like a real jerk.

00:12:25 ◼   ► What was the best Star Wars toy you had growing up, John?

00:12:29 ◼   ► You just mentioned that BMX thing.

00:12:30 ◼   ► I was a present snooper, but somehow they hid my BMX bike for me.

00:12:34 ◼   ► That might be an X-bike.

00:12:35 ◼   ► My 1984 Mongoose Californian was the best Christmas present I ever received.

00:12:40 ◼   ► But on the Star Wars category specifically, I didn't get most of the things that I wanted.

00:12:46 ◼   ► I did have the tie that the wings popped off and the X-wing that the character goes in.

00:12:53 ◼   ► I also had the Death Star with the trash compactor with the square foam cubes.

00:13:01 ◼   ► I think my best one, and these were weird.

00:13:02 ◼   ► Not a lot of people had these.

00:13:03 ◼   ► I don't know if you had these.

00:13:05 ◼   ► Do you remember the 12-inch figures?

00:13:07 ◼   ► Yes.

00:13:08 ◼   ► Yes, I do.

00:13:09 ◼   ► They were fantastic, and I had a Boba Fett.

00:13:11 ◼   ► Oh, and that was cool.

00:13:14 ◼   ► I had a Boba Fett, Darth Vader, Luke, and Leia.

00:13:17 ◼   ► The Boba Fett was obviously my favorite.

00:13:20 ◼   ► Did it have some cloth too?

00:13:22 ◼   ► Yes, that's what I'm saying.

00:13:24 ◼   ► It was before the age of these hyper-realistic toys that look really like the thing on the

00:13:28 ◼   ► screen.

00:13:29 ◼   ► Obviously, the Kenner toys were great and everything, but they didn't even have elbows

00:13:32 ◼   ► and knees that moved.

00:13:33 ◼   ► They were pretty sketchy-looking in terms of fidelity.

00:13:36 ◼   ► Boba Fett was cool, and I had him, not with the shooting missile, but I had the regular

00:13:40 ◼   ► one.

00:13:41 ◼   ► But the 12-inch Boba Fett might as well have been.

00:13:42 ◼   ► It was like an HD, right?

00:13:44 ◼   ► Yes, a cloth cape, plastic head that looked like the one in the movie.

00:13:48 ◼   ► They didn't have articulated joints either, but they were just so much bigger and more

00:13:52 ◼   ► realistic-looking.

00:13:53 ◼   ► Very cool.

00:13:54 ◼   ► Did you guys ever watch The Toys That Made Me?

00:13:56 ◼   ► It's a Netflix documentary.

00:13:58 ◼   ► It covers a lot of…

00:14:00 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:01 ◼   ► They talk about G.I.

00:14:02 ◼   ► Joe at that point, and I think that 12-inch Boba Fett is in line of those old precursor

00:14:11 ◼   ► G.I.

00:14:12 ◼   ► Joe figures that were 12 inches tall, very articulated, and very much in the doll category.

00:14:24 ◼   ► I don't like to make that distinction.

00:14:27 ◼   ► So here's the thing, and I don't think you believe that, is that there was a distinction

00:14:33 ◼   ► between action figures and dolls.

00:14:35 ◼   ► Whatever.

00:14:36 ◼   ► You're playing with dolls, right?

00:14:39 ◼   ► This was very much an action figure.

00:14:45 ◼   ► A grossly rendered action figure, right?

00:14:50 ◼   ► As opposed to the sort of, what are they, like the G.I.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Joe characters, or what, six inches tall?

00:14:56 ◼   ► These things were big and manipulative, and they felt more like an entity in your life

00:15:04 ◼   ► rather than something that you could make a recreation of the Alamo with.

00:15:10 ◼   ► Do you know what I mean?

00:15:13 ◼   ► They were things.

00:15:14 ◼   ► They were things that you interacted with rather than being playthings that you could

00:15:18 ◼   ► place in a battlefield.

00:15:19 ◼   ► I was going to bring it up.

00:15:23 ◼   ► You said that, and it brings to mind that whoever, whichever, and you know it was some

00:15:27 ◼   ► Don Draper, Madman type guy who came up with the phrase "action figure."

00:15:34 ◼   ► And I get it.

00:15:35 ◼   ► And it is funny.

00:15:36 ◼   ► We're of a generation.

00:15:37 ◼   ► We're now in 2020.

00:15:39 ◼   ► We can all say, "Well, if your young son wants to play with dolls, or your young daughter

00:15:45 ◼   ► wants to play with army Star Wars characters with lightsabers and guns, it's all good.

00:15:52 ◼   ► Nobody just has fun.

00:15:54 ◼   ► You don't need to worry about words like that.

00:15:56 ◼   ► It's all silly."

00:15:57 ◼   ► But 1978, '79, it mattered.

00:16:00 ◼   ► We learned that from William Watson's doll on Free To Be You and Me.

00:16:03 ◼   ► We knew it was right.

00:16:06 ◼   ► I had a doll.

00:16:07 ◼   ► I carried a baby doll.

00:16:08 ◼   ► Her name was Kelkie.

00:16:10 ◼   ► And that was because we had a neighbor who was a few years older than me.

00:16:16 ◼   ► Her name was Kelly.

00:16:18 ◼   ► And I guess as a young three-year-old, I had a crush on her.

00:16:22 ◼   ► Not a crush-crush, but looked up to her because she was the neighbor.

00:16:27 ◼   ► Are you telling me that as a three-year-old, you didn't have a crush-crush?

00:16:30 ◼   ► No, you know what I mean?

00:16:32 ◼   ► No, but I liked my Kelkie doll more than I liked Kelly the neighbor.

00:16:36 ◼   ► Once I had the baby doll, I mean, and I couldn't pronounce Kelly, so the baby was Kelkie.

00:16:43 ◼   ► And she was a little…

00:16:45 ◼   ► You'll know the type of doll.

00:16:47 ◼   ► It had a hard head and hard hands, like articulated plastic.

00:16:51 ◼   ► But a squishy body.

00:16:52 ◼   ► But a squishy pillow body.

00:16:54 ◼   ► And I carried Kelkie with me everywhere I went by the arm.

00:17:00 ◼   ► And so the arm…

00:17:01 ◼   ► Eventually, my mom had to sew the arm back on.

00:17:04 ◼   ► And then at some point, that wasn't working.

00:17:07 ◼   ► And my mom, I believe, went out and bought me a replacement.

00:17:11 ◼   ► And I didn't fall for it.

00:17:15 ◼   ► But my dad was very… my dad's a good man.

00:17:19 ◼   ► And he's all on board with it.

00:17:20 ◼   ► My dad was not a fan of, at the time, of taking me, let's say, to the bank with him.

00:17:26 ◼   ► And I would tote along my Kelkie.

00:17:29 ◼   ► He needed to listen more freely to you than me.

00:17:31 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:17:32 ◼   ► He'd be cool with it now.

00:17:33 ◼   ► Yeah, but I think that's true for all of us, right?

00:17:37 ◼   ► We are in a different place now than we were 20 years ago, for sure.

00:17:42 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:17:43 ◼   ► 20 years ago was the year 2000, dude.

00:17:45 ◼   ► I know.

00:17:46 ◼   ► I know.

00:17:47 ◼   ► And here's the thing.

00:17:48 ◼   ► Here's why I picked that is that I knew both of you 20 years ago.

00:17:51 ◼   ► And that's uncomfortable.

00:17:54 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true.

00:17:56 ◼   ► I just looked up the 12-inch Boba Fett, by the way.

00:17:58 ◼   ► If I had kept the box, apparently I could sell it for three grand on eBay today.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Wow.

00:18:03 ◼   ► So here's the thing about that.

00:18:05 ◼   ► So this bothered me a lot, though.

00:18:07 ◼   ► And the one toy…

00:18:08 ◼   ► So a massive Kenner toy that I did not want, because I could just tell before I even saw

00:18:14 ◼   ► it at a friend's house, I was like, "I don't want it," is I did not want the Death Star,

00:18:19 ◼   ► because the Death Star was clearly a Death Star-inspired playset, where it was sort of

00:18:25 ◼   ► like a bunch of interior sets from the Death Star, as opposed to a thing that looked like

00:18:33 ◼   ► the Death Star, that you could take a panel off and put people in.

00:18:38 ◼   ► So the Death Star playset was a semi-sphere, basically?

00:18:41 ◼   ► No, it wasn't even a sphere.

00:18:45 ◼   ► As I recall, it was just like an apartment building.

00:18:47 ◼   ► It was just a rectangle.

00:18:48 ◼   ► Really?

00:18:49 ◼   ► My recollection was that it was just like a cutaway of a floor that bent in kind of

00:18:53 ◼   ► an angle.

00:18:54 ◼   ► Like, it wasn't even… there was no hint that it was in a giant gray sphere.

00:18:58 ◼   ► I mean, they don't do that to this day.

00:18:59 ◼   ► Look at the LEGO Death Star.

00:19:00 ◼   ► It has no relation to the actual Death Star, because it's just too darn big.

00:19:04 ◼   ► The thing I'm familiar with interacting with was a semi-sphere, and it had a trash

00:19:10 ◼   ► compactor.

00:19:11 ◼   ► Oh, I've got…

00:19:13 ◼   ► It was all made out of cardboard.

00:19:16 ◼   ► It was not great.

00:19:17 ◼   ► It was bad.

00:19:18 ◼   ► And it supports everything you're saying, but it was a specific thing.

00:19:24 ◼   ► Here, I just put in an iMessage.

00:19:26 ◼   ► This is what I had.

00:19:27 ◼   ► Trash compactor with… what do you call it?

00:19:31 ◼   ► What's the name of the monster in there?

00:19:33 ◼   ► Oh, I forget the name of the monster.

00:19:35 ◼   ► It begins with a D. Whatever.

00:19:37 ◼   ► Trash compactor monster.

00:19:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:39 ◼   ► Oh, no.

00:19:40 ◼   ► It's…

00:19:41 ◼   ► I got it.

00:19:42 ◼   ► Get it in a second.

00:19:43 ◼   ► Hang on.

00:19:44 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:19:45 ◼   ► It's a terrible… it was a terrible toy, though.

00:19:46 ◼   ► It was just… you could fake it.

00:19:47 ◼   ► You didn't need it.

00:19:48 ◼   ► I didn't like it at all.

00:19:50 ◼   ► Oh, man.

00:19:51 ◼   ► This is what you had.

00:19:52 ◼   ► Okay, that's…

00:19:53 ◼   ► Diane Lugo.

00:19:54 ◼   ► That's not what I had.

00:19:55 ◼   ► That is what I had.

00:19:56 ◼   ► This is my biggest Star Wars toy, and honestly, I would have rather had either the AT-AT or

00:19:59 ◼   ► the Millennium Falcon.

00:20:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:01 ◼   ► The Millennium Falcon was the bomb.

00:20:03 ◼   ► And it even had a cool thing where the one landing gear was meant to be used as a pistol

00:20:07 ◼   ► grip.

00:20:08 ◼   ► You could keep it down, and then you could fly around your house with the Millennium

00:20:12 ◼   ► Falcon with this pistol grip down.

00:20:14 ◼   ► Very fun.

00:20:15 ◼   ► Very cool.

00:20:16 ◼   ► But it bothered me when the toys… there's an uncanny valley where it's like, "Okay,

00:20:22 ◼   ► so the original Han Solo did not look like Harrison Ford at all," because all of those

00:20:27 ◼   ► characters… they just had the most…

00:20:30 ◼   ► A melty, generic face.

00:20:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:33 ◼   ► Like, somebody… like, some kid who's actually pretty talented just carved a candle, you

00:20:38 ◼   ► know?

00:20:44 ◼   ► And they had eyes that were just sort of like… the eyes that you just draw as an idiot, you

00:20:49 ◼   ► know? Like, two dots and then, like, a little upside-down parenthesis, you know? Like, a

00:20:53 ◼   ► parenthesis for eyebrows.

00:20:54 ◼   ► Yeah, and the paint didn't land on the features, even, that way.

00:20:56 ◼   ► No!

00:20:57 ◼   ► They had gloves or boots. It was like, "Eh, the paint is more or less on the boot," and

00:21:01 ◼   ► then it kind of fades into, like…

00:21:02 ◼   ► Right, and then…

00:21:03 ◼   ► I'm looking at this 12-inch Vader again, and I realized that Boba Fett… looking at

00:21:06 ◼   ► these pictures, Boba Fett had articulated joints. Vader didn't. They were hollow plastic.

00:21:10 ◼   ► Like, Vader's arms and legs, like… the whole body of least Vader, anyway, was, like,

00:21:15 ◼   ► hollow plastic, but they didn't have elbows. But Boba Fett did, apparently. Maybe that's

00:21:18 ◼   ► why he liked them better.

00:21:19 ◼   ► Yeah. So, there was a 12-inch 3PO, an evader, and I believe they're from '77, because

00:21:26 ◼   ► I believe I saw them before… at a France house.

00:21:31 ◼   ► Before Empire Strikes Back came out. And I think that once Empire came out, it was like,

00:21:38 ◼   ► "Well, we're going to make a bunch of money, so let's make these better." I have never

00:21:43 ◼   ► seen a 12-inch Boba Fett. I did not know those existed. I knew they existed before Empire

00:21:51 ◼   ► came out, because I was trying to collect enough stickers in order to get one with a

00:21:55 ◼   ► rocket pack, and I did not.

00:21:58 ◼   ► There were so many things that bothered me. It bothered me that the lightsaber characters

00:22:03 ◼   ► had, instead of a lightsaber that went into their hand…

00:22:07 ◼   ► That was the worst.

00:22:08 ◼   ► … that little noodle that comes out.

00:22:11 ◼   ► And it was two different sides. And the worst part about it was, the lightsaber doesn't

00:22:16 ◼   ► have one section that's thicker and then the next section that's thinner. It's

00:22:20 ◼   ► uniform. Why would you do that? The only good thing about it was that my mother couldn't

00:22:24 ◼   ► take it away, because she took away the guns from all my other kind of figures.

00:22:30 ◼   ► Because of sort of a loose "no playing with guns" policy?

00:22:35 ◼   ► It was a very tight "no playing with guns" policy. Very tight.

00:22:39 ◼   ► Gotcha.

00:22:40 ◼   ► Well, seriously, sorry to create character on this, but do you resent that, or do you

00:22:47 ◼   ► think I was good?

00:22:49 ◼   ► I resent it.

00:22:50 ◼   ► Really? Because you're not like "I want to play with guns" kind of guy.

00:22:55 ◼   ► I wasn't big on it with my kids either, but come on. It's Star Wars, it's fantasy

00:23:02 ◼   ► violence. All I did was make my own guns out of wood anyway, so I was like, "You're

00:23:07 ◼   ► not stopping anything."

00:23:09 ◼   ► That is so true. And I know that "no guns" and I know there's guaranteed way too many

00:23:15 ◼   ► people who listen to this podcast. I know that there are literally almost certainly

00:23:20 ◼   ► thousands of people who are going to listen to this show who are currently raising kids

00:23:24 ◼   ► with a "no guns" policy, and there are thousands who are rolling their eyes saying,

00:23:29 ◼   ► "That's ridiculous and silly." I'm just saying, however you want to raise your kids

00:23:35 ◼   ► is all fine. But all I know is having raised a son in the last 17 years with numerous friends,

00:23:44 ◼   ► it was a thing we would check, right? Friends are coming over, what's the gun policy?

00:23:49 ◼   ► Because you don't want any trouble. The kids raised in the "no gun" family will pick

00:23:56 ◼   ► up anything and everything. I mean, like, oh, you know, you find a stick on the ground

00:24:04 ◼   ► that's vaguely L-shaped and it becomes a gun. Okay, sure, I did that. I'm talking

00:24:09 ◼   ► that the kids that Jonas grew up with in "no gun" families would pick up a gum wrapper,

00:24:15 ◼   ► like a piece of paper, and the kids would be playing something entirely else, and then

00:24:21 ◼   ► they would just fold it into a gun. They were nuts for making guns out of pieces of cellophane,

00:24:27 ◼   ► like not sticks, leaves. Just pick up a leaf and it would become a gun. And it's like,

00:24:32 ◼   ► I don't want to send the kid back to his house. I presume that his parents knew that

00:24:39 ◼   ► he was doing this, but it's like, I don't want him to think that they picked it up.

00:24:43 ◼   ► Jonas's dad taught me how to make a gun out of a piece of gum.

00:24:46 ◼   ► That's a little bit James Bond, though.

00:24:50 ◼   ► There's a whole nature/nurture thing going on there. But I mean, I didn't buy my kids'

00:24:54 ◼   ► guns ever. But when my kids got Star Wars figures, I didn't take the tiny little guns

00:24:59 ◼   ► away from the Star Wars figures. I feel like that's the right balance. I never wanted my

00:25:03 ◼   ► kids to have guns, especially realistic-looking guns. I never bought them for them, but I

00:25:06 ◼   ► did buy them Star Wars action figures/dolls, and if they came with guns, they came with

00:25:11 ◼   ► guns. And I think that's the right balance. Because if you do a hard ban, where it's like,

00:25:15 ◼   ► we got you a toy, but now we're removing one of the fun parts of the toy, that makes the

00:25:18 ◼   ► kid make a gun out of a gum wrapper, maybe.

00:25:21 ◼   ► Yeah. We bought Jonas all the guns.

00:25:24 ◼   ► Really? The only thing that kid has ever screwed me up with was really, really, really sour

00:25:33 ◼   ► treats. Nobody has made me want to vomit so much as your son trying to feed me a sour

00:25:44 ◼   ► treat in Ireland. That was the worst.

00:25:46 ◼   ► Those Irish sour candies are the sourest imaginable.

00:25:50 ◼   ► They're no joke.

00:25:51 ◼   ► They're like something from Harry Potter. They're magically imbued with the extra sour.

00:25:54 ◼   ► No, but anyway, we bought Jonas all the Star Wars guns. And in his generation, they were

00:25:58 ◼   ► all bright orange or green.

00:26:01 ◼   ► All the real guns are on computers now anyway. I played Destiny with Jonas. We know where

00:26:06 ◼   ► the real guns are at.

00:26:09 ◼   ► He's a gentle soul. It was never like a rough-hauser. Anyway, I would recommend not worrying about

00:26:18 ◼   ► it, but whatever you want to do. Anyway, long story short, it bothered me that their lightsabers

00:26:24 ◼   ► were like sticks that came out of their arms.

00:26:26 ◼   ► I always felt like that was an attempt at tapering and all they could do was like...

00:26:33 ◼   ► The manufacturer could only make...

00:26:34 ◼   ► That precision was all they could do and they were just like, "Yeah, good enough."

00:26:38 ◼   ► But they should have worried more about length. They were like a foot and a half long in scale,

00:26:45 ◼   ► right? They were like the length of their forearm because that's where they slid into.

00:26:48 ◼   ► So how could you make it longer than the forearm because they slide into the forearms? It was

00:26:51 ◼   ► just bad.

00:26:52 ◼   ► You know what? The Luke character had a yellow lightsaber.

00:26:55 ◼   ► Yeah, it was a mess. I mean, it was the type of thing where the toy manufacturer was like,

00:27:00 ◼   ► "Who cares what color it is in the movie? Whatever." And it turns out everybody cares.

00:27:04 ◼   ► Meanwhile, I'm five years old and I'm like, "Have you people ever even seen this movie?"

00:27:10 ◼   ► I'm so mad about it. I'm still mad.

00:27:12 ◼   ► They didn't realize that this was the movie that would literally create the first generation

00:27:15 ◼   ► of people who would care very deeply about the color of the flashlight.

00:27:19 ◼   ► In fact, too deeply. And I think we're going to touch on that if we ever talk about what

00:27:24 ◼   ► we're going to talk about.

00:27:25 ◼   ► But there were other aspects. There were other aspects that they... This is what bothered

00:27:29 ◼   ► me about it was that they clearly paid attention to other details. So Han Solo came with the

00:27:35 ◼   ► Han Solo DL-44 blaster. Now, see, now how do I know that his blaster was a DL-44?

00:27:41 ◼   ► Well, first of all, it's 44.

00:27:44 ◼   ► Again, I barely remember my own birthday anymore, but somehow DL-44, I remember. And the Stormtroopers

00:27:54 ◼   ► came with Stormtrooper little half rifles, whatever you want to call them. They got the

00:27:59 ◼   ► guns right. And it could have easily just made like Lego. You know, the way that Lego

00:28:03 ◼   ► just sort of has like one generic pistol and... Or like lightsabers, right? So all the Star

00:28:09 ◼   ► Wars figures from Lego have a generic... There's just a lightsaber piece and nobody worries

00:28:16 ◼   ► about whether it looks like Darth Vader's lightsaber.

00:28:18 ◼   ► You print them out by the thousands, you stick them in boxes.

00:28:21 ◼   ► So any of these Star Wars characters with a blaster could have had the same pistol and

00:28:26 ◼   ► it, you know... But they got it right. So why in the world wouldn't you get the color

00:28:30 ◼   ► of Luke's lightsaber right? How can you not know he has a blue lightsaber? It was the

00:28:33 ◼   ► most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.

00:28:35 ◼   ► I suspect they did. And one of you is going to have to correct me on when Pantone actually

00:28:42 ◼   ► came around. Because I just don't think that they could... I don't think they could dye

00:28:47 ◼   ► that plastic that color.

00:28:49 ◼   ► No, because...

00:28:50 ◼   ► Yeah, yellow.

00:28:51 ◼   ► Yeah, because Obi-Wan...

00:28:52 ◼   ► It was just blue.

00:28:53 ◼   ► Yeah, Obi-Wan had a blue lightsaber. Just give him... Just use the same part from Obi-Wan.

00:28:58 ◼   ► Oh yeah, wait. Why was this yellow then?

00:29:00 ◼   ► It was crazy.

00:29:01 ◼   ► Because it wasn't... Because I'm thinking of Jedi and I'm thinking they were trying

00:29:03 ◼   ► to do a green thing, but no.

00:29:05 ◼   ► I mean, it matches his hair. I don't know. I just sent a picture of... Apparently they

00:29:09 ◼   ► did 1995 and 2019. They did reproductions of the original Kenner thing and they faithfully

00:29:14 ◼   ► reproduced the yellow lightsaber with the stupid ship.

00:29:19 ◼   ► Well anyway, it's a long... It's an erratic annual schedule.

00:29:26 ◼   ► Nice recovery.

00:29:28 ◼   ► But we don't cover everything. We can't cover everything. And we happen to skip the rise

00:29:34 ◼   ► of Skywalker. We don't have time. There's no way. We're already... The introduction

00:29:38 ◼   ► has taken us half an hour. There's absolutely no way we can cover it.

00:29:42 ◼   ► Can we say that 1977 Luke Skywalker has a very flaccid looking...

00:29:48 ◼   ► I mean, it was 1977. It was a long time ago. You got to allow for...

00:29:53 ◼   ► It was. It was. That guy went to way too many key parties.

00:29:56 ◼   ► In the immortal words of George Costanza, he was in the pool.

00:29:59 ◼   ► He was in the pool. He was. Sorry, Jon. I don't want to cut you off because we really

00:30:04 ◼   ► should move on. But like 1977 Luke Skywalker has definitely...

00:30:10 ◼   ► You know what? The Obi-Wan character is all kinds of wrong. And that bothered me. I haven't

00:30:14 ◼   ► seen this figure in a long time since I was a kid.

00:30:16 ◼   ► Yeah. That's the one I grew up with and that's just not Obi-Wan.

00:30:20 ◼   ► You could have in line, but you didn't.

00:30:22 ◼   ► He kind of looks like a kid, like a character from Flash Gordon or something.

00:30:26 ◼   ► Yeah. He's wearing some kind of maroon 70s polyester jumpsuit.

00:30:32 ◼   ► It's sort of like with the Obi-Wan character. It's like they found out he was an old man

00:30:36 ◼   ► and kids weren't really going to care. And so somebody who'd never seen the movie just

00:30:40 ◼   ► asked somebody...

00:30:41 ◼   ► Jazzed him up.

00:30:43 ◼   ► Yeah. It was just like second or third hand, what does this Obi-Wan character look like?

00:30:48 ◼   ► And then they made this.

00:30:49 ◼   ► Yeah. They didn't even bother painting his shoes a different color.

00:30:53 ◼   ► You meant the touch of that cape?

00:30:54 ◼   ► His paint color just goes straight down to his...

00:30:56 ◼   ► I don't know if you guys ever touched that cape, but it's plastic.

00:30:58 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:30:59 ◼   ► They're all plastic.

00:31:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:31:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:31:02 ◼   ► All the kind of things have plastic capes.

00:31:03 ◼   ► That's why...

00:31:04 ◼   ► So John, I cut you off to make fun of Flaccid Luke. So sorry, Mark Hamill.

00:31:10 ◼   ► So we are here to talk today about the Ewok adventure, the 1984 TV movie that I've forgotten

00:31:18 ◼   ► even exists. Now, I want to talk about The Mandalorian because I feel like we could cover

00:31:24 ◼   ► that in a reasonable length of time. We can kind of tie it in.

00:31:29 ◼   ► It's adorable.

00:31:30 ◼   ► All right.

00:31:31 ◼   ► We've got a few hours left in 2020. So...

00:31:35 ◼   ► Let me take a break before we even get started. And I will thank our first sponsor. It's our

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00:32:01 ◼   ► to configuring it right there in the browser yourself as you make your website. And if

00:32:06 ◼   ► you want like a catalog where you want to sell stuff and do all the commerce right there

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00:32:38 ◼   ► configure the HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript, whatever you need. Fantastic both if you're

00:32:44 ◼   ► technically oriented and if you're not. And as I always like to say, if you're listening

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00:33:28 ◼   ► Big New Year's thing. I'm sure that'll be a push next year. But you can get started

00:33:32 ◼   ► on your New Year's resolutions. Build a new website.

00:33:35 ◼   ► Jon, does Marco ever make you listen to the reads right there during the show? It always

00:33:40 ◼   ► sounds to me like he pops them in after the fact.

00:33:43 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino He'll never reveal the secrets of our program.

00:33:46 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt Well, don't you let people just listen to it?

00:33:50 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino Yeah, but if you don't listen live, you don't

00:33:52 ◼   ► know what's happening.

00:33:53 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt Yeah, I love that Goober is just saying you

00:33:54 ◼   ► don't listen live.

00:33:55 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino No, I stick to Canon.

00:33:56 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt Wow.

00:33:57 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino You're getting better at this because that's

00:33:58 ◼   ► a good segue.

00:33:59 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt There's multiple Canon versions now because

00:34:04 ◼   ► you've got the member version.

00:34:09 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino No, that's not Canon.

00:34:10 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt It's very complicated.

00:34:11 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino No, that's fan.

00:34:12 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt But as you know, Jon, no one pays for podcasts,

00:34:15 ◼   ► so don't worry about it.

00:34:16 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino That's fan.

00:34:17 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt So what is the Canon version of ATP?

00:34:19 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt They're all Canon.

00:34:21 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt No, they're not.

00:34:23 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino That's not, that's unlikely.

00:34:25 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt Every week we put out three Canon episodes

00:34:28 ◼   ► every single week.

00:34:31 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt We, over the break, at some point in the last

00:34:37 ◼   ► 10 days, we introduced Jonas to the Star Wars holiday special.

00:34:43 ◼   ► This is what I wanted to ask you, Jon, with this birthday of yours.

00:34:47 ◼   ► What is it like to have a birthday so close to life day?

00:34:50 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt That's never come up.

00:34:53 ◼   ► I thankfully avoided ever seeing the Star Wars holiday special despite knowing about

00:34:57 ◼   ► it, despite knowing about its infamy.

00:34:59 ◼   ► I avoided it for almost my entire life until we did it on the incomparable a year or two

00:35:04 ◼   ► ago.

00:35:05 ◼   ► And that was the first time I'd ever seen it and it was terrible.

00:35:08 ◼   ► And then somehow I erased that from my memory and I got sucked back into doing a commentary

00:35:13 ◼   ► track on it.

00:35:14 ◼   ► So I've seen it two times, both times in the form of a podcast.

00:35:18 ◼   ► The first time it really, really bothered me.

00:35:20 ◼   ► The second time I think I was mostly numb to it, but it's no good.

00:35:22 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino I was really shocked because we're on the

00:35:24 ◼   ► same slack about that.

00:35:26 ◼   ► And when it came up the first time, I'm like, I don't want anything to do with it.

00:35:32 ◼   ► I think I texted you, Jon, and you were like, don't watch it.

00:35:36 ◼   ► I took a bullet for you.

00:35:38 ◼   ► And then not like a year later, you were like, ah, doing a live commentary track.

00:35:43 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino I was like, what are you doing?

00:35:44 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino I need two doses to truly be immune.

00:35:48 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino Yeah, I think so.

00:35:50 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino I think so.

00:35:51 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino Yeah.

00:35:52 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino Jonas is usually pretty keyed in on this.

00:35:53 ◼   ► He's on YouTube all the time and he knows the Star Wars.

00:36:01 ◼   ► And he honestly had sort of vaguely heard about it and wasn't even sure it was real.

00:36:06 ◼   ► Had never seen a moment of it.

00:36:08 ◼   ► We dialed up, you know, somebody's copy of a copy of a VHS tape, best version available

00:36:16 ◼   ► on YouTube.

00:36:17 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino Did you get the one with commercials in it?

00:36:19 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino Yes, I believe so.

00:36:20 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino That's the only good part.

00:36:22 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino We got the, I had some commercials, we started

00:36:24 ◼   ► watching it and he couldn't believe it.

00:36:27 ◼   ► And I remember when it came out, I was so excited.

00:36:31 ◼   ► I could not believe it.

00:36:32 ◼   ► You know, be a chance for more Star Wars.

00:36:35 ◼   ► And it was going to be free right on TV.

00:36:38 ◼   ► And then the moment it started, I realized I knew exactly what was going on.

00:36:41 ◼   ► This is horrible.

00:36:42 ◼   ► And it just seemed to me, the thing that was the most confusing to me, though, and it gets

00:36:48 ◼   ► to my problem with like the articulation of some of the toys is I could have accepted

00:36:53 ◼   ► more readily if they had also recast all of the parts.

00:36:58 ◼   ► And it was just there was just some other young kid playing quote unquote, Luke Skywalker.

00:37:04 ◼   ► And there was a man in a gorilla suit playing quote Chewbacca.

00:37:09 ◼   ► But it was they were all they got the actors and Chewbacca did look like Chewbacca.

00:37:15 ◼   ► And it was like there was the real R2D2.

00:37:18 ◼   ► And I couldn't understand how this could how these people could play any part in something

00:37:22 ◼   ► that was obviously a complete and utter fraud.

00:37:25 ◼   ► And I don't remember really watching it to completion.

00:37:28 ◼   ► And, and but you know, it scarred me.

00:37:32 ◼   ► It scarred me in a way that because it seemed incomprehensible that there could be any affiliation

00:37:38 ◼   ► with the actual Star Wars, but there clearly was.

00:37:41 ◼   ► And and yet this was a complete, horrible shot on videotape fraud.

00:37:47 ◼   ► So wait, let's save that.

00:37:50 ◼   ► What year did that come out?

00:37:52 ◼   ► 1980?

00:37:53 ◼   ► No.

00:37:54 ◼   ► No, it was before Empire.

00:37:56 ◼   ► It was.

00:37:57 ◼   ► Yeah, like 79.

00:37:58 ◼   ► 79, I think.

00:37:59 ◼   ► 78 or 79.

00:38:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:03 ◼   ► Man, somebody do that math because I think I think this goes towards this thesis statement

00:38:10 ◼   ► that you sent me earlier, John.

00:38:12 ◼   ► Yeah, well, okay.

00:38:14 ◼   ► 1978 Star Wars.

00:38:16 ◼   ► 78.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Right.

00:38:18 ◼   ► So what what did Star Wars mean at that time?

00:38:21 ◼   ► Right?

00:38:22 ◼   ► We'd had the one movie where basically a crazy old guy takes a kid and forces him to

00:38:29 ◼   ► engage in something way beyond his pay grade.

00:38:35 ◼   ► And ultimately it works out because magic?

00:38:38 ◼   ► It's, it's a weird story, right?

00:38:41 ◼   ► Like so is Earth Day that far off Star Wars?

00:38:46 ◼   ► Right?

00:38:47 ◼   ► Like not, not we?

00:38:48 ◼   ► Yes, I agree.

00:38:49 ◼   ► I definitely agree with you.

00:38:51 ◼   ► I mean, they made a 70s variety show.

00:38:53 ◼   ► Like we, if you're alive in the 70s, you know what they were doing, and they just shoved

00:38:57 ◼   ► Star Wars into it.

00:38:58 ◼   ► And they literally opened up the CBS Rolodex and just contacted the CBS rotary of, who

00:39:08 ◼   ► do we call?

00:39:09 ◼   ► Well, CBS always calls B. Arthur when, when there's a mod there.

00:39:13 ◼   ► Right.

00:39:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:39:15 ◼   ► And if it wouldn't you, I would call B. Arthur.

00:39:16 ◼   ► If I was going to throw in a party, B. Arthur's coming.

00:39:19 ◼   ► Right.

00:39:20 ◼   ► And if it had been on ABC instead of CBS, it would have been a completely different

00:39:25 ◼   ► set of stars.

00:39:26 ◼   ► It would have been like John Ritter from Three's Company would have been in instead of B. Arthur,

00:39:32 ◼   ► you know.

00:39:33 ◼   ► And Harvey Korman.

00:39:34 ◼   ► Harvey Korman, you know.

00:39:35 ◼   ► Or Art Carney.

00:39:36 ◼   ► Right?

00:39:37 ◼   ► That, you know what?

00:39:38 ◼   ► That would have been a great show.

00:39:42 ◼   ► Right.

00:39:43 ◼   ► And if it would have been, if it would have been NBC, they would have got Bob Hope instead

00:39:46 ◼   ► of Art Carney, you know, and you know, all of a sudden Bob Hope is in for 30 seconds.

00:39:51 ◼   ► Bob Hope, Bob Hope doing Yoda would have been good.

00:39:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:39:55 ◼   ► And he didn't exist.

00:39:56 ◼   ► It was on Jefferson Starship, put him in there.

00:39:58 ◼   ► Just for the name.

00:40:00 ◼   ► It broke my heart.

00:40:01 ◼   ► Anyway, here's my thesis statement.

00:40:03 ◼   ► My premise for the show.

00:40:04 ◼   ► I ran it by a guy.

00:40:05 ◼   ► I didn't have to run it by John because I feel like you'll grok it immediately.

00:40:09 ◼   ► Hey.

00:40:10 ◼   ► Well, I just wanted to, once you said it was on.

00:40:14 ◼   ► I'm joking.

00:40:15 ◼   ► I'm joking.

00:40:16 ◼   ► Just go.

00:40:17 ◼   ► I forget.

00:40:18 ◼   ► Actually, I didn't write it down, so tell me if I get it right.

00:40:20 ◼   ► But basically.

00:40:21 ◼   ► You did.

00:40:22 ◼   ► You wrote it down to me.

00:40:24 ◼   ► Okay.

00:40:25 ◼   ► Star Wars used to be.

00:40:27 ◼   ► And the Star Wars that infused my vision of what it means was this thing that was extremely

00:40:33 ◼   ► rare, extremely special.

00:40:34 ◼   ► And they were these blockbuster, spectacular, two hour, big budget movies with the greatest

00:40:40 ◼   ► special effects that blew away the second place movies with special effects for this

00:40:45 ◼   ► sort of thing.

00:40:46 ◼   ► We're so far in second place.

00:40:49 ◼   ► It wasn't even worth talking about them.

00:40:52 ◼   ► And that they were like the Olympics.

00:40:53 ◼   ► They only came out every few years.

00:40:55 ◼   ► But at least with the Olympics, you knew there'd be one every four years.

00:41:00 ◼   ► And then when Return of the Jedi was over, there was a question as to whether there would

00:41:04 ◼   ► a serious, serious question as to whether there would ever be any Star Wars again.

00:41:09 ◼   ► And in fact, there wasn't for 16 years except for special editions.

00:41:16 ◼   ► And it was that special.

00:41:19 ◼   ► And then when George Lucas said, we're going to make a new trilogy, the one that was long

00:41:23 ◼   ► rumored is going to be a prequel trilogy.

00:41:25 ◼   ► That's why these movies were episodes four, five and six.

00:41:29 ◼   ► And it was like, this is so special.

00:41:30 ◼   ► This is going to be so great.

00:41:31 ◼   ► This is special.

00:41:33 ◼   ► And now we've got news announcements that there's seven different Star Wars shows.

00:41:41 ◼   ► They make movies.

00:41:43 ◼   ► They can't make movies fast.

00:41:44 ◼   ► They can't make Star Wars movies fast enough.

00:41:47 ◼   ► And my thesis statement is that it was good the old way when we grew up, when they were

00:41:54 ◼   ► extremely special and extremely rare.

00:41:57 ◼   ► But if you're going to go in a different direction and start squeezing them out more and into

00:42:02 ◼   ► an expanded, you know, what do you call it?

00:42:03 ◼   ► Like the Marvel expanded universe and there's the Star Wars expanded universe.

00:42:07 ◼   ► And you're going to just keep making stuff.

00:42:09 ◼   ► It's better to do it like this.

00:42:13 ◼   ► And that's why I'm not that big a fan of the last trilogy of movies.

00:42:17 ◼   ► I really, this, the seven, eight, nine, and the longer I go from them, the less of a fan

00:42:24 ◼   ► I am.

00:42:25 ◼   ► And I feel like doing these TV shows is a better way to do it under Disney stewardship.

00:42:29 ◼   ► That's my thesis statement.

00:42:30 ◼   ► Well, I have to say that the part that you described of when Star Wars was rare and everything,

00:42:37 ◼   ► that's true, but I didn't super enjoy it.

00:42:39 ◼   ► It was a lot of tension.

00:42:41 ◼   ► I could have done with more Star Wars.

00:42:43 ◼   ► Our childhood, at least mine anyway, was defined by wishing that there was more Star Wars.

00:42:48 ◼   ► We saw, you know, A New Hope, Empire, and Return of the Jedi.

00:42:53 ◼   ► And all we did was talk on the playground about the nine movies in the lava pit for

00:42:56 ◼   ► the rest of our adolescence.

00:42:58 ◼   ► And there wasn't any more movies.

00:43:00 ◼   ► And it seemed like we were waiting forever.

00:43:02 ◼   ► And then of course we had the prequels, which were disappointing.

00:43:04 ◼   ► And then we had to wait again, right?

00:43:06 ◼   ► And so I have great affection for The Force Awakens, because I felt like that was the

00:43:12 ◼   ► payoff to a long, painful journey with Star Wars, where I felt like I wasn't getting more

00:43:16 ◼   ► of what I wanted for a very, very long time.

00:43:19 ◼   ► And The Force Awakens was, I think, a very good Star Wars movie that said, yes, there

00:43:24 ◼   ► will exist a new Star Wars thing that you will really like.

00:43:29 ◼   ► And I thought The Last Jedi was okay, not as good as the other one.

00:43:32 ◼   ► And then Rise of Skywalker we didn't talk about, and they kind of dropped the ball.

00:43:35 ◼   ► So I agree that the second trilogy doesn't hold a candle to the first, obviously, but

00:43:40 ◼   ► it's better than the prequels.

00:43:42 ◼   ► But the whole about rarity versus having more stuff, I didn't really like the rarity part.

00:43:47 ◼   ► It's what we got.

00:43:48 ◼   ► It made Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder, right?

00:43:51 ◼   ► All that and everything.

00:43:52 ◼   ► That's true.

00:43:53 ◼   ► But I would have preferred a childhood where Star Wars ended up like the MCU.

00:43:57 ◼   ► And the other thing to remember about MCU, speaking of that thing, is the MCU, that's

00:44:01 ◼   ► not the source material.

00:44:02 ◼   ► The comics are the source material.

00:44:04 ◼   ► This is the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is derivative material based on properties

00:44:09 ◼   ► developed in comic books.

00:44:12 ◼   ► Star Wars is not like that.

00:44:13 ◼   ► It wasn't developed as a comic book first or whatever.

00:44:16 ◼   ► It was born as a movie.

00:44:18 ◼   ► It is a movie franchise.

00:44:20 ◼   ► So I think it's a little bit different in that you don't have 60 years worth of dozens

00:44:25 ◼   ► of characters from which to pull and let somebody else give their take on Guardians of the Galaxy

00:44:30 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:44:31 ◼   ► That doesn't exist in Star Wars.

00:44:32 ◼   ► It was the EU and it kind of spun out from there and now they can do more picking and

00:44:35 ◼   ► choosing.

00:44:36 ◼   ► But it's just so different that I'm not sure adopting one of the formulas of the existing,

00:44:41 ◼   ► especially things like Cinematic Universe, is the right formula.

00:44:44 ◼   ► I guess I'm agreeing with you that Marvel on TV, I don't know if there's an acronym

00:44:48 ◼   ► for that, but Star Wars on TV seems like a perfectly natural fit for me because now we

00:44:55 ◼   ► do have some canon to pull from and the television format allows you to get what I didn't have

00:45:00 ◼   ► when I was a kid, which is, "Hey, guess what?

00:45:02 ◼   ► More Star Wars."

00:45:03 ◼   ► And when it's a TV show, the stakes are lower.

00:45:06 ◼   ► You make a good TV show, you make a bad TV show, whatever, there'll be another TV show,

00:45:09 ◼   ► it's not a big deal.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Whereas if you have one trilogy of movies every few decades, the pressure is on and

00:45:15 ◼   ► if you end up with a trilogy like the prequels, where it just kind of fizzles and we end up

00:45:19 ◼   ► not liking it, it's like, "Well, I guess I'll see you guys again in another decade

00:45:23 ◼   ► or two."

00:45:24 ◼   ► And that's no fun.

00:45:26 ◼   ► So there were three thoughts there, A, the thought that we didn't get enough is when

00:45:33 ◼   ► we were young and we always wanted more, and ending up on the thought that the television

00:45:45 ◼   ► is a place that we can flesh that out.

00:45:48 ◼   ► And in the middle, there is the notion that Marvel succeeded because it had a lot of room

00:45:54 ◼   ► to play with this stuff and these characters in what has become a safe space.

00:46:01 ◼   ► You can write comics and Spider-Man can turn into a living spider and do all kinds of horrible,

00:46:09 ◼   ► weird and insane stuff.

00:46:11 ◼   ► And you can even get a stinker movie.

00:46:12 ◼   ► You get a Thor 2 or something.

00:46:14 ◼   ► It's not a big deal, right?

00:46:16 ◼   ► Because there were so many more of them.

00:46:19 ◼   ► And in that way, it is the finite expression of Star Wars that sort of makes a difference,

00:46:30 ◼   ► right?

00:46:31 ◼   ► I wanted more Star Wars when I was young, and I'm not sure that giving people what

00:46:40 ◼   ► they want is always the best notion of making the most creative thing.

00:46:48 ◼   ► And I sort of feared that this notion that, you know, when I was young, if they just kept

00:46:53 ◼   ► pumping out Star Wars, I'd feel awesome.

00:46:56 ◼   ► Would it mean the same?

00:46:58 ◼   ► I mean, that's what I said.

00:47:01 ◼   ► It obviously looms large in our memory because there was so little of it and because what

00:47:04 ◼   ► we had was so good.

00:47:06 ◼   ► That's true.

00:47:07 ◼   ► Because we made that up, right?

00:47:08 ◼   ► Like, I don't know about you, but I remember having arguments about, like, could yoga beat

00:47:12 ◼   ► yoga?

00:47:14 ◼   ► Could Yoda beat the Emperor?

00:47:17 ◼   ► And my whole notion was like, Yoda would never fight the Emperor.

00:47:21 ◼   ► It wouldn't happen.

00:47:22 ◼   ► He's beyond.

00:47:24 ◼   ► He's just, he doesn't fight.

00:47:26 ◼   ► He certainly doesn't light up a lightsaber and pinball all over the place.

00:47:30 ◼   ► Like, that's beneath him.

00:47:31 ◼   ► He just doesn't do that.

00:47:33 ◼   ► But part of the reason that prequels are so painful is it was this giant gap and the weight

00:47:37 ◼   ► that was put on them.

00:47:38 ◼   ► And instead, I mean, I was never into the EU, but during that whole time, the expanded

00:47:43 ◼   ► universe was a thing and people were writing novels and like, there was this whole world

00:47:47 ◼   ► spinning out after Return of the Jedi.

00:47:48 ◼   ► It's just that it wasn't a world that I participated in.

00:47:51 ◼   ► So Star Wars did have its moment to like, go in a million different directions.

00:47:56 ◼   ► And the reason I say I wanted more Star Wars, and I mostly mean on, you know, the movie

00:48:00 ◼   ► screen or on television screen, as opposed to books, is because Star Wars as a universe,

00:48:06 ◼   ► as a world, can support, you know, so many different stories.

00:48:11 ◼   ► Like so clearly, it's not like we were going to burn it out.

00:48:13 ◼   ► In the same way that superheroes is such an open ended thing that you can support tons

00:48:16 ◼   ► and tons of heroes.

00:48:18 ◼   ► It didn't need to be weighted so heavily with like this expectation of just there's one

00:48:23 ◼   ► story we can tell.

00:48:24 ◼   ► Like there's, you know, there were so many stories you could tell in the Star Wars universe

00:48:27 ◼   ► and the expanded universe told a lot of them.

00:48:30 ◼   ► But we didn't get to see any of them in movies or on television.

00:48:33 ◼   ► That's what I would like more of, even if some of it was kind of stinky.

00:48:36 ◼   ► I mean, we got the Ewok adventure, we got the Hollywood special, we got that other Ewok

00:48:40 ◼   ► movie, and just wasn't enough.

00:48:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:44 ◼   ► And even the books were like...

00:48:46 ◼   ► So I read the Thrawn trilogy and then a few others and I'm like, this is just not...

00:48:50 ◼   ► It's just not.

00:48:53 ◼   ► It's just not.

00:48:54 ◼   ► I read the first one and it was like, and I did finish it and it was like, man, this

00:48:58 ◼   ► is bad.

00:48:59 ◼   ► Right.

00:49:00 ◼   ► And I just put it aside.

00:49:01 ◼   ► I mean, if you wanted more Star Wars, this is the only places you were getting it, right?

00:49:03 ◼   ► I know, but do I want Star Wars at the cost of it being bad?

00:49:08 ◼   ► And not that those books about it were...

00:49:11 ◼   ► And now the EU was kicked out of Canada and now it's being mined.

00:49:15 ◼   ► For properties to put back into Canada.

00:49:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

00:49:20 ◼   ► But the providence of where good ideas from is less interesting than like, do I want to

00:49:24 ◼   ► sit through this?

00:49:25 ◼   ► And I did...

00:49:26 ◼   ► I feel like the universe, like the Star Trek universe, like these are worlds that can support

00:49:31 ◼   ► so many different stories.

00:49:33 ◼   ► Like you literally got a whole galaxy.

00:49:35 ◼   ► Like I do 100%.

00:49:36 ◼   ► This is a conversation I had with Matt Drance and Rene Richard.

00:49:41 ◼   ► I forget who else was it.

00:49:42 ◼   ► Maybe Belton.

00:49:43 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:49:45 ◼   ► Never heard of him.

00:49:46 ◼   ► Never heard of him.

00:49:47 ◼   ► Years ago.

00:49:49 ◼   ► When Disney bought the rights to Star Wars, Drance was making the point, they're like,

00:49:57 ◼   ► you know what?

00:49:58 ◼   ► Star Wars is a big world.

00:49:59 ◼   ► And my initial reaction was like, you know what?

00:50:03 ◼   ► Star Wars exists to tell the story of Luke Skywalker in those three movies.

00:50:08 ◼   ► It's got a beginning and an arc and an end, and we should leave it at that.

00:50:12 ◼   ► I believe, I completely agree that the universe is an exciting and an enticing premise.

00:50:21 ◼   ► And there's a lot there.

00:50:23 ◼   ► But it exists to tell the stories and it can't be a coherent whole without those stories

00:50:29 ◼   ► holding it together.

00:50:32 ◼   ► I would compare it to...

00:50:33 ◼   ► Given that, where do we feel, given the way the Mandalorian has gone?

00:50:37 ◼   ► Well, here's my comparison, is to George Lucas's good personal friend Francis Ford Coppola

00:50:43 ◼   ► with the Godfather movies.

00:50:46 ◼   ► And obviously, let's just face it, I think I bring it up every time we do one of these

00:50:50 ◼   ► Star Wars spectaculars.

00:50:51 ◼   ► These are kids movies.

00:50:54 ◼   ► And a lot of this grown men arguing about Star Wars stuff, often you can pop a bubble

00:51:00 ◼   ► by just saying, remember, these are for kids.

00:51:02 ◼   ► And there's a reason we do this around Christmas and they come out around Christmas.

00:51:06 ◼   ► It is a Christmas present to all of us.

00:51:10 ◼   ► The original trilogy was for everybody, as Wave would say of Pixar movies.

00:51:14 ◼   ► They're not for kids.

00:51:15 ◼   ► They're for everybody.

00:51:16 ◼   ► But that's part of what made the original Star Wars movie.

00:51:23 ◼   ► So honestly, I don't know how else to say it other than a sort of religious experience

00:51:29 ◼   ► for me and my friends growing up.

00:51:32 ◼   ► And we talked about it the way that people of generations past would talk about their

00:51:37 ◼   ► actual religion.

00:51:39 ◼   ► But the thing that made it so fantastic to me was that it was obviously made so seriously.

00:51:46 ◼   ► The story wasn't serious.

00:51:48 ◼   ► The dialogue famously, as Harrison Ford said to George Lucas, George, you can't say this

00:51:55 ◼   ► shit.

00:51:56 ◼   ► I love that guy.

00:51:57 ◼   ► I'd be so close, old man.

00:52:01 ◼   ► But the production value.

00:52:02 ◼   ► You can't write this shit.

00:52:03 ◼   ► You can't say it.

00:52:04 ◼   ► You can write it.

00:52:05 ◼   ► Getting closer, getting warmer.

00:52:06 ◼   ► What was it?

00:52:07 ◼   ► All right, correct.

00:52:08 ◼   ► George, you can write this shit, but you can't say it.

00:52:09 ◼   ► That's my guess as the third old man.

00:52:11 ◼   ► All right.

00:52:12 ◼   ► That sounds right.

00:52:13 ◼   ► And it also, that sounds better.

00:52:16 ◼   ► So we'll let that stand.

00:52:17 ◼   ► But so much work went into it and it was so palpable, right?

00:52:22 ◼   ► The famous opening shot right away, just boom.

00:52:26 ◼   ► Seriously, maybe, arguably the best opening shot of any movie ever made.

00:52:32 ◼   ► And it just immediately emphasized this is going to look real.

00:52:36 ◼   ► This looks like a massive kilometers long starship chasing a little guy.

00:52:43 ◼   ► And you could just tell by the architecture of the ships, even though they didn't really

00:52:47 ◼   ► cheat, who was the good guy, who was the bad guy.

00:52:53 ◼   ► Just the amount of design, right?

00:52:55 ◼   ► And maybe if there's anything I've been obsessed with my entire life, it's design.

00:53:00 ◼   ► Like the amount of design that went into this movie for kids.

00:53:04 ◼   ► Whereas almost all this stuff that was made for kids when I grew up was clearly garbage.

00:53:10 ◼   ► Just like, "Blah, this is terrible."

00:53:12 ◼   ► Like even Disney started making animated movies where they just cheaped out on the frame rate

00:53:18 ◼   ► and the style.

00:53:20 ◼   ► And it's like 101 Dalmatians and some of those movies of that era, they weren't even well

00:53:26 ◼   ► animated.

00:53:27 ◼   ► It was like, "Ah, it's just for kids.

00:53:29 ◼   ► Why spend all the money to do it right?"

00:53:32 ◼   ► Star Wars had this attitude that kids deserve the highest possible production values and

00:53:39 ◼   ► special effects and articulation of the models and just developing this whole world.

00:53:47 ◼   ► I appreciated that so much.

00:53:49 ◼   ► The Godfather sort of had that for gangster movies.

00:53:51 ◼   ► Here's this whole world that was brought.

00:53:54 ◼   ► It was so visceral.

00:53:55 ◼   ► People still talk about it to this day.

00:53:57 ◼   ► Like if in some alternate universe, George Lucas had just locked the box after 1983 and

00:54:05 ◼   ► there had never been another Star Wars movie or TV show and he still just had the rights

00:54:11 ◼   ► the way that Coppola has to the Godfather.

00:54:14 ◼   ► We would still be talking.

00:54:15 ◼   ► We wouldn't be having the Star Wars Holiday Spectacular right now every year, but we would

00:54:19 ◼   ► still talk about those three Star Wars movies the way people talk about the Godfather movies.

00:54:25 ◼   ► And it would still be a thing.

00:54:26 ◼   ► And that's sort of what I wanted.

00:54:28 ◼   ► As a young kid, I certainly wasn't allowed.

00:54:32 ◼   ► I wasn't allowed and I had no interest in watching the Godfather movies at that age.

00:54:38 ◼   ► But I treated the Star Wars movies that way.

00:54:42 ◼   ► And even as a ten-year-old sort of had feelings about the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi that

00:54:48 ◼   ► are sort of like people's comments on the Godfather Part 3, which is now.

00:54:54 ◼   ► And again, we could do a whole show on the similarities.

00:54:57 ◼   ► The way that Coppola keeps going back to the Godfather movies, the way Lucas couldn't keep

00:55:00 ◼   ► his goddamn hands off the Star Wars movies.

00:55:03 ◼   ► Well, here's where they diverged though.

00:55:06 ◼   ► You mentioned the gangster movies.

00:55:07 ◼   ► Organized crime movies and gangster movies obviously existed before the Godfather.

00:55:10 ◼   ► The Godfather put a stake in the ground and said, "No, no, this is how you do this."

00:55:15 ◼   ► But the universe, like the universe of Italian-American organized crime was not a universe created

00:55:20 ◼   ► by Francis Ford Coppola.

00:55:21 ◼   ► It was like a real world thing, right?

00:55:23 ◼   ► So if he'd just lock the box on the Godfather trilogy, he can't contain the universe because

00:55:30 ◼   ► organized crime is a thing.

00:55:31 ◼   ► And here's what we got.

00:55:33 ◼   ► Because that's not his box to lock up, he's got those characters in that story, but the

00:55:36 ◼   ► setting continues to exist.

00:55:38 ◼   ► Then you get Goodfellas, which is kind of like saying, "Well, Star Wars was locked up,

00:55:43 ◼   ► but the Star Wars universe is available for someone else to pick up the ball and say,

00:55:47 ◼   ► 'I can make a gangster movie.

00:55:49 ◼   ► I can make a Star Wars movie.'"

00:55:51 ◼   ► And then they make Goodfellas.

00:55:52 ◼   ► And Goodfellas is amazing, and I would not want to live in a world without it.

00:55:55 ◼   ► And I feel like not allowing other people to make things in the Star Wars universe would

00:55:59 ◼   ► be like not allowing anyone to make any more gangster movies after the Godfather Part II.

00:56:04 ◼   ► I think that last is a jump.

00:56:09 ◼   ► I do.

00:56:11 ◼   ► I'm not sure I disagree with you, but I'm not sure that I can totally get on board with

00:56:17 ◼   ► that either.

00:56:18 ◼   ► Yeah, because where do you put all the Battlestar Galacticas and the...

00:56:20 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:21 ◼   ► I love Battlestar Galactica.

00:56:22 ◼   ► Yeah, me too.

00:56:23 ◼   ► But it wasn't in the Star Wars universe.

00:56:25 ◼   ► No, but I mean, it exists because it was pushed out of the Star Wars universe, right?

00:56:30 ◼   ► And I don't know if you noticed, but the Mandalorian has a bunch of Cylons coming and picking up

00:56:35 ◼   ► baby users.

00:56:36 ◼   ► Those aren't Cylons, come on.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Oh, come on.

00:56:38 ◼   ► Those are from Dark Forces.

00:56:39 ◼   ► We'll get there.

00:56:40 ◼   ► We're only an hour in, okay?

00:56:43 ◼   ► Come on.

00:56:45 ◼   ► But I agree and I disagree.

00:56:48 ◼   ► I kind of see it where Star Wars carved out this weird genre that wasn't just space opera

00:56:55 ◼   ► shoot them up with laser guns and spaceships, but it was a very specific version of it, right?

00:57:02 ◼   ► Like with lightsabers.

00:57:03 ◼   ► Yeah, and they made a universe.

00:57:04 ◼   ► The Star Wars universe is distinct from the Buck Rogers universe or the Battlestar Galactica

00:57:09 ◼   ► universe, even though they both look like they're space and have ILM spaceships.

00:57:12 ◼   ► Because it's this weird meld of space opera that is a lot like on the surface, and if

00:57:19 ◼   ► you don't really pay attention, it is a lot like Battlestar Galactica or any of these

00:57:23 ◼   ► other things.

00:57:24 ◼   ► It's the same ILM people made this ships and biles like rock thing.

00:57:27 ◼   ► That's why it looks so similar.

00:57:28 ◼   ► So wait, specifically the Galactica thing I meant is the dark troopers look like Cylons.

00:57:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

00:57:35 ◼   ► I know.

00:57:36 ◼   ► I know.

00:57:37 ◼   ► I know.

00:57:38 ◼   ► I just want to delineate that for people who may think that I'm painting with a very

00:57:43 ◼   ► broad brush.

00:57:44 ◼   ► Now that we're talking about the Godfather and Star Wars, it occurs to me like, you know,

00:57:47 ◼   ► the thing we always talk about with Star Wars, you know, what defines the Star Wars universe?

00:57:50 ◼   ► It was like the dirty used future, right?

00:57:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:54 ◼   ► And you know, the first Star Wars movie came out in the 70s.

00:57:58 ◼   ► Everything on screen in the 70s was dirty.

00:58:00 ◼   ► It was like dirty New York City.

00:58:03 ◼   ► Like the Godfather, Taxi Driver.

00:58:07 ◼   ► Just like the Hulk.

00:58:08 ◼   ► But I think that's the brilliance of it, right?

00:58:10 ◼   ► It was like time, but it was a space movie with film grain and dirt from the 70s.

00:58:15 ◼   ► No, because it's not an affectation.

00:58:19 ◼   ► It's not.

00:58:20 ◼   ► It was authentically.

00:58:21 ◼   ► It came by it honestly.

00:58:22 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:58:23 ◼   ► It came by it honestly.

00:58:25 ◼   ► He's hanging out with a bunch of really nitty-gritty film people who did a lot of really nitty-gritty

00:58:31 ◼   ► stuff.

00:58:32 ◼   ► But he's also the guy who made American Graffiti, so it ends up being that dirty 70s, but with

00:58:36 ◼   ► a plucky space hero blonde porn boy from Tatooine.

00:58:40 ◼   ► But there's the insight.

00:58:41 ◼   ► That's what we should be celebrating.

00:58:42 ◼   ► It's like, well, what if I take the future and do it the same way?

00:58:47 ◼   ► What if I treat the future as human and humanely as I treat the current?

00:58:54 ◼   ► And what if I talk about the future Nazis as an analog?

00:58:59 ◼   ► Why don't I do the classic sci-fi thing, which is talk about something that's horrific and

00:59:04 ◼   ► horrible and despicable and project them in a light that is apropos for the time and maybe

00:59:11 ◼   ► a little bit advanced in that I'm going to couch them in laser beams?

00:59:16 ◼   ► And that is the value of...

00:59:20 ◼   ► That's why THX 1138 was a nice draft and Star Wars worked.

00:59:28 ◼   ► And I think it worked because it played on that same notion and it dragged the future

00:59:33 ◼   ► down to Earth.

00:59:35 ◼   ► And it made sci-fi a thing that felt real.

00:59:42 ◼   ► You could reach out and touch a droid.

00:59:44 ◼   ► You could touch O2D2.

00:59:46 ◼   ► You could touch certainly the Millennium Falcon.

00:59:50 ◼   ► Chewbacca was your pet dog.

00:59:52 ◼   ► You could do this.

00:59:54 ◼   ► And yet it was divorced enough from reality to help land the narrative, the points, the

01:00:07 ◼   ► perspective that it wanted to convey.

01:00:08 ◼   ► Now sure, Nazis are bad.

01:00:12 ◼   ► I hope everybody got that from Star Wars.

01:00:14 ◼   ► I'm not sure they did.

01:00:15 ◼   ► Based on the internet, apparently not everybody.

01:00:17 ◼   ► Right, yeah.

01:00:18 ◼   ► I know.

01:00:19 ◼   ► But I mean, that was the point, right?

01:00:21 ◼   ► And I liked it and I admire it.

01:00:23 ◼   ► And I think that's why it is so... it still sticks with us so much, like that lived-in

01:00:30 ◼   ► universe.

01:00:32 ◼   ► Lived-in is a word that means that we can inhabit it.

01:00:36 ◼   ► I think basically...

01:00:39 ◼   ► I'm convinced.

01:00:40 ◼   ► The more we talk about it, I'm convinced that there were only two right ways to handle this.

01:00:45 ◼   ► One would have been that there was...

01:00:47 ◼   ► The good way and the wrong way.

01:00:48 ◼   ► That's gonna work out right, man.

01:00:50 ◼   ► If anything Star Wars has taught us, there's light and bad and everything else.

01:00:54 ◼   ► For Lucas to have made one trilogy, Star Wars, Empire, Return of the Jedi, I thought it was

01:01:02 ◼   ► so awesome.

01:01:03 ◼   ► It was so freaking great as a kid when they renumbered them and Empire, instead of being

01:01:08 ◼   ► Star Wars 2, was Episode 5.

01:01:11 ◼   ► And it just hinted at this greater story.

01:01:13 ◼   ► But what if he'd never gone back?

01:01:15 ◼   ► In some ways, there's an ineffable awesomeness to the fact that if the only three Star Wars

01:01:24 ◼   ► pieces that ever existed were Episodes 4, 5, and 6, and that was it.

01:01:30 ◼   ► Or if you're going to start making more, I think the way that Disney is handling it now

01:01:37 ◼   ► is the way to do it, and to give people enough Star Wars so that if a truly bad movie comes

01:01:45 ◼   ► out like Solo.

01:01:46 ◼   ► Would you guys watch that?

01:01:49 ◼   ► I would not call Solo a truly bad movie.

01:01:51 ◼   ► We differ there very strongly.

01:01:53 ◼   ► Okay.

01:01:54 ◼   ► Well, I thought it was horrible.

01:01:55 ◼   ► I thought it was...

01:01:56 ◼   ► I'm in the middle.

01:01:57 ◼   ► Did you see The Rise of Skywalker?

01:01:58 ◼   ► Come on.

01:01:59 ◼   ► Ooh, I...

01:02:00 ◼   ► Okay.

01:02:01 ◼   ► I think Solo's...

01:02:02 ◼   ► I think The Rise of Skywalker versus Solo.

01:02:05 ◼   ► Which one is better?

01:02:06 ◼   ► Solo.

01:02:07 ◼   ► Solo.

01:02:08 ◼   ► I would rather watch The Rise of Skywalker again.

01:02:09 ◼   ► Oh my goodness.

01:02:10 ◼   ► You need to watch Solo again.

01:02:11 ◼   ► I think your memory is warped.

01:02:13 ◼   ► I remain a big fan of The Last Jedi.

01:02:17 ◼   ► If anything, I've grown more fond of it over the years.

01:02:20 ◼   ► Well, here's my problem with these things, and to compare them with the Marvel Cinematic

01:02:25 ◼   ► Universe.

01:02:26 ◼   ► My least favorite Marvel movies, and I think that the whole Marvel thing has been great.

01:02:30 ◼   ► I love these movies.

01:02:33 ◼   ► Even the ones that I'm not the biggest... that I don't love the most, I still enjoy watching

01:02:38 ◼   ► them all.

01:02:39 ◼   ► I love the way they string together.

01:02:41 ◼   ► The ones that I like the least are the Avenger movies, and especially the last few with the

01:02:46 ◼   ► big guy with the magic rings.

01:02:48 ◼   ► Endgame, Infinite One, the guy with the big...

01:02:51 ◼   ► That's awesome, man.

01:02:52 ◼   ► It's Thanos.

01:02:53 ◼   ► Because it's like they're trying to make this thing that's even bigger than a two-hour blockbuster

01:02:59 ◼   ► movie, right?

01:03:00 ◼   ► Making this... what's even bigger than just regular old Captain America, like the first

01:03:08 ◼   ► Captain America movie, which was a swell movie and just not my favorite.

01:03:13 ◼   ► I like the Iron Man movies better.

01:03:15 ◼   ► The Iron Man ones were my sweet spot.

01:03:18 ◼   ► But Captain America was never my favorite hero either, but they played him straight.

01:03:23 ◼   ► They did a good job.

01:03:24 ◼   ► But they tell a story, and it's sort of a movie the way you think of a movie, whereas

01:03:28 ◼   ► the Avenger ones are... and I know this gets tossed about a lot, like the Scorsese line

01:03:35 ◼   ► about all of these movies, about them, that they're like theme park attractions or something.

01:03:40 ◼   ► But the Avenger movies, like the Endgame ones, they really are like two-and-a-half-hour nonstop

01:03:47 ◼   ► roller coaster rides, where it's just this nonstop blur, and there's so many... you know,

01:03:54 ◼   ► even... you could say, "Well, wow, two-and-a-half hours is a long time for a movie or a long

01:03:58 ◼   ► time for a podcast."

01:03:59 ◼   ► But it's like they were trying to cram in what easily seemed like it could be like a

01:04:05 ◼   ► season of 12-hour-long episodes of a show into two hours, right?

01:04:13 ◼   ► And like at a pace that makes it feel like a two-and-a-half-hour trailer for something

01:04:19 ◼   ► even bigger, where you get to fill in all these gaps.

01:04:22 ◼   ► And then inevitably, everybody's... there's 40 different people punching each other all

01:04:28 ◼   ► at the same time, and that's it.

01:04:30 ◼   ► And it's like that's just... there's only so much of that I can take.

01:04:34 ◼   ► And to me, the Rise of Skywalker had a feel of that, where it's just... they're just mashing

01:04:42 ◼   ► things together, and all of a sudden they're here, and all of a sudden they're there, and

01:04:46 ◼   ► all of a sudden the Emperor's back, and there you are.

01:04:51 ◼   ► If you want a simple story with a clear character and arc and a series of events that culminates

01:04:58 ◼   ► in a satisfying way, you should check out Solo.

01:05:00 ◼   ► Ah, no, terrible.

01:05:01 ◼   ► Okay, okay, let's just let Solo go.

01:05:04 ◼   ► Let's let it go.

01:05:06 ◼   ► We didn't convene to discuss that.

01:05:09 ◼   ► Interestingly, I, in a way, think you're right.

01:05:15 ◼   ► Stelt was fighting with the MCU, in terms of the grandiose-ness.

01:05:25 ◼   ► I think the original plan was very different from the MCU, but that's the plan that they

01:05:29 ◼   ► abandoned.

01:05:30 ◼   ► The original plan of, "We're going to have a trilogy with standalone movies in between,"

01:05:34 ◼   ► that's nothing like the MCU.

01:05:36 ◼   ► The MCU was, "We're going to have 12 movies, and they're all going to be loosely connected,

01:05:40 ◼   ► and they're going to be all over the map, and then we're going to have sequels to some

01:05:43 ◼   ► of the movies within those 12, and those are connected more tightly."

01:05:45 ◼   ► That's totally different.

01:05:47 ◼   ► Star Wars is like, "Look, we're the trilogy company.

01:05:48 ◼   ► We do trilogy.

01:05:49 ◼   ► We did one good trilogy, we did a crappy trilogy, we're going to try to do another good one,

01:05:52 ◼   ► and we'll have these standalones in between."

01:05:54 ◼   ► And I feel like they just kind of lost their nerve.

01:05:57 ◼   ► Solo's incredible failure in the market scared the hell out of them, and everyone just ran

01:06:01 ◼   ► for the hills.

01:06:02 ◼   ► And now the new strategy is, "We could try doing TV shows," which I think the previous

01:06:07 ◼   ► strategy could have worked.

01:06:09 ◼   ► It would be like Marvel giving up after Thor 2 and saying, "We've got to scrap this whole

01:06:12 ◼   ► plan.

01:06:13 ◼   ► There's no way we're going to make 12 movies that culminated in a big Avengers movie.

01:06:16 ◼   ► That's just not going to happen.

01:06:17 ◼   ► Give up on it."

01:06:18 ◼   ► So I think Disney lost its nerve.

01:06:20 ◼   ► But fine, whatever.

01:06:21 ◼   ► They scrapped that plan, and they're on to a new plan, which is umpteen TV shows.

01:06:24 ◼   ► And I'm hoping this will keep the scaredy-cats from bailing, because it's like, "Ah, you

01:06:28 ◼   ► make a bad TV show, you make a bad episode of a TV show."

01:06:31 ◼   ► You keep trying.

01:06:32 ◼   ► It's lower stakes.

01:06:33 ◼   ► We've got the streaming service.

01:06:34 ◼   ► They cost less money.

01:06:36 ◼   ► You can have a satisfying conclusion to an eight-episode series.

01:06:42 ◼   ► It's easier than, like John just said, to try to cram the culmination of 12 other movies

01:06:48 ◼   ► into a single movie.

01:06:49 ◼   ► You can have a 12-episode season and have a satisfying season finale.

01:06:54 ◼   ► And then you can have a season after that.

01:06:57 ◼   ► TV takes the pressure off and gives you more room to breathe and relax.

01:07:01 ◼   ► Now, if Mandalorian had turned out to be a dud in the market, what are they going to

01:07:05 ◼   ► do?

01:07:06 ◼   ► Scrap that plan and come up with another one?

01:07:07 ◼   ► I feel like they need to get a little backbone at Disney and figure out what they can do

01:07:10 ◼   ► with this very valuable property.

01:07:12 ◼   ► Yeah, except they hit the end of the park with Mandalorian.

01:07:17 ◼   ► And to John's point, maybe, since he's a bit of a degenerate gambler—

01:07:25 ◼   ► I don't gamble.

01:07:27 ◼   ► Big—yeah, I'm sorry.

01:07:29 ◼   ► Sorry.

01:07:30 ◼   ► I invest in sports projections.

01:07:34 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

01:07:35 ◼   ► I've been right next to you when you didn't gamble.

01:07:40 ◼   ► Disney is moving, and it feels like if Disney is on the balls of their feet playing volleyball

01:07:53 ◼   ► or winter ale and tennis, for the sake of Syracuse, they're ready to move quickly.

01:07:59 ◼   ► Have they switched to TV rather than movies?

01:08:05 ◼   ► And if so, are they making smaller bets rather than just trying to smash it into the ground

01:08:13 ◼   ► and score some easy points?

01:08:15 ◼   ► Are they understanding that, "Okay, we've got to play in a media environment that maybe

01:08:21 ◼   ► we didn't plan before because we were Star Wars, and now we're going to have to do these

01:08:24 ◼   ► shows that are frankly as good as Game of Thrones, I think, at least in terms of getting

01:08:31 ◼   ► attention and production quality?"

01:08:35 ◼   ► Is that the plan?

01:08:36 ◼   ► But slightly more kid-friendly.

01:08:37 ◼   ► I mean, but they're still making movies.

01:08:39 ◼   ► Oh, slightly more?

01:08:40 ◼   ► Slightly more?

01:08:41 ◼   ► Do you know what?

01:08:43 ◼   ► I didn't watch Game of Thrones for the first year and a half because the very first episode

01:08:47 ◼   ► saw a child thrown out of a window, incest, prostitutes having sex in a barn.

01:08:59 ◼   ► It was not good.

01:09:00 ◼   ► It was like, "Hey, how much HBO can we stick into one hour?

01:09:05 ◼   ► We've got all of the HBO."

01:09:06 ◼   ► And I felt insulted by it.

01:09:08 ◼   ► I'm like, "Look, I don't know."

01:09:09 ◼   ► On the Thrones credit, they didn't just put that in the first episode to get people into

01:09:13 ◼   ► the series.

01:09:14 ◼   ► It was there the whole time.

01:09:15 ◼   ► I know.

01:09:16 ◼   ► They kept rolling with it.

01:09:17 ◼   ► And I went back, like our friend Chris Parrish was like, "No, you've just got to stick to

01:09:21 ◼   ► it."

01:09:22 ◼   ► And I did, and it was better.

01:09:24 ◼   ► But I still never got over that.

01:09:26 ◼   ► Like, "Okay, look, you're definitely trying to HBO the crap out of me."

01:09:30 ◼   ► But is The Mandalorian--I don't even know.

01:09:36 ◼   ► They're definitely not trying to HBO the crap out of you.

01:09:39 ◼   ► They're defining what Disney+ is, and I like it so far.

01:09:44 ◼   ► Is that a pivot?

01:09:47 ◼   ► Is that an abdication of like, "Look, we can't make it on the big screen in trilogies anymore

01:09:52 ◼   ► because that world has passed"?

01:09:54 ◼   ► No, I think they're just rebooting the movie thing.

01:09:57 ◼   ► But they're taking a long break to rethink the movie thing.

01:10:00 ◼   ► And in the meantime, you can't let the stuff just sit there.

01:10:03 ◼   ► Which is the benefit of not having it owned by one person who's going to get burned out

01:10:06 ◼   ► and has to have a good thing for 16 years, right?

01:10:08 ◼   ► It's a whole company there.

01:10:10 ◼   ► Plenty of creative people who are willing to do stuff in this area.

01:10:12 ◼   ► So while the movie stuff is on hiatus and being sorted out--because how many different

01:10:18 ◼   ► movie rumors have we heard?

01:10:19 ◼   ► Speaking of Game of Thrones, the Game of Thrones guys were going to do a trilogy, someone else

01:10:22 ◼   ► was going to get a trilogy, Ryan Johnson was going to get a trilogy, and like, who knows

01:10:25 ◼   ► what's happening now?

01:10:26 ◼   ► The movie stuff is like, we're rethinking it.

01:10:28 ◼   ► But in the meantime, here's a bunch of TV series, some of which are properties that

01:10:33 ◼   ► were previously rumored to be movies.

01:10:36 ◼   ► And we can do the TV stuff now, because it's lower stakes.

01:10:40 ◼   ► It's cheaper, you can put them out incrementally, it's a good fit for our current COVID times

01:10:45 ◼   ► rather than movies.

01:10:46 ◼   ► And so this is all--it's a strategy shift.

01:10:49 ◼   ► And like I said, I don't think they should have bailed on the movie one, they just did

01:10:53 ◼   ► it badly, but you shouldn't just give up after one mistake.

01:10:56 ◼   ► But it turned out to be advantageous, because Marvel having a bunch of movies in the can

01:11:01 ◼   ► is really not helping them right now.

01:11:02 ◼   ► Like that Black Widow movie was done like a year ago, and they're still just holding

01:11:05 ◼   ► on to it, right?

01:11:06 ◼   ► So, they might have kind of lucked out.

01:11:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I'd feel bad for Scarlett Johansson if she wasn't Scarlett Johansson.

01:11:12 ◼   ► Like not that she's wrong in any way, but it's like, come on, she's fine.

01:11:15 ◼   ► It's not a big deal.

01:11:17 ◼   ► But yeah, that's been in the bank for like, what, a year and a half?

01:11:20 ◼   ► Like it feels like a long time.

01:11:22 ◼   ► It's a good thing that we know people who worked really hard to get that thing finished

01:11:25 ◼   ► on time.

01:11:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:11:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:11:28 ◼   ► You don't know.

01:11:29 ◼   ► Hello.

01:11:30 ◼   ► I like it, and I feel like one of the things that The Mandalorian is helping to sort of

01:11:37 ◼   ► define is, what does it mean to be a show?

01:11:41 ◼   ► You know, and I forget what Kottke has called them, but you know, like super movies or mega

01:11:48 ◼   ► movies or something like that.

01:11:50 ◼   ► But to consider a show like The Sopranos, you can't say that it's less of an artistic achievement

01:12:00 ◼   ► or has lower artistic goals than a motion picture.

01:12:06 ◼   ► It's of that quality, and there's so many shows that have come out in the years since

01:12:10 ◼   ► that are similar.

01:12:12 ◼   ► And if anything, are more adult story driven, more like the character development and plot

01:12:21 ◼   ► development of something meant for adults as opposed to motion pictures, theatrical

01:12:28 ◼   ► motion pictures, which have really, but they have.

01:12:31 ◼   ► They've moved more towards a theme park style attraction level of, and it's partly the international

01:12:38 ◼   ► market that you can't have.

01:12:40 ◼   ► It depends on the movie.

01:12:41 ◼   ► You're getting to my thesis statement, though.

01:12:44 ◼   ► I came into this with a thesis statement about The Mandalorian, and you just came very close

01:12:48 ◼   ► to it.

01:12:49 ◼   ► So my statement, because I thought, silly me, I thought we were going to talk about

01:12:52 ◼   ► season two with The Mandalorian in mind.

01:12:56 ◼   ► We'll probably talk about season two.

01:12:57 ◼   ► Let me have something to say about season one.

01:12:58 ◼   ► Here's my thought on that, right?

01:13:02 ◼   ► Television — Jon just talked about it — television in recent years, like there is a dividing

01:13:07 ◼   ► line where the start of what we call prestige TV, Sopranos, those type of HBO shows that

01:13:12 ◼   ► were more sophisticated, more ambitious and artful than TV had been before.

01:13:19 ◼   ► We all know, it has all sorts of different names that we can, whether it was Sopranos

01:13:23 ◼   ► in your mind about that.

01:13:24 ◼   ► Golden Age of TV, Sopranos, The Wire, past 10, 15, 20 years.

01:13:28 ◼   ► Things you couldn't do on network television weren't as formulaic, were more sophisticated,

01:13:34 ◼   ► more adult views of human interactions, where characters did things and had emotions that

01:13:39 ◼   ► were not explicable at the most elementary level, where it's like, well, there's

01:13:45 ◼   ► a good guy and a bad guy, and he's mean, he's angry, and he's sad.

01:13:47 ◼   ► It's way more complicated than that.

01:13:49 ◼   ► I go back to The Sopranos because it's such a great example.

01:13:52 ◼   ► If you look at the — I mean, obviously there are cartoonish characters in The Sopranos,

01:13:55 ◼   ► but the main characters and their actions and emotions and situation is way more complicated

01:14:01 ◼   ► than a first level, a second level, a third level text, subtext is just much more sophisticated,

01:14:07 ◼   ► right?

01:14:08 ◼   ► So that is the big turn that television has taken in our lifetime.

01:14:13 ◼   ► Into that, we drop — now we're going to do Star Wars on TV.

01:14:17 ◼   ► One way they could have gone with Star Wars on TV is, let's make a sophisticated adult

01:14:25 ◼   ► version of Star Wars.

01:14:27 ◼   ► In some respects, the movies are like that.

01:14:28 ◼   ► I go back to The Force Awakens, which is a straightforward Star Wars story that hits

01:14:32 ◼   ► all the beats that you would expect, but it takes itself seriously and it tries to do

01:14:35 ◼   ► serious stuff in a way that you would expect from a movie, right?

01:14:40 ◼   ► But television, pre-the-golden age of TV, pre-Sopranos, pre-Prestige TV, didn't do

01:14:46 ◼   ► that.

01:14:47 ◼   ► If you had Star Wars on television, it's the Ewok adventure, which is less sophisticated

01:14:50 ◼   ► than the original trilogy.

01:14:52 ◼   ► It's simpler, it's sillier, it's more pat, it's for television, right?

01:14:57 ◼   ► But when they came to television with season one of The Mandalorian, I think they did something

01:15:02 ◼   ► interesting, which is they didn't make Star Wars on TV so it looks like Game of Thrones

01:15:07 ◼   ► or The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or any of that modern prestige TV.

01:15:14 ◼   ► What they did was they made a television show that held onto the — I don't know, not

01:15:22 ◼   ► the innocence, not the simplicity — they made a television show that had — this is

01:15:29 ◼   ► going to sound bad, it's not like I'm a trash can show, but I'm not — that was less sophisticated

01:15:34 ◼   ► than the adult fancy television shows on prestige TV.

01:15:38 ◼   ► It was structured more like a Western with a single silent character episode with not

01:15:42 ◼   ► a lot of dialogue, a very simple story, fairly straightforward motivation, hints at lore,

01:15:48 ◼   ► a slow pace, it wasn't a million characters, it wasn't like you couldn't figure out what

01:15:53 ◼   ► was motivating anybody, there was no deep angst or anguish that was constantly on screen,

01:15:59 ◼   ► everything was subtle, calm, simple, understandable, parsable, and in a way that I think, subconsciously

01:16:09 ◼   ► or not, made people feel comfortable with the show.

01:16:13 ◼   ► I mean, it was a show of its time and it was good for its time, as in, we wanted more Star

01:16:18 ◼   ► Wars, we didn't need it to be like the Avengers, we also didn't want it to be like Game of

01:16:23 ◼   ► Thrones or Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, we were ready — it was the right show at the

01:16:29 ◼   ► right time — we were ready for Star Wars, it looks familiar, but it's not going to overwhelm

01:16:34 ◼   ► you with 5,000 characters and tons of lore and a bunch of darkness and terrible gore

01:16:41 ◼   ► and violence and just — it was a breath of fresh air.

01:16:46 ◼   ► And I think they found — it depends on what you like, if you want something that's much

01:16:51 ◼   ► more sophisticated, The Mandalorian isn't it, The Mandalorian I think is as simple and

01:16:56 ◼   ► straightforward as the original Star Wars, it's less sophisticated than Empire Strikes

01:17:00 ◼   ► Back, right?

01:17:01 ◼   ► Oh, definitely.

01:17:02 ◼   ► So, I —

01:17:03 ◼   ► Anyway, that was my thesis, and I feel like season two is a good contrast to season one,

01:17:08 ◼   ► but I think that decision for this specific show — doesn't mean that's the whole TV

01:17:12 ◼   ► strategy — but that decision for this specific show was very smart and I think is part of

01:17:18 ◼   ► the reason The Mandalorian has had such a positive reaction.

01:17:21 ◼   ► I agree almost entirely, and I agree, I think, more than you suspect, because I think you

01:17:29 ◼   ► struggle with the word "sophistication" and you see it as being an antonym for simplicity,

01:17:36 ◼   ► and I don't think it is, I think The Mandalorian is a sophisticated show and it is expressed

01:17:43 ◼   ► through its simplicity.

01:17:45 ◼   ► But it's not sophisticated in terms of, like, adult character motivations.

01:17:50 ◼   ► Adult themes and emotions in relationship, I mean, it's the thinking of an apple angle

01:17:54 ◼   ► here that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, right?

01:17:57 ◼   ► Right, sure.

01:17:58 ◼   ► No, I'm not trying to — I'm not sitting in an all-white room here, but what I'm

01:18:02 ◼   ► suggesting is that you get the sense when watching The Mandalorian that they have considered

01:18:12 ◼   ► that and they have rejected it, rather than, "Hey, we're just doing a dumb show."

01:18:17 ◼   ► And the thing they did do —

01:18:19 ◼   ► And it's considered simplicity, rather than one that's just born out of, like, "Well,

01:18:26 ◼   ► we don't know how to do anything else."

01:18:28 ◼   ► Especially in season one, because in season one it's such a clear homage to the lone

01:18:33 ◼   ► silent gunman in a Western-type environment, which is itself a fairly sophisticated form.

01:18:39 ◼   ► It just strikes us in this modern era, like, really?

01:18:42 ◼   ► You're going to have, like, the first three episodes, the guy's going to have, like,

01:18:44 ◼   ► seven lines?

01:18:45 ◼   ► Like, is this the show?

01:18:47 ◼   ► And it's so shocking compared to, like, the television shows that are trying to be

01:18:51 ◼   ► The Avengers writ small, where it's got to be tons of characters in action, and, you

01:18:55 ◼   ► know, like, just think of all the superhero shows on TV, right?

01:18:58 ◼   ► I just watched Wonder Woman '84 twice in 24 hours.

01:19:02 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

01:19:03 ◼   ► Oh my God.

01:19:04 ◼   ► Well, I had to — well, I didn't have to.

01:19:06 ◼   ► I got to talk to Don Morin and John Moles about it today.

01:19:10 ◼   ► I'd rather watch the Star Wars.

01:19:12 ◼   ► I swear to God, I swear to God, 20/20 is the year of Pedro Pascal being a dad, and

01:19:18 ◼   ► it's weird.

01:19:19 ◼   ► He's good and bad, turns out.

01:19:23 ◼   ► The sophistication of The Mandalorian is that it appreciates the sophistication of everything

01:19:30 ◼   ► that's gone before it, and it adopts that the same way that Star Wars Episode IV adopted

01:19:39 ◼   ► the basics.

01:19:40 ◼   ► This was the '70s.

01:19:42 ◼   ► All of his contemporaries were doing really pretty deep work, and Lucas went off and made

01:19:49 ◼   ► a crazy space-carbo movie, and it worked.

01:19:53 ◼   ► And I think that's a little bit of the essence that's been brought forward into The Mandalorian

01:19:59 ◼   ► is that I don't think you can riff on things without knowing where you're coming from,

01:20:06 ◼   ► right?

01:20:07 ◼   ► That's the story of Zoltus of the Hills.

01:20:09 ◼   ► I do think that Mandalorian, especially season one, knew exactly what it was doing, and I

01:20:15 ◼   ► think season two has grown and is building towards something else.

01:20:19 ◼   ► Let me take a break.

01:20:20 ◼   ► We have one more sponsor, and it can coincide with the first spoiler break.

01:20:26 ◼   ► And we'll just say, after we come back from the sponsor break, there will almost certainly

01:20:31 ◼   ► be—I plan to spoil lots of stuff for The Mandalorian.

01:20:36 ◼   ► So up until now, I think somebody who is only Mandalorian-curious could have listened to

01:20:40 ◼   ► us, and perhaps we've given them a taste.

01:20:43 ◼   ► After this break, spoiler's free, and there's no need for any of us to preface them.

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01:22:27 ◼   ► I don't think that the first episode, I went back and watched it again.

01:22:31 ◼   ► They couldn't more, I don't know what they could have done in the first episode of The

01:22:35 ◼   ► Mandalorian to more dramatically say this is Western inspired than if they had put a

01:22:42 ◼   ► cowboy hat on top of The Mandalorian.

01:22:45 ◼   ► They needed one of those squid face guys.

01:22:49 ◼   ► The first scene is a lone gunslinger coming into a saloon, or I guess in the Star Wars

01:22:56 ◼   ► universe we call them cantines, cantinas.

01:23:00 ◼   ► He jangles as he walks like he has spurs.

01:23:05 ◼   ► It could not be more Western.

01:23:07 ◼   ► But part of what makes a Western a Western isn't that it takes place in the US West.

01:23:12 ◼   ► It's about the pace and letting things breathe.

01:23:17 ◼   ► And that to me is what's missing in the modern blockbuster movie.

01:23:20 ◼   ► And what makes The Mandalorian to me so delightful is that you could just have extended sequences

01:23:27 ◼   ► in a cockpit of a janky spaceship and instead of just cutting to, okay cut to where they're

01:23:34 ◼   ► flying to, just have a whole scene in the cockpit where characters talk and stuff happens

01:23:40 ◼   ► and you learn things and people say things and you breathe the moment.

01:23:45 ◼   ► Like you said about the first Star Wars, what a weird movie the first Star Wars is.

01:23:49 ◼   ► There's like a five, ten minute stretch where you just follow a trash can robot going around

01:23:54 ◼   ► the desert while weird little people in robes with red eyes try to steal them.

01:24:02 ◼   ► It's a very strangely paced movie that worked.

01:24:06 ◼   ► And The Mandalorian, it's not strangely paced, but it breathes.

01:24:11 ◼   ► And the other thing is it's, to put it in computer terms, it's single threaded, right?

01:24:19 ◼   ► And so one of the Star Wars-isms, the famous wipes that go between, oh this group's over

01:24:25 ◼   ► on Dagobah and this group of characters is on Bespin and we wipe as we cut between them.

01:24:31 ◼   ► It's single threaded.

01:24:32 ◼   ► You don't have to worry about that.

01:24:34 ◼   ► It's just here's The Mandalorian and while he's going after him, that's it.

01:24:40 ◼   ► One of the great tropes of a Star Wars movie is probably from Jedi, where it's the triple

01:24:48 ◼   ► assault, right?

01:24:49 ◼   ► Like, you've got land, space, and a Jedi trying to chop somebody up.

01:24:58 ◼   ► And well, that's basically it.

01:25:04 ◼   ► I think the best execution of that was honestly Rogue One.

01:25:08 ◼   ► I loved that space and ground combat was brilliant.

01:25:14 ◼   ► And The Mandalorian keeps it so tight.

01:25:20 ◼   ► When he's fighting one AT-ST, that's bananas.

01:25:25 ◼   ► It is mind-blowing.

01:25:26 ◼   ► Like, oh my god, this thing is just going to murder everybody.

01:25:29 ◼   ► It's a crazy thing.

01:25:30 ◼   ► There's a village here, basically unarmed people, and this is a tank.

01:25:34 ◼   ► How do we take out the tank?

01:25:36 ◼   ► That is the kind of stakes that I really appreciate from this show.

01:25:41 ◼   ► I really, really do love it.

01:25:44 ◼   ► Season One, I think, was amazing.

01:25:49 ◼   ► In some ways, I fear, and Suki said, I don't know how you feel about this, it felt like

01:25:55 ◼   ► a training series of levels for a video game that we're now just starting to play in Season

01:26:03 ◼   ► Two, where now you've got dark troopers and now you've leveled up a little bit.

01:26:08 ◼   ► Well, now you've got more money.

01:26:09 ◼   ► I mean...

01:26:10 ◼   ► You've got more money, you've got a jetpack, you've got stuff to play with.

01:26:14 ◼   ► Because The Mandalorian, this is the first go.

01:26:17 ◼   ► Is this going to work, are people going to like it, or is it going to land like Solo

01:26:20 ◼   ► did?

01:26:21 ◼   ► So you don't put all the money into it, you do the best you can, you do things on the

01:26:24 ◼   ► cheap if you can with the big volume.

01:26:26 ◼   ► Save money where you can, indulge the people who want to make actual physical models, because

01:26:32 ◼   ► whatever.

01:26:33 ◼   ► But in general, I'm not saying that that's why it was a simple story, it's clear that

01:26:37 ◼   ► they wanted to do what they did, but it's also clear that money was tight enough that

01:26:42 ◼   ► it had to be won at ST, because you couldn't have an army of them, right?

01:26:45 ◼   ► And Season Two, we've got a hit on our hands.

01:26:48 ◼   ► It's not like they really changed that, it was still single-threaded, each episode The

01:26:51 ◼   ► Mandalorian goes to a place, meets some people, does some things, it's not like there's suddenly

01:26:55 ◼   ► a hundred people in flight at the same time and armies clashing, and so it's still a very

01:27:00 ◼   ► personal and private story.

01:27:02 ◼   ► But in Season Two you can see, oh, there's a lot more ships.

01:27:05 ◼   ► Oh, they can have more than one action episode, right?

01:27:09 ◼   ► The action episodes, or the scenes of action within the episodes, became more populous

01:27:14 ◼   ► and frankly, better.

01:27:15 ◼   ► So in Season One you had him hanging off the side of the sandcrawler and everything, right?

01:27:20 ◼   ► In Season Two you had legit space battles, you had space ice spiders, you had assaults

01:27:27 ◼   ► on bases with all sorts of things.

01:27:29 ◼   ► Well, Asua Kitano, you would not have done that in Season One because I don't think you

01:27:33 ◼   ► had the knowledge, the institutional knowledge to pull that off well.

01:27:40 ◼   ► You need to know how the volume works, you need to know how everything works, you need

01:27:44 ◼   ► to know how to light those swords, you need to know how to do a bunch of stuff about it.

01:27:49 ◼   ► Did you guys watch the cartoons?

01:27:52 ◼   ► So I did, because I had, you know...

01:27:55 ◼   ► I think the last time we were on, Jon and I were imploring you to watch the old Samurai

01:27:58 ◼   ► Jack animated ones.

01:27:59 ◼   ► Oh, I did watch those too, and they were so much better than they sound.

01:28:06 ◼   ► But the problem I had all along with The Clone Wars was that every season, so many of the

01:28:14 ◼   ► episodes were just like...

01:28:17 ◼   ► And it's so weird because it's like, with a regular sitcom growing up, you know, like

01:28:23 ◼   ► an episode of Different Strokes, it's like you've got a cast, you've got a set, somebody

01:28:28 ◼   ► writes a script, and you know, they're not all going to be good.

01:28:32 ◼   ► I feel like that's the song to the Facts of Life.

01:28:35 ◼   ► But they all show, you've got cameras, you've got crew, and you film the episode, and there's

01:28:40 ◼   ► twenty-one episodes a season, and you know, a bunch of them are sort of phoned in, and

01:28:45 ◼   ► that's it.

01:28:46 ◼   ► But like with an animated series, everything has to be drawn.

01:28:49 ◼   ► It just seems like such a waste to...

01:28:53 ◼   ► It seems like there's clearly more work being put into making these episodes than the writing.

01:28:57 ◼   ► You know, there were just so many episodes that were like, why was that even a show?

01:29:01 ◼   ► That was terrible.

01:29:02 ◼   ► Well, I mean, so those things, The Clone Wars and Rebels and those type of shows, they were

01:29:07 ◼   ► not above doing, I thought you were going to say in terms of sitcoms, they were not

01:29:10 ◼   ► above doing the "and everything resets."

01:29:12 ◼   ► Yeah, yep.

01:29:13 ◼   ► They would do a monster of the week, they would do a land on a planet, have a local

01:29:17 ◼   ► problem, maybe hit one or two character notes for a development, but otherwise, we can mostly

01:29:22 ◼   ► forget that that episode happened and it moves on.

01:29:23 ◼   ► But the thing is, Clone Wars and Rebels didn't forget that those episodes happened, and very

01:29:27 ◼   ► often at the end of the season or even in a future season, "Hey, remember that planet

01:29:32 ◼   ► that you landed on when that thing happened?

01:29:33 ◼   ► Here's that person from that planet again."

01:29:35 ◼   ► Right?

01:29:36 ◼   ► So it wasn't as sort of episodic as like a 70s sitcom, but it also wasn't like The Mandalorian,

01:29:41 ◼   ► where it's literally like, you know, The Mandalorian is episodic, but we're following this guy

01:29:45 ◼   ► and he's doing the thing, right?

01:29:48 ◼   ► He's on a quest, he makes progress on his quest, he has sidetracks or whatever.

01:29:53 ◼   ► And I think a lot of it was because those shows, first of all, they had way more seasons,

01:29:57 ◼   ► and second, those were definitely more targeted at kids who would like the episode where you

01:30:02 ◼   ► go on the funny planet and deal with the thing and could handle small character development

01:30:06 ◼   ► between Ahsoka and Anakin in this one episode, but mostly it's about whatever this monster

01:30:11 ◼   ► of the week was.

01:30:12 ◼   ► And it's the same creative team, like it's Filoni and everything, well, not the exact

01:30:16 ◼   ► same creative team, but a lot of the same creative team doing this.

01:30:19 ◼   ► And I think season two of The Mandalorian reminds me a lot more of the rhythm and pacing

01:30:27 ◼   ► of Rebels and later Clone Wars than does season one.

01:30:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:32 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think the other advantage that they have now, and it also showed to me in

01:30:38 ◼   ► the Clone Wars, and it was that they clearly had their purview of what can you do within

01:30:49 ◼   ► this period of time with these characters.

01:30:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, they were hemmed in.

01:30:53 ◼   ► They had Anakin and Obi-Wan.

01:30:56 ◼   ► You have limited flexibility.

01:30:58 ◼   ► You're book-ended.

01:30:59 ◼   ► Right.

01:31:00 ◼   ► And the next Revenge of the Sith is going to be Lucas's thing, and the Clone Wars movie

01:31:11 ◼   ► was already made.

01:31:13 ◼   ► And so you've just got this interstitial thing, and you can't really change the greater world,

01:31:19 ◼   ► but yet we want you to make 40 or 50 of these episodes.

01:31:23 ◼   ► What are you going to do?

01:31:25 ◼   ► And they also weren't playing with minor characters, right?

01:31:29 ◼   ► And that, to me, is part-- it's not like The Mandalorian hasn't touched major characters,

01:31:37 ◼   ► but by making the primary character not one of the-- it's the opposite direction of Solo,

01:31:45 ◼   ► right?

01:31:46 ◼   ► They took arguably the most beloved hero from the original trilogy and made a whole movie

01:31:50 ◼   ► just about his backstory.

01:31:52 ◼   ► Here with The Mandalorian, they just created an all-new character who exists on the outside

01:31:59 ◼   ► of this realm in a period of time where it's all sort of undefined.

01:32:07 ◼   ► And by not making it about one of the main characters, there's so much more freedom to

01:32:16 ◼   ► me.

01:32:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:32:18 ◼   ► They learned the lesson of Ahsoka.

01:32:21 ◼   ► Ahsoka and the Clone Troopers, none of which were characters in the Star Wars prequels,

01:32:26 ◼   ► right?

01:32:27 ◼   ► Right.

01:32:28 ◼   ► And one of the most valuable properties to come out of Clone Wars is not Anakin and Obi-Wan,

01:32:31 ◼   ► although they are doing an Obi-Wan show.

01:32:33 ◼   ► But Ahsoka is going to get her own show.

01:32:35 ◼   ► And the Clone Troopers that we care about, Fives and all that, they were characters made

01:32:41 ◼   ► out of nothing for the Clone Wars, and those are the most valuable things to come out of

01:32:46 ◼   ► it.

01:32:47 ◼   ► And yes, Obi-Wan and Anakin marched through it, and Ahsoka played off Anakin in an important

01:32:51 ◼   ► way.

01:32:54 ◼   ► Think of it this way.

01:32:55 ◼   ► Clone Wars had not introduced those new characters, but merely had Obi-Wan and Anakin marching

01:32:59 ◼   ► through the story with minor characters bouncing off them.

01:33:02 ◼   ► It wouldn't have been nearly as good.

01:33:04 ◼   ► Yeah, Obi-Wan is the Miles O'Brien of Star Wars.

01:33:09 ◼   ► In that that guy's just in everything, and he's kind of underappreciated in most of it.

01:33:16 ◼   ► I suppose my question is, what's the...

01:33:27 ◼   ► I guess...

01:33:28 ◼   ► Don't worry, guy.

01:33:29 ◼   ► We'll edit this out.

01:33:30 ◼   ► No, no, I'm trying to formulate this in a careful way.

01:33:38 ◼   ► What's the value of having them be this episodic approach as opposed to trying to wrap it up

01:33:46 ◼   ► in a movie, which I think tries to get to your thesis?

01:33:51 ◼   ► There's certainly less risk.

01:33:54 ◼   ► There's less on the line.

01:33:56 ◼   ► We get to explore more common ideas.

01:33:59 ◼   ► But ultimately, is there value to explore this universe that was made in imaginations

01:34:08 ◼   ► from so many people over the course of our lifetimes?

01:34:14 ◼   ► Or is it to tell a story?

01:34:16 ◼   ► And if it's to tell a story, what's that story if we're willing to just discard some episodes

01:34:23 ◼   ► and be like, "We're moving on and it's more of a situational storytelling endeavor rather

01:34:30 ◼   ► than a narrative storytelling endeavor."

01:34:34 ◼   ► I hope that makes sense.

01:34:35 ◼   ► Sorry, I was trying to formulate that carefully because I think there's a distinction there.

01:34:43 ◼   ► Does the world exist to explore or does the world exist to tell a story?

01:34:49 ◼   ► Well, I think that's one of the mistakes that the most recent movie trilogy made was the

01:34:54 ◼   ► movie trilogies, as established by the original trilogies, have always existed to tell a specific

01:35:02 ◼   ► story, which the original trilogy did so well and so coherently.

01:35:08 ◼   ► And arguably, even though the prequels are terrible, they also told a story.

01:35:14 ◼   ► We know what the story is.

01:35:15 ◼   ► They did it very badly, but it's there.

01:35:19 ◼   ► The third trilogy didn't seem to nail down its story at the start.

01:35:26 ◼   ► So it didn't tell a free thing along the lines.

01:35:29 ◼   ► Like they are connected to each other, but they're connected to each other in a wavy

01:35:33 ◼   ► line that just doesn't terminate in a satisfying way, as we've established.

01:35:36 ◼   ► And that was a big mistake because what we're not looking for is, "Oh, here's three new

01:35:39 ◼   ► adventures in the Star Wars universe."

01:35:41 ◼   ► Because you look at the seven, eight, and nine, you're like, "But you were supposed

01:35:44 ◼   ► to be telling a story and you kind of flubbed that."

01:35:47 ◼   ► So that's what I think the trilogy movies are doing.

01:35:50 ◼   ► But writ large, I think, as I said before, the Star Wars universe exists as a fertile

01:35:54 ◼   ► place where anybody can tell the story that they want to tell.

01:35:58 ◼   ► Like in my past Ink Opera episodes, many moons ago, I was saying, "If someone wants

01:36:03 ◼   ► to make a horror movie in the Star Wars universe, let them.

01:36:07 ◼   ► Go for it."

01:36:08 ◼   ► Right?

01:36:09 ◼   ► Like Star Wars is not a genre, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of creative works.

01:36:13 ◼   ► If you want, you know, we already did the Skywalker thing and I feel like, "Fine, leave

01:36:17 ◼   ► that alone."

01:36:18 ◼   ► Right?

01:36:19 ◼   ► But there are tons of new stories you can tell in this universe.

01:36:21 ◼   ► And it can still be Star Wars because the universe is well established and it will inflect

01:36:26 ◼   ► your story.

01:36:27 ◼   ► That's what's interesting about it.

01:36:28 ◼   ► It's like telling a love story in, you know, Japan with samurai.

01:36:32 ◼   ► Right?

01:36:33 ◼   ► Right.

01:36:34 ◼   ► Love story is the genre.

01:36:35 ◼   ► Japan with samurai is the setting.

01:36:37 ◼   ► You can do that and it's cool and interesting.

01:36:39 ◼   ► Right?

01:36:40 ◼   ► But when people are going to do something, "I'm going to make a TV series.

01:36:45 ◼   ► I'm going to make a single movie.

01:36:46 ◼   ► I'm going to make a trilogy of movies," those people should have stories they want to tell,

01:36:50 ◼   ► whether it's a standalone love story or a set of three movies that connect in an arc,

01:36:54 ◼   ► whatever it is.

01:36:55 ◼   ► They have a story they want to tell and they feel like this story can be best told in the

01:36:58 ◼   ► Star Wars universe.

01:37:00 ◼   ► That's what they're doing.

01:37:01 ◼   ► But Star Wars, as a franchise, I feel like exists for anybody who has a good story to

01:37:05 ◼   ► tell that fits into the Star Wars universe to tell it.

01:37:09 ◼   ► I love that.

01:37:14 ◼   ► And this is very, very, very reductive, but should I put you in the column of more TV

01:37:18 ◼   ► shows and fewer movies?

01:37:22 ◼   ► What do you follow on that spectrum?

01:37:23 ◼   ► Would you like more experimentation with lower stakes or swings for the fences, basically?

01:37:30 ◼   ► What I would personally prefer, which is not perhaps the thing that the Disney Corporation

01:37:35 ◼   ► should do, is I like trilogy movies that tell a story.

01:37:40 ◼   ► That is a Star Wars format that I enjoy.

01:37:42 ◼   ► So if I could only pick one thing that could be Star Wars, I would say get someone to make

01:37:46 ◼   ► a new Star Wars trilogy of movies and have it actually be a sensible story and do a really

01:37:50 ◼   ► good job in it.

01:37:51 ◼   ► That's my personal taste, but whatever.

01:37:55 ◼   ► But I also love TV shows and watch a ton of them.

01:37:57 ◼   ► Now, my personal taste in TV shows does go much more towards the Breaking Bad, The Wire,

01:38:05 ◼   ► The

01:38:28 ◼   ► like

01:38:43 ◼   ► that

01:39:04 ◼   ► is

01:39:23 ◼   ► in

01:39:44 ◼   ► the Star Wars universe.

01:39:59 ◼   ► But whoever comes in, whatever creative person comes in, they have to know what kind of thing

01:40:03 ◼   ► they're doing.

01:40:04 ◼   ► And Dave Filoni, I think, knows what he's trying to do, or knew what he was trying to

01:40:08 ◼   ► do with Clone Wars and Rebels.

01:40:09 ◼   ► And Favreau knows what he's doing with Mandalorian.

01:40:12 ◼   ► And I like seeing that authorial voice.

01:40:15 ◼   ► And it just so happens that their authorial voice, I think, fits very well with the Star

01:40:19 ◼   ► Wars franchise.

01:40:20 ◼   ► Now, there's a reason that so many people list.

01:40:22 ◼   ► To be honest, it aligns with us.

01:40:26 ◼   ► Well, what I was going to say, there's a reason people of our generation and who have similar

01:40:31 ◼   ► tastes to us and me, they all cite Empire as our favorite Star Wars movie, because it

01:40:35 ◼   ► actually is the most sophisticated.

01:40:38 ◼   ► Its relationships are one notch a little bit more nuanced than just like Luke finds the

01:40:43 ◼   ► pretty princess and maybe Han is a little bit jealous.

01:40:47 ◼   ► They take that one more notch of complexity.

01:40:49 ◼   ► Instead of being middle school complexity, it's high school level romance complexity.

01:40:54 ◼   ► And Luke and his father, and then I feel like Jedi, for all its Ewoks that people complain

01:40:59 ◼   ► about, takes it a level farther.

01:41:00 ◼   ► And see my episode where I talked about Return of the Jedi and the Incomparable, having a

01:41:05 ◼   ► franchise capping climactic movie where the hero wins through being passive and refusing

01:41:12 ◼   ► to fight remains unprecedented.

01:41:15 ◼   ► And it's actually a way more complex message and story than people give it credit for now,

01:41:21 ◼   ► so much so that it's essentially never been attempted again.

01:41:23 ◼   ► I mean, it wasn't like Captain America was putting down his shield and refusing to fight

01:41:27 ◼   ► Thanos.

01:41:28 ◼   ► It's just not done.

01:41:31 ◼   ► So you mentioned, and I agree, it actually is.

01:41:34 ◼   ► And I totally did not respect it.

01:41:37 ◼   ► Not that I didn't respect it.

01:41:40 ◼   ► As a kid when Return of the Jedi came out, I loved the opening and I did not care for

01:41:47 ◼   ► the Ewok stuff at all.

01:41:50 ◼   ► And I loved the space battle and I loved the climactic Vader, Luke, Emperor finale in the

01:41:59 ◼   ► throne room.

01:42:00 ◼   ► I just thought that the whole thing on Endor was like, "Ah, this is like 40 minutes of

01:42:06 ◼   ► filler and it's like, it's just so blatant that they just wanted to get our main characters

01:42:10 ◼   ► together and okay, the speeder bikes are cool, blah, blah, blah."

01:42:16 ◼   ► I didn't think, "Oh, that sucks that Luke refused to try to fight the Emperor with his

01:42:21 ◼   ► lightsaber."

01:42:23 ◼   ► But I didn't respect it at all.

01:42:25 ◼   ► And I agree with you, Jon, that in hindsight, it's remarkable.

01:42:29 ◼   ► It's this movie about people cutting off arms and shooting people and blowing up things

01:42:34 ◼   ► and the true climax.

01:42:37 ◼   ► And it feels, it is a natural storytelling moment.

01:42:40 ◼   ► It comes about organically and feels true to all of the characters.

01:42:45 ◼   ► And true to what came before it.

01:42:46 ◼   ► We had three movies, Knowledge and Defense, Never Attack.

01:42:49 ◼   ► That wasn't BS.

01:42:51 ◼   ► That was the T-shirt.

01:42:52 ◼   ► It was earned.

01:42:53 ◼   ► It was so earned.

01:42:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:42:55 ◼   ► And it is interesting.

01:42:58 ◼   ► And it's, to me, it helps that movie stand as a classic.

01:43:02 ◼   ► Helps the whole trilogy feel like it was tied off in a bundle and it stands as a trilogy.

01:43:08 ◼   ► And to me, too, to go back to just my opening point that it doesn't matter how long the

01:43:13 ◼   ► ongoing cinematic universe goes and it doesn't matter what's officially canon and what's

01:43:19 ◼   ► not and what used to be canon and got erased when they decided to reset it.

01:43:24 ◼   ► Those three movies stand alone and there's nothing that can come.

01:43:26 ◼   ► They could make 20 seasons of The Mandalorian and make Obi-Wan and young Princess Leia and

01:43:35 ◼   ► do whatever you want.

01:43:36 ◼   ► Do a whole series where...

01:43:37 ◼   ► I mean, eventually, I've been saying this for years, eventually they're going to reboot

01:43:40 ◼   ► the original trilogy, you realize.

01:43:43 ◼   ► And I'll be fine with that, too, because that doesn't take away from the original movies.

01:43:46 ◼   ► They're going to do it.

01:43:47 ◼   ► They're going to cast the new Luke and Leia and they're going to redo the trilogy.

01:43:49 ◼   ► Probably when we're grandparents, right?

01:43:51 ◼   ► I don't know about that.

01:43:52 ◼   ► That's a great idea.

01:43:53 ◼   ► Wait, so that sort of leads me to...

01:43:54 ◼   ► It does leave me alone that they absolutely will.

01:43:56 ◼   ► That leads me to something that I was going to ask previously.

01:43:58 ◼   ► And eventually it's, what is it, one hour, 50 minutes closing in?

01:44:03 ◼   ► We should talk about Mandalorian season two.

01:44:07 ◼   ► What is your pecking order in terms of canon?

01:44:11 ◼   ► And I don't mean in like...

01:44:12 ◼   ► I don't worry about canon.

01:44:14 ◼   ► I don't worry about it either.

01:44:15 ◼   ► Do you know what?

01:44:16 ◼   ► If it existed in the cartoon, that's cool.

01:44:18 ◼   ► I used to worry about it.

01:44:19 ◼   ► If it exists in a TV show, that's cool.

01:44:21 ◼   ► If it's in the movies, that counts.

01:44:23 ◼   ► Is basically it.

01:44:25 ◼   ► You know, there's been a lot of people complaining about the end of season two of The Mandalorian

01:44:29 ◼   ► because...

01:44:30 ◼   ► You can say that.

01:44:32 ◼   ► Spoilers are free.

01:44:33 ◼   ► Just saying.

01:44:34 ◼   ► Spoilers are free.

01:44:35 ◼   ► He couldn't take the Darksaber because blah blah blah, Mandalorian BS code.

01:44:40 ◼   ► And they were like, well, in the cartoon, somebody...

01:44:42 ◼   ► Who cares?

01:44:43 ◼   ► Don't worry about it.

01:44:44 ◼   ► There's a pecking order to this stuff and whatever gets written later...

01:44:47 ◼   ► I think it made perfect sense in The Mandalorian season two because our character, our hero,

01:44:52 ◼   ► is established as, we didn't know this in season one, but in season two, it revealed

01:44:55 ◼   ► that, hey, you know, Mandalorians are as straight edge as you are about the whole helmet business,

01:45:00 ◼   ► right?

01:45:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:45:02 ◼   ► That's one of the best things.

01:45:03 ◼   ► That's one of the things I love about Worf is whenever he interacts with Klingons, they're

01:45:06 ◼   ► like, whoa, dude, you just, you got to tone down the Klingon.

01:45:08 ◼   ► And in season one, you didn't realize that.

01:45:10 ◼   ► You just thought they were all like that, but now you realize they're not.

01:45:12 ◼   ► And so the whole rules about the, oh, well, you got to fight for him.

01:45:15 ◼   ► It's no more stupid or reasonable than any of the other rules about Mandalorians.

01:45:20 ◼   ► And I can imagine, you know, for who, depending on who's on either side of the dark saber,

01:45:24 ◼   ► saying, oh, I actually take that rule super seriously.

01:45:26 ◼   ► And I can't actually, you can't actually just give it to me because then I won't be the

01:45:29 ◼   ► rightful leader.

01:45:30 ◼   ► People got all sorts of BS rules for their society.

01:45:33 ◼   ► And so I'm willing to let that slide.

01:45:34 ◼   ► And yes, I know it was different in the, in the Clone Wars, but if you don't believe in

01:45:37 ◼   ► those rules, you're not bound by them.

01:45:38 ◼   ► But if you do, then you are.

01:45:40 ◼   ► Me too.

01:45:41 ◼   ► Exactly how I feel.

01:45:42 ◼   ► And you know what I love about that is immediate and very first reaction is, well, I yield.

01:45:47 ◼   ► That's the sizzle.

01:45:48 ◼   ► I don't care.

01:45:51 ◼   ► You have it.

01:45:52 ◼   ► I yield.

01:45:53 ◼   ► Okay, fine.

01:45:54 ◼   ► You beat me.

01:45:55 ◼   ► It doesn't matter.

01:45:56 ◼   ► It was the helmet.

01:45:57 ◼   ► And he already got over that because he had, he was forced a couple episodes earlier to

01:45:58 ◼   ► make a choice.

01:45:59 ◼   ► Like, do you care more about the helmet rules?

01:46:00 ◼   ► Do you care more about saving the child?

01:46:02 ◼   ► Then he made his choice.

01:46:03 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:46:04 ◼   ► He's like, I don't care.

01:46:05 ◼   ► This is yours.

01:46:06 ◼   ► I yield.

01:46:07 ◼   ► I don't need my ego to fight over this dumb thing that I got off this asshole that was

01:46:13 ◼   ► going to kill a kid.

01:46:14 ◼   ► So he's not interested in going, trying to blow up the Death Star too, right?

01:46:17 ◼   ► No, and if anything, he's frustrated about it.

01:46:19 ◼   ► Just take it.

01:46:20 ◼   ► I don't want any part of any of this.

01:46:22 ◼   ► And this crazy wizard guy that just came in and chopped up a whole bunch of Cylons.

01:46:26 ◼   ► That guy's kind of spooky.

01:46:29 ◼   ► And he just took my kid.

01:46:32 ◼   ► There's a scene in the first season that bothered me, but in hindsight now I realized they were

01:46:37 ◼   ► right.

01:46:38 ◼   ► I like it.

01:46:39 ◼   ► And the further development of the Mandalorian character says to me that it actually was

01:46:44 ◼   ► right.

01:46:45 ◼   ► But it's the scene.

01:46:46 ◼   ► It might've been the first episode.

01:46:47 ◼   ► But early on, you mentioned it where he somehow gets caught up with some Jawas.

01:46:52 ◼   ► And the Jawas steal his stuff.

01:46:55 ◼   ► And then he gets him back.

01:46:58 ◼   ► But he doesn't kill all the Jawas.

01:47:00 ◼   ► And I was like, come on.

01:47:01 ◼   ► This guy.

01:47:02 ◼   ► And it's because I was reading too much into what I thought the Mandalorian was.

01:47:09 ◼   ► And he was.

01:47:10 ◼   ► He was a badass when he was going after one of his targets.

01:47:14 ◼   ► But it turns out that not killing those Jawas for stealing his stuff was definitely correct

01:47:20 ◼   ► for this character.

01:47:22 ◼   ► And that was a darker take on this.

01:47:24 ◼   ► I was thinking about that the other day.

01:47:26 ◼   ► So the first episode of the season one of The Mandalorian, our bounty hunter is faced

01:47:31 ◼   ► with the situation where he's got to kill this cute little thing.

01:47:33 ◼   ► And is he going to do it or not?

01:47:34 ◼   ► It turns out he saves the cute little thing instead of killing it.

01:47:38 ◼   ► The way he sort of—

01:47:39 ◼   ► Just for any listeners out there, if you've got a choice between shooting a baby and a

01:47:42 ◼   ► robot, shoot the robot.

01:47:44 ◼   ► Shoot the robot every time.

01:47:46 ◼   ► It was a murderous robot.

01:47:47 ◼   ► It wasn't just a bystander.

01:47:48 ◼   ► It was a robot.

01:47:49 ◼   ► I don't care.

01:47:50 ◼   ► Shoot the robot.

01:47:51 ◼   ► You can build another robot.

01:47:52 ◼   ► Come on.

01:47:53 ◼   ► The more conventional way to do this character in the modern era of television is to have

01:47:57 ◼   ► a previous series of events where The Mandalorian is established as somebody who does hew to

01:48:04 ◼   ► the bounty hunter code by showing a situation where he is told to bring in a sympathetic

01:48:10 ◼   ► character dead or alive and ends up killing him.

01:48:14 ◼   ► And we see him do that like, "Oh, this guy's the anti-hero thing.

01:48:18 ◼   ► He's a little bit of a bad guy.

01:48:20 ◼   ► He has a code and maybe he didn't want to kill a guy."

01:48:22 ◼   ► It was like, "Well, I'm a bounty hunter.

01:48:23 ◼   ► I've got to do what I've got to do."

01:48:24 ◼   ► And I kill him.

01:48:25 ◼   ► And then when he's faced with baby Yoda, he's like, "Okay, well now I make a different

01:48:30 ◼   ► choice."

01:48:31 ◼   ► But The Mandalorian doesn't do that.

01:48:32 ◼   ► The Mandalorian says, "From season one, episode one, this guy's got a gruff exterior,

01:48:37 ◼   ► but he's a softy.

01:48:39 ◼   ► He knows right from wrong.

01:48:40 ◼   ► He's had a hard life.

01:48:42 ◼   ► He puts on a hard front.

01:48:43 ◼   ► He's a great fighter.

01:48:44 ◼   ► But there isn't the episode where he kills a baby Yoda and then has second choices about

01:48:48 ◼   ► the second and is haunted by it and then makes a different choice on the second baby Yoda.

01:48:51 ◼   ► He's good from the jump, right?

01:48:54 ◼   ► I agree with you so much because the Horatio Sans character, the blue guy that they meet

01:48:59 ◼   ► in the bar, it's like, "I can bring you in warm or cold?"

01:49:03 ◼   ► And then he's an idiot.

01:49:05 ◼   ► And he goes messing around with things.

01:49:07 ◼   ► And it's like, "Yeah, he turns up cold.

01:49:09 ◼   ► But he's not dead.

01:49:10 ◼   ► He's just frozen in carbonite."

01:49:11 ◼   ► It'll be back in season two and they'll be friends.

01:49:15 ◼   ► That's part of the family-friendly nature of the show.

01:49:18 ◼   ► And it's part of also understanding that you can have a character who has to do a job and

01:49:22 ◼   ► is conflicted and has character development and moments without first putting them into

01:49:26 ◼   ► the super-duper anti-hero thing.

01:49:29 ◼   ► The farthest Star Wars has ever gone in that, famously, is Han Solo shooting Greedo first,

01:49:34 ◼   ► which is the hardest core arc that you get of like, "We know Han is good-hearted, but

01:49:39 ◼   ► we also, the first thing we see him do, I mean, granted, it's self-defense, but we don't

01:49:44 ◼   ► see him find a non-O'odham way out of that situation.

01:49:46 ◼   ► I feel like that's why Lucas regretted that and keeps trying to mess with it or whatever.

01:49:50 ◼   ► And I think that little harder edge helps in an otherwise fairly fluffy movie.

01:49:54 ◼   ► But the Mandalorian clearly, they want you to know this character has inner turmoil and