No Storytelling Engine this week (on Monday, I was still in Atlanta, GA watching my flight get delayed, and things only got more fun from there) but I will blog a little, just to make a brief observation which some might claim has some connection to the current political process.
To wit, nobody who calls themselves a "maverick" is ever actually a maverick. Real mavericks don't call themselves mavericks, because they don't give a damn about what you think of them. They just go out and do things, and let other people worry about labels. A guy (or a gal, or a two-person combination of a guy and a gal whose names happen to fit conveniently on a yard sign) who says, "I'm a maverick" (or "we're mavericks", repeatedly in a vice-presidential debate for example) is desperately courting your opinion. And if he's that desperate for your approval, he's probably going to be desperate for someone else's. (Like, say, hypothetically speaking, a Republican President or a bunch of racist right-wing voters.)
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Out Of Town
Just wanted to drop a note to say I'll be out of town all next week and don't know how often I'll have Net access, so this blog might be fairly quiet for a bit.
Thanks for your patience!
Thanks for your patience!
Friday, October 03, 2008
Authenticity and the "Darkening" Of DC
So we've all heard about 'The Dark Knight', right? Grossed something like $500 million, critical and financial success, absolute blockbuster to end all blockbusters and DC's first real success in the movies since...well, arguably since 1989, when 'Batman' launched with a different Batman and a different Joker and a different director. Certainly, the biggest success DC has had since Marvel started absolutely cleaning up with their string of well-received hits. (And, okay, 'Elektra'.)
But the thing is, I think DC is taking away the wrong lesson from this. They're talking about how this proves "dark" superheroes sell, and how they're going to be doing more dark stories in their next several movies, and how this validates Dan DiDio's tenure at DC where he made a conscious decision to aim for a more "adult" audience. (Which has been a bit of a controversial point over the last few years, with both sides pulling out sales charts that support their case, and goalposts moving back and forth, and all the general fun you get from Internet debates. But I digress.)
Because I don't think that 'The Dark Knight' succeeded because it was "dark", I think it succeeded because it was real. It was heart-felt, to use an older term. Christopher Nolan felt genuinely, personally touched by some of the Batman stories he'd read (most obviously "The Killing Joke") and he told a Batman story that meant something to him, and that intensity, that depth of feeling resonated with his audience. The audience was willing to follow him to a very dark place for that story, because that's where the story led.
It's that last point that's key--"that's where that story led". The darkness in 'The Dark Knight' wasn't forced, it wasn't there for its own sake...it was there because Christopher Nolan told a story of moral ambiguity, of the specter of mindless chaos in a world still reeling from the 'War On Terror' (and no, Bush isn't Batman. Bush is Harvey Dent. But I digress again.) Nolan didn't tack on a sad ending and he didn't tack on a happy ending. He followed the story through to the ending it had to have.
Audiences can always smell when they're being manipulated, and just as surely, they can smell when they're not. Everyone who watched '28 Days Later', whether they loved the movie or hated it, all hated the ending, precisely because it pandered. The writers looked at the ending they had to have, with Selena and Hannah about to become the unwilling mothers of a new society while Jim was left to die, and it scared them, so they copped out. Even before they tacked on the uber-happy ending where Jim survived being gut-shot in the middle of nowhere, they backed away from the truth of what things were, and the audience knew it.
And DC has been doing just the opposite. They've been tacking on death and rape, blood and gore and misery and discord not because they're where the story has to lead, but because they think it sells. (And they're not the only ones--in fact, the single worst offender in this regard in the last decade has to be Penance, whose character can be summed up as "Dark Speedball". Does anyone think this was a deeply heart-felt change for this character?)
In the end, things have to be real. The audience will follow you if they're real, whether through darkness or light. We don't want sad endings or happy endings, we want true endings. We want our happiness to be earned, our sadness to feel honest. We want to be moved, not pandered to. And if DC can't understand that, then its next "dark" movie is going to feel more like 'Superman Returns' than 'The Dark Knight'...and it'll probably do the same kind of box office.
But the thing is, I think DC is taking away the wrong lesson from this. They're talking about how this proves "dark" superheroes sell, and how they're going to be doing more dark stories in their next several movies, and how this validates Dan DiDio's tenure at DC where he made a conscious decision to aim for a more "adult" audience. (Which has been a bit of a controversial point over the last few years, with both sides pulling out sales charts that support their case, and goalposts moving back and forth, and all the general fun you get from Internet debates. But I digress.)
Because I don't think that 'The Dark Knight' succeeded because it was "dark", I think it succeeded because it was real. It was heart-felt, to use an older term. Christopher Nolan felt genuinely, personally touched by some of the Batman stories he'd read (most obviously "The Killing Joke") and he told a Batman story that meant something to him, and that intensity, that depth of feeling resonated with his audience. The audience was willing to follow him to a very dark place for that story, because that's where the story led.
It's that last point that's key--"that's where that story led". The darkness in 'The Dark Knight' wasn't forced, it wasn't there for its own sake...it was there because Christopher Nolan told a story of moral ambiguity, of the specter of mindless chaos in a world still reeling from the 'War On Terror' (and no, Bush isn't Batman. Bush is Harvey Dent. But I digress again.) Nolan didn't tack on a sad ending and he didn't tack on a happy ending. He followed the story through to the ending it had to have.
Audiences can always smell when they're being manipulated, and just as surely, they can smell when they're not. Everyone who watched '28 Days Later', whether they loved the movie or hated it, all hated the ending, precisely because it pandered. The writers looked at the ending they had to have, with Selena and Hannah about to become the unwilling mothers of a new society while Jim was left to die, and it scared them, so they copped out. Even before they tacked on the uber-happy ending where Jim survived being gut-shot in the middle of nowhere, they backed away from the truth of what things were, and the audience knew it.
And DC has been doing just the opposite. They've been tacking on death and rape, blood and gore and misery and discord not because they're where the story has to lead, but because they think it sells. (And they're not the only ones--in fact, the single worst offender in this regard in the last decade has to be Penance, whose character can be summed up as "Dark Speedball". Does anyone think this was a deeply heart-felt change for this character?)
In the end, things have to be real. The audience will follow you if they're real, whether through darkness or light. We don't want sad endings or happy endings, we want true endings. We want our happiness to be earned, our sadness to feel honest. We want to be moved, not pandered to. And if DC can't understand that, then its next "dark" movie is going to feel more like 'Superman Returns' than 'The Dark Knight'...and it'll probably do the same kind of box office.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Storytelling Engines: Highlander
(or "There Won't Be Only One")
'Highlander' is a relative rarity among storytelling engines, because it didn't start out as one. In fact, writer Gregory Widen turned in a script that seems to defy sequelization at all--it's the story of the final battle between a group of immortals that have lived in secret among the human race, summed up by the iconic line, "There can be only one!" (As an aside, it's important to note the difference between coming up with a sequel and coming up with a storytelling engine. Coming up with a sequel means finding the logical extension of a stand-alone story, while coming up with a storytelling engine involves setting up a premise that can generate multiple stories. It's the difference between 'Die Hard 2' and 'Dawn of the Dead'.)
But as the movie developed from a minor flop into a slow-burn cult hit, it became evident that "only one" wasn't enough. The movie developed a franchise that wanted more, and wouldn't take, "Everyone's dead except Connor!" for an answer. About the first attempts to develop the story into a storytelling engine, the film's theatrical sequels, well...the less said the better. They were slapdash, didn't fit the lyrical fantasy tone of the original, and they were stuck trying to tie into the ending of a film that was fairly definitive in establishing itself as the conclusion to the whole concept.
The TV series, though, took a different tack. TV writers are, by definition, good at creating storytelling engines, because they're all too aware of a) the challenges of writing twenty-two episodes of television on an enormously tight schedule, and b) the need to write five or six seasons in order to get the lucrative rewards of perpetual syndication (and DVD release, nowadays.) So they took the risky step of breaking down the 'Highlander' film to its component elements, finding those that would support a storytelling engine, and discarding the rest.
The first big one they let go was the protagonist. Connor McLeod was a spiky, alienated immortal burned out on caring about the mortals who lived and died all around him. His story was all about finding his ability to love again...and that's a wonderful plot for a one-time movie, but as open-ended TV series go, it doesn't work. (Plus, actor Christopher Lambert probably wasn't willing to commit to a weekly series.) So Connor gained a "cousin", Duncan, who was a bit more genial, connected to the world, and generally audience-friendly. (It says a lot, by the way, that despite only appearing together twice in the franchise, Lambert and Adrian Paul have a chemistry that easily convinces you that they spent lots of time together off-screen.)
The second thing that had to go was the Gathering. Again, this was just necessary to the development of a storytelling engine as opposed to a one-time story. The Gathering, and the final battle of all the immortals, is by definition the end of the story. (Unless you suddenly decide they're all aliens from the planet Geist or something.) Setting it in an "alternate universe" (the official explanation, never actually referred to onscreen) where immortals are more prevalent, and new ones appear all the time, gives the writers the chance to tell more stories than Widen's conception allowed. (The movie occurred in the series continuity, by the way, but Kurgan was just another nasty immortal dispatched by Connor, not the second-to-last of his kind.)
Which brings up another point; the series' mythos had to be widened to accomodate more stories. Some recurring villains had to show up, simply because it's hard to create a new villain every week (as touched on in the column on the Punisher); the organization of the Watchers was created to help create supporting allies and enemies, and various recurring foes like the Four Horsemen, Kalas, Ahriman, and Xavier St. Cloud helped keep the pressure off the writers. And of course, supporting characters, both mortal and immortal, generated stories of their own--Richie, Amanda, Joe, Tessa, the list goes on and on. (Mainly because the series wasn't afraid to kill off supporting characters.) Indeed, by Season Six, Duncan was barely featured in the series at all. (Primarily because Adrian Paul was already thinking of moving on.)
The revamped Highlander concept ran six series and spawned a further two movies (and several books and comics), a respectable run for any series but all the more impressive for a series that started with the end of the story. It's surprising, really, that it took until 2006 for the comic book to arrive, since a comic can conquer the last hurdle that the series had to being a true open-ended storytelling engine...comic book characters, unlike actors, never age.
'Highlander' is a relative rarity among storytelling engines, because it didn't start out as one. In fact, writer Gregory Widen turned in a script that seems to defy sequelization at all--it's the story of the final battle between a group of immortals that have lived in secret among the human race, summed up by the iconic line, "There can be only one!" (As an aside, it's important to note the difference between coming up with a sequel and coming up with a storytelling engine. Coming up with a sequel means finding the logical extension of a stand-alone story, while coming up with a storytelling engine involves setting up a premise that can generate multiple stories. It's the difference between 'Die Hard 2' and 'Dawn of the Dead'.)
But as the movie developed from a minor flop into a slow-burn cult hit, it became evident that "only one" wasn't enough. The movie developed a franchise that wanted more, and wouldn't take, "Everyone's dead except Connor!" for an answer. About the first attempts to develop the story into a storytelling engine, the film's theatrical sequels, well...the less said the better. They were slapdash, didn't fit the lyrical fantasy tone of the original, and they were stuck trying to tie into the ending of a film that was fairly definitive in establishing itself as the conclusion to the whole concept.
The TV series, though, took a different tack. TV writers are, by definition, good at creating storytelling engines, because they're all too aware of a) the challenges of writing twenty-two episodes of television on an enormously tight schedule, and b) the need to write five or six seasons in order to get the lucrative rewards of perpetual syndication (and DVD release, nowadays.) So they took the risky step of breaking down the 'Highlander' film to its component elements, finding those that would support a storytelling engine, and discarding the rest.
The first big one they let go was the protagonist. Connor McLeod was a spiky, alienated immortal burned out on caring about the mortals who lived and died all around him. His story was all about finding his ability to love again...and that's a wonderful plot for a one-time movie, but as open-ended TV series go, it doesn't work. (Plus, actor Christopher Lambert probably wasn't willing to commit to a weekly series.) So Connor gained a "cousin", Duncan, who was a bit more genial, connected to the world, and generally audience-friendly. (It says a lot, by the way, that despite only appearing together twice in the franchise, Lambert and Adrian Paul have a chemistry that easily convinces you that they spent lots of time together off-screen.)
The second thing that had to go was the Gathering. Again, this was just necessary to the development of a storytelling engine as opposed to a one-time story. The Gathering, and the final battle of all the immortals, is by definition the end of the story. (Unless you suddenly decide they're all aliens from the planet Geist or something.) Setting it in an "alternate universe" (the official explanation, never actually referred to onscreen) where immortals are more prevalent, and new ones appear all the time, gives the writers the chance to tell more stories than Widen's conception allowed. (The movie occurred in the series continuity, by the way, but Kurgan was just another nasty immortal dispatched by Connor, not the second-to-last of his kind.)
Which brings up another point; the series' mythos had to be widened to accomodate more stories. Some recurring villains had to show up, simply because it's hard to create a new villain every week (as touched on in the column on the Punisher); the organization of the Watchers was created to help create supporting allies and enemies, and various recurring foes like the Four Horsemen, Kalas, Ahriman, and Xavier St. Cloud helped keep the pressure off the writers. And of course, supporting characters, both mortal and immortal, generated stories of their own--Richie, Amanda, Joe, Tessa, the list goes on and on. (Mainly because the series wasn't afraid to kill off supporting characters.) Indeed, by Season Six, Duncan was barely featured in the series at all. (Primarily because Adrian Paul was already thinking of moving on.)
The revamped Highlander concept ran six series and spawned a further two movies (and several books and comics), a respectable run for any series but all the more impressive for a series that started with the end of the story. It's surprising, really, that it took until 2006 for the comic book to arrive, since a comic can conquer the last hurdle that the series had to being a true open-ended storytelling engine...comic book characters, unlike actors, never age.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The Alternate Reality Sequel List
Have you ever noticed that there are some movies that you just want to pretend the sequels happened in an alternate reality? I don't mean that these sequels are bad...necessarily...you don't wish that the film never had a sequel at all...again, necessarily...but you just want to say, "No, that's not what really happened after the end of that movie. That's a fun 'What if?' question. The real ending to the movie is inside my head."
Because believing these sequels to be "real" (if you'll grant me the idea that these movies have a reality to us, even though we know them to be fictional--they're not literally true, but they matter on an emotional level) changes our viewing of the original, spoiling them just a tad. Nobody can cheer for Ripley saving Newt at the end of 'Aliens' when they know she's just going to die off-camera before the next movie starts. So I think we're allowed to cut the sequels out of the world of the original, and restore the original's happy endings to their former glory by deciding the sequels don't "count" in the same way as the original film does.
I'll give a few examples...say, five?
5. Austin Powers. This is the perfect example, in some ways. It's not that the sequels were terrible (although 'The Spy Who Shagged Me' really was, honestly.) It's that the first movie ends with Austin coming to terms with the demise of the 60s culture he represented, growing as a person, and settling down with Vanessa, who had grown to accept him as well. The next movie then opens with her dying, and just expects the audience to be fine with that. And I guess I can be, so long as we accept that the sequels are all just some alternate-reality Austin who shrugs off his wife's death in seconds and goes on to have a string of meaningless relationships (and unfunny sequels.)
4. Ghostbusters. Here, the sequel isn't even that bad. (It's not that good, either, but it's not bad.) But the whole exciting triumph of the heroes from the first movie is given a sour, unpleasant tone when we find out they were blamed for saving the world, driven into bankruptcy, and went their separate ways. As a parallel universe, it works. As a continuation of the first movie, it fails.
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark. It took Spielberg and Lucas twenty-seven years to figure out what movie audiences knew all along--Marion and Indy should have wound up together. (And they still didn't do a good job of showing it.) While the sequels and prequel have their merits, they're easier to watch if you just pretend they're fanciful "imaginary stories" and not continuations of the nigh-unto-perfect original film.
2. The Matrix. Arguably, the sequels don't even connect logically with the end of the original film; at the end of 'The Matrix', Neo has total, god-like control over the reality of the Matrix, and can alter it at will. In the next movie, he's a trench-coated Superman. Not only do you need to pretend the sequels happened in a parallel universe to make the original work, you need to imagine a wholly different original movie for the sequels to have a shot in hell of making sense.
1. Star Wars. This one might be a bit controversial, but I'm going to put it in, and here's why. When you watched the original 'Star Wars' movie, back before sequels and prequels and Expanded Universes and video games and metric tons of books, the world of 'Star Wars' existed entirely in your head. Every space in the film is filled in with your imagination--and part of the brilliance of the film is that there are so many spaces, so many clever hints at things that Lucas just leaves you to fill in yourself so that the world grows into you and you grow into it. The world of 'Star Wars' literally becomes a part of your imagination. Every kid in 1977 had a different idea of what the Clone Wars were, or how Darth Vader became evil, or how Luke's father died, or even just what those things in the cantina were called. And every movie, book, video game, and tie-in since then has replaced a bit of your imagination with someone else's. I want to be able to look at this movie and see it just for itself, to say, "No. It doesn't matter what someone else said, even if that someone else is George Lucas. This is what I think happened next."
Anyone got some of their own to add?
Because believing these sequels to be "real" (if you'll grant me the idea that these movies have a reality to us, even though we know them to be fictional--they're not literally true, but they matter on an emotional level) changes our viewing of the original, spoiling them just a tad. Nobody can cheer for Ripley saving Newt at the end of 'Aliens' when they know she's just going to die off-camera before the next movie starts. So I think we're allowed to cut the sequels out of the world of the original, and restore the original's happy endings to their former glory by deciding the sequels don't "count" in the same way as the original film does.
I'll give a few examples...say, five?
5. Austin Powers. This is the perfect example, in some ways. It's not that the sequels were terrible (although 'The Spy Who Shagged Me' really was, honestly.) It's that the first movie ends with Austin coming to terms with the demise of the 60s culture he represented, growing as a person, and settling down with Vanessa, who had grown to accept him as well. The next movie then opens with her dying, and just expects the audience to be fine with that. And I guess I can be, so long as we accept that the sequels are all just some alternate-reality Austin who shrugs off his wife's death in seconds and goes on to have a string of meaningless relationships (and unfunny sequels.)
4. Ghostbusters. Here, the sequel isn't even that bad. (It's not that good, either, but it's not bad.) But the whole exciting triumph of the heroes from the first movie is given a sour, unpleasant tone when we find out they were blamed for saving the world, driven into bankruptcy, and went their separate ways. As a parallel universe, it works. As a continuation of the first movie, it fails.
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark. It took Spielberg and Lucas twenty-seven years to figure out what movie audiences knew all along--Marion and Indy should have wound up together. (And they still didn't do a good job of showing it.) While the sequels and prequel have their merits, they're easier to watch if you just pretend they're fanciful "imaginary stories" and not continuations of the nigh-unto-perfect original film.
2. The Matrix. Arguably, the sequels don't even connect logically with the end of the original film; at the end of 'The Matrix', Neo has total, god-like control over the reality of the Matrix, and can alter it at will. In the next movie, he's a trench-coated Superman. Not only do you need to pretend the sequels happened in a parallel universe to make the original work, you need to imagine a wholly different original movie for the sequels to have a shot in hell of making sense.
1. Star Wars. This one might be a bit controversial, but I'm going to put it in, and here's why. When you watched the original 'Star Wars' movie, back before sequels and prequels and Expanded Universes and video games and metric tons of books, the world of 'Star Wars' existed entirely in your head. Every space in the film is filled in with your imagination--and part of the brilliance of the film is that there are so many spaces, so many clever hints at things that Lucas just leaves you to fill in yourself so that the world grows into you and you grow into it. The world of 'Star Wars' literally becomes a part of your imagination. Every kid in 1977 had a different idea of what the Clone Wars were, or how Darth Vader became evil, or how Luke's father died, or even just what those things in the cantina were called. And every movie, book, video game, and tie-in since then has replaced a bit of your imagination with someone else's. I want to be able to look at this movie and see it just for itself, to say, "No. It doesn't matter what someone else said, even if that someone else is George Lucas. This is what I think happened next."
Anyone got some of their own to add?
Monday, September 22, 2008
Storytelling Engines: Futurama
(or "Packing Up The Shop")
Futurama, Matt Groening's second television series, suffered from a single great problem that afflicts all too many science-fiction/fantasy shows. It was on the Fox Network. (Rimshot.) The series' creators, all of whom had gained a lot of experience while working on the Simpsons, designed their series almost as an exercise in creating a good storytelling engine; the futuristic setting allowed for any number of stories set on any number of distant, quirky planets, and the delivery-service that the show centered on gave them a good reason for going there. Fry, as an unfrozen 20th century guy, served as a viewpoint character and a handy source of exposition for the strange world of the future, and all of the characters had their own private frustrations and unfulfilled desires that expressed themselves in comic ways (Fry's unrequited love for Leela, Leela's need to find her true parents, Zoidberg's desire for wealth and legitimacy, et cetera.) Really, you can go back through just about every column I've done, looking at things other series did right, and you'll find them expressed in Futurama at some point or another.
But unfortunately, Fox has a love/hate relationship with sci-fi series. The executives never got behind Futurama, never understood its appeal, and seemed to go out of its way to scuttle the show. By the time the fourth season rolled around, the show's creators knew that they were going to be canceled. This actually afforded them some unique opportunities--not totally unique, of course, as there have been other series that have had the time to wrap up their dangling plot threads, but certainly Futurama was part of an exclusive group. Their final season, produced with the threat of cancellation looming over their heads, explained Leela's parentage, gave Amy and Kif a family (albeit one that could be conveniently ignored in all future episodes) and in the final episode, showed Fry and Leela finally finding each other.
All of which changed the group dynamic pretty radically, of course. That wouldn't be a problem for most canceled shows--apart from a comic-book spin-off series that seemed set in a perpetual continuity twilight of "sometime before all the big changes happened", nobody really expected the series to come back. But this is the 21st century, the new Golden Age of archival fiction, and DVD sales forced Fox to sit up and take notice of the fan following of their canceled show. (All except those execs who were beaten to death and ground into a fine powder with a million uses, of course.)
The series revived itself with straight-to-DVD movies, and one of the interesting things to notice is the way that they set about finding ways to rejigger the character dynamics to something with a bit more long-term comedic storytelling potential. So Fry and Leela took a step back from the couple they were implied to be at the end of the series, Amy and Kif took steps both forward and back, and the next release will feature a return of Mom (of the Friendly Robot Company.) The shifts aren't dramatic--but they didn't have to be, since the writers had taken a little care to hedge their bets at the end of the series. (Other series, such as the classic Britcom 'Only Fools and Horses', took less care with their "permanent" endings, and had to take more drastic measures when the show unexpectedly returned.)
So what does this say about the storytelling engine of the series? Only that in the current era, when a series can slowly build demand through DVD releases, Internet communities, and word-of-mouth, it's wise to anticipate a return for your storytelling engine. Because nowadays, the only way you'll go away for good is if you're really out of stories to tell. And that's exactly what a good storytelling engine is supposed to prevent.
(And as a small, self-indulgent aside, this marks the 300th post for Fraggmented! I don't know how big an audience I have, but at least I'm persistent.)
Futurama, Matt Groening's second television series, suffered from a single great problem that afflicts all too many science-fiction/fantasy shows. It was on the Fox Network. (Rimshot.) The series' creators, all of whom had gained a lot of experience while working on the Simpsons, designed their series almost as an exercise in creating a good storytelling engine; the futuristic setting allowed for any number of stories set on any number of distant, quirky planets, and the delivery-service that the show centered on gave them a good reason for going there. Fry, as an unfrozen 20th century guy, served as a viewpoint character and a handy source of exposition for the strange world of the future, and all of the characters had their own private frustrations and unfulfilled desires that expressed themselves in comic ways (Fry's unrequited love for Leela, Leela's need to find her true parents, Zoidberg's desire for wealth and legitimacy, et cetera.) Really, you can go back through just about every column I've done, looking at things other series did right, and you'll find them expressed in Futurama at some point or another.
But unfortunately, Fox has a love/hate relationship with sci-fi series. The executives never got behind Futurama, never understood its appeal, and seemed to go out of its way to scuttle the show. By the time the fourth season rolled around, the show's creators knew that they were going to be canceled. This actually afforded them some unique opportunities--not totally unique, of course, as there have been other series that have had the time to wrap up their dangling plot threads, but certainly Futurama was part of an exclusive group. Their final season, produced with the threat of cancellation looming over their heads, explained Leela's parentage, gave Amy and Kif a family (albeit one that could be conveniently ignored in all future episodes) and in the final episode, showed Fry and Leela finally finding each other.
All of which changed the group dynamic pretty radically, of course. That wouldn't be a problem for most canceled shows--apart from a comic-book spin-off series that seemed set in a perpetual continuity twilight of "sometime before all the big changes happened", nobody really expected the series to come back. But this is the 21st century, the new Golden Age of archival fiction, and DVD sales forced Fox to sit up and take notice of the fan following of their canceled show. (All except those execs who were beaten to death and ground into a fine powder with a million uses, of course.)
The series revived itself with straight-to-DVD movies, and one of the interesting things to notice is the way that they set about finding ways to rejigger the character dynamics to something with a bit more long-term comedic storytelling potential. So Fry and Leela took a step back from the couple they were implied to be at the end of the series, Amy and Kif took steps both forward and back, and the next release will feature a return of Mom (of the Friendly Robot Company.) The shifts aren't dramatic--but they didn't have to be, since the writers had taken a little care to hedge their bets at the end of the series. (Other series, such as the classic Britcom 'Only Fools and Horses', took less care with their "permanent" endings, and had to take more drastic measures when the show unexpectedly returned.)
So what does this say about the storytelling engine of the series? Only that in the current era, when a series can slowly build demand through DVD releases, Internet communities, and word-of-mouth, it's wise to anticipate a return for your storytelling engine. Because nowadays, the only way you'll go away for good is if you're really out of stories to tell. And that's exactly what a good storytelling engine is supposed to prevent.
(And as a small, self-indulgent aside, this marks the 300th post for Fraggmented! I don't know how big an audience I have, but at least I'm persistent.)
Friday, September 19, 2008
The Theory Of Idea Consistency
So I've been reading 'The Making of Star Wars' and 'The Making of Indiana Jones' (both big, thick, meaty books that you could probably use for weight training), and it got me thinking a bit about George Lucas...and then I read 'When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?', one of George Carlin's last books, and I noticed something they had in common. They're both ferociously lazy. Lucas has had a downturn in quality ever since the early 1990s, and 'When Will Jesus...' reads like it wasn't edited at all. (Seriously, it reads like Carlin just typed until he'd gotten three hundred pages of words, and his editor just rubber-stamped it.)
And this got me formulating a theory. (Actually, a hypothesis, but I don't think we'll need to worry about the scientific community's opinions on this.) My theory is this: All creative people have roughly the same percentage of good ideas.
Now, that doesn't mean all creative people are the same; Lucas is an absolutely brilliant visionary, and anyone who doubts that should really read 'The Making of Star Wars' to see just how ahead of the curve he was, and just how much that movie transformed film-making as we know it. But the other thing you notice when you read 'The Making of Star Wars' is just how much he was throwing out. He was constantly redrafting and redefining and recreating the script from the frankly incoherent gibberish it started as into one of the truly timeless and enduring films of the 20th century. In other words, some people have better good ideas than others, some people have more ideas than others, some people's internal crap detectors are better than others, but everyone is churning out about the same percentage of good ideas.
This is the problem with guys who make it big, like Lucas and Carlin (and I'll toss in Frank Miller here, too, and I'm sure commenters can add to the list ad nauseum.) Everyone, no matter how brilliant, needs some help in sorting out the good ideas from the bad ideas. Nobody's crap detector is one hundred percent perfect. So when Lucas had to justify his every idea to a skeptical studio, he was forced to sharpen and trim and cut all the weak stuff out. When he had $200 million just lying around to make a movie with and a studio begging to distribute it sight unseen, he made a movie that was flabby, underthought, and with a lot of bad ideas overshadowing the good stuff. (And again, I say this as someone who really does think Lucas is brilliant, and it's one of the great tragedies of Hollywood film-making that 'Star Wars' soured him on directing for so long.)
Ultimately, what I'm saying is that there's a belief in the creative industries (film, prose, music, et cetera) that the vision of the artist is paramount, and that all oversight ever does is compromise it. Everyone wants to see the "Director's Cut", everyone complains about the editor butchering the work, everyone thinks that this story would be better if the artist was just left alone. But it's not true. For every one empty suit that just doesn't get it, there are a dozen talented editors and producers who can function as additional crap detectors, helping you sort your good stuff from your bad. And when you become too successful to listen to them, your work is bound to suffer.
Your work, that is. Everything I write is brilliant.
And this got me formulating a theory. (Actually, a hypothesis, but I don't think we'll need to worry about the scientific community's opinions on this.) My theory is this: All creative people have roughly the same percentage of good ideas.
Now, that doesn't mean all creative people are the same; Lucas is an absolutely brilliant visionary, and anyone who doubts that should really read 'The Making of Star Wars' to see just how ahead of the curve he was, and just how much that movie transformed film-making as we know it. But the other thing you notice when you read 'The Making of Star Wars' is just how much he was throwing out. He was constantly redrafting and redefining and recreating the script from the frankly incoherent gibberish it started as into one of the truly timeless and enduring films of the 20th century. In other words, some people have better good ideas than others, some people have more ideas than others, some people's internal crap detectors are better than others, but everyone is churning out about the same percentage of good ideas.
This is the problem with guys who make it big, like Lucas and Carlin (and I'll toss in Frank Miller here, too, and I'm sure commenters can add to the list ad nauseum.) Everyone, no matter how brilliant, needs some help in sorting out the good ideas from the bad ideas. Nobody's crap detector is one hundred percent perfect. So when Lucas had to justify his every idea to a skeptical studio, he was forced to sharpen and trim and cut all the weak stuff out. When he had $200 million just lying around to make a movie with and a studio begging to distribute it sight unseen, he made a movie that was flabby, underthought, and with a lot of bad ideas overshadowing the good stuff. (And again, I say this as someone who really does think Lucas is brilliant, and it's one of the great tragedies of Hollywood film-making that 'Star Wars' soured him on directing for so long.)
Ultimately, what I'm saying is that there's a belief in the creative industries (film, prose, music, et cetera) that the vision of the artist is paramount, and that all oversight ever does is compromise it. Everyone wants to see the "Director's Cut", everyone complains about the editor butchering the work, everyone thinks that this story would be better if the artist was just left alone. But it's not true. For every one empty suit that just doesn't get it, there are a dozen talented editors and producers who can function as additional crap detectors, helping you sort your good stuff from your bad. And when you become too successful to listen to them, your work is bound to suffer.
Your work, that is. Everything I write is brilliant.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Storytelling Engines: The Simpsons
(or "And Then The Children Were Rescued By...Oh, Let's Say Moe.")
The storytelling engine of the Simpson family is a pretty familiar one to anyone who watches television. The average family with a not-so-average life is pretty familiar ground for television comedy, and has been ever since the days of 'I Love Lucy'. Matt Groening (who supposedly based the series on his own family) created a deceptively simple family structure that generates plenty of stories--the dumb-but-loveable dad, the mischievous-but-good-at-heart son, the intelligent-but-socially-awkward daughter, and the slightly-stir-crazy stay-at-home mom each have their own reasons to provide the writer with storylines (and hyphens, apparently.) Groening's main contribution to the genre was to open up the throttle slightly in a way that works well with the choice of cartoons as a way to deliver the series. Homer isn't just dumb, he's cartoonishly stupid. Bart isn't just mischievous, he's cartoonishly wicked, et cetera, et cetera.
The series developed the other elements of its storytelling engine over its first few seasons, bringing in supporting characters like Moe and Barney, settings like the nuclear power plant and the school, and gradually developing more ways to generate stories as it went on. This is pretty much par for the course with any sitcom (although as a cartoon, the Simpsons have the advantage of not having to worry about actor availability. You can develop a much larger supporting cast when they're all really Hank Azaria.) Again, this is nothing we haven't seen in any sitcom.
But all family sitcoms suffer from the same problem--there's only a limited number of stories you can tell that don't fundamentally break the status quo (and let's not forget, the "status quo" is simply the set of elements making up the current storytelling engine.) One of the key elements of a family sitcom is that in the end, despite the wacky adventures, the family finds a way to put things right at the end of every episode. The more wild the adventure, the harder it is to put things right, and so eventually sitcoms falter as they run out of new wacky adventures.
Which is where the Simpsons broke ranks, back in Season Five. Oh, sure, they'd had a few adventures that were a little outrageous, ones that maybe stretched the limits of the audience's belief that things would really be "back to normal", but the episode 'Homer Loves Flanders' marked a real departure in the series' whole direction. In it, Homer becomes best friends with annoying goody two-shoes Ned Flanders, and at the end of the episode, nothing occurs to break up their friendship. Indeed, they deepen their mutual respect for each other in the episode's climax, prompting Lisa to comment, "Is this the end to our wacky adventures?"
And then the episode ends with a coda, where "next week", Homer hates Flanders as if nothing had ever happened. From that point on, the Simpsons operates on the assumption that unless a future episode explicitly mentions a change to the status quo, it's assumed that everything simply resets back to the default state. So Apu and Manjoula really get married, because she shows up in later episodes, but Bart and Lisa don't wind up trapped on a desert island along with the whole class of Springfield Elementary.
This is a whole new kind of idea, a post-modern take on the storytelling engine that takes it for granted that the audience is not only familiar with the storytelling engine of the Simpsons, but the concept of a storytelling engine in general and the way that a sitcom works. It allows the writers much more creative freedom than the traditional sitcom--they don't have to come up with an ending that returns everything to normal, they just have to take their ideas as far as they can logically go, and let the audience's knowledge of the "sitcom rules" do the rest. Arguably, the series has overused the idea a bit, as it moves on into its twentieth season, but then again, the very fact that it even has a twentieth season, when such legendary sitcoms as 'The Cosby Show' and 'All In the Family' didn't even run for half that length, shows that the Simpsons' elasticity is one of the overlooked elements to their long-running sucess.
The storytelling engine of the Simpson family is a pretty familiar one to anyone who watches television. The average family with a not-so-average life is pretty familiar ground for television comedy, and has been ever since the days of 'I Love Lucy'. Matt Groening (who supposedly based the series on his own family) created a deceptively simple family structure that generates plenty of stories--the dumb-but-loveable dad, the mischievous-but-good-at-heart son, the intelligent-but-socially-awkward daughter, and the slightly-stir-crazy stay-at-home mom each have their own reasons to provide the writer with storylines (and hyphens, apparently.) Groening's main contribution to the genre was to open up the throttle slightly in a way that works well with the choice of cartoons as a way to deliver the series. Homer isn't just dumb, he's cartoonishly stupid. Bart isn't just mischievous, he's cartoonishly wicked, et cetera, et cetera.
The series developed the other elements of its storytelling engine over its first few seasons, bringing in supporting characters like Moe and Barney, settings like the nuclear power plant and the school, and gradually developing more ways to generate stories as it went on. This is pretty much par for the course with any sitcom (although as a cartoon, the Simpsons have the advantage of not having to worry about actor availability. You can develop a much larger supporting cast when they're all really Hank Azaria.) Again, this is nothing we haven't seen in any sitcom.
But all family sitcoms suffer from the same problem--there's only a limited number of stories you can tell that don't fundamentally break the status quo (and let's not forget, the "status quo" is simply the set of elements making up the current storytelling engine.) One of the key elements of a family sitcom is that in the end, despite the wacky adventures, the family finds a way to put things right at the end of every episode. The more wild the adventure, the harder it is to put things right, and so eventually sitcoms falter as they run out of new wacky adventures.
Which is where the Simpsons broke ranks, back in Season Five. Oh, sure, they'd had a few adventures that were a little outrageous, ones that maybe stretched the limits of the audience's belief that things would really be "back to normal", but the episode 'Homer Loves Flanders' marked a real departure in the series' whole direction. In it, Homer becomes best friends with annoying goody two-shoes Ned Flanders, and at the end of the episode, nothing occurs to break up their friendship. Indeed, they deepen their mutual respect for each other in the episode's climax, prompting Lisa to comment, "Is this the end to our wacky adventures?"
And then the episode ends with a coda, where "next week", Homer hates Flanders as if nothing had ever happened. From that point on, the Simpsons operates on the assumption that unless a future episode explicitly mentions a change to the status quo, it's assumed that everything simply resets back to the default state. So Apu and Manjoula really get married, because she shows up in later episodes, but Bart and Lisa don't wind up trapped on a desert island along with the whole class of Springfield Elementary.
This is a whole new kind of idea, a post-modern take on the storytelling engine that takes it for granted that the audience is not only familiar with the storytelling engine of the Simpsons, but the concept of a storytelling engine in general and the way that a sitcom works. It allows the writers much more creative freedom than the traditional sitcom--they don't have to come up with an ending that returns everything to normal, they just have to take their ideas as far as they can logically go, and let the audience's knowledge of the "sitcom rules" do the rest. Arguably, the series has overused the idea a bit, as it moves on into its twentieth season, but then again, the very fact that it even has a twentieth season, when such legendary sitcoms as 'The Cosby Show' and 'All In the Family' didn't even run for half that length, shows that the Simpsons' elasticity is one of the overlooked elements to their long-running sucess.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
What It's Like To Be An American Right Now
It's like when you're in the last reel of a horror movie, and the surviving characters have almost made it back out of the house with the zombie psycho-killer in it, and you're trying to figure out if they're going to go for the uplifting ending, where they escape into a glorious sunrise of a bright tomorrow, or if the door's going to slam shut on them at the last second and they're going to be trapped in the darkness for another four years.
Er, I mean...another night of terror.
God, I can't wait for the election to come around. I can't stand the suspense much longer.
Er, I mean...another night of terror.
God, I can't wait for the election to come around. I can't stand the suspense much longer.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Storytelling Engines: Doctor Who
(or "The Perfect Engine")
Disclaimer time, here: I'm a bit biased when it comes to Doctor Who. I've been watching the series since I was two years old, I have loads of Doctor Who DVDs and videos, and I currently type this in a room with bookshelves stacked from top to bottom with Doctor Who novels, Doctor Who trade paperbacks, Doctor Who audio plays, and non-fiction books about Doctor Who.
On the other hand, a) that does make me pretty well-informed on the series, in all its various incarnations, and b) that's a lot of incarnations of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is one of those rare concepts that has been adapted to every medium; there have been Doctor Who stage plays, Doctor Who poems, Doctor Who movies and radio plays and comics and yes, a television show that still holds the record as the longest-running science-fiction series in television history. So what is it that makes the concept of Doctor Who as enduring as Superman, Batman, and Sherlock Holmes?
The key, I think, is to look at the elements that have persisted throughout its forty-five year history. Because actors have come and gone, characters and settings have changed, and the show has constantly renewed itself over the years ("regenerated", one might say.) But the constant? It's about a mysterious man with a magic box that can go anywhere in time and space.
That's a concept that doesn't need any help at all to generate ideas. The supporting cast can change, the antagonists can come and go, but any writer who can't do something with "anywhere in time and space" doesn't have any business being a writer. Every other book, every other storytelling engine can be ground up and fed into Doctor Who's mill. The Doctor can wander through any historical adventure, he can bump into any science fiction trope, and because of that, there's no end to the number of potential adventures he might have. The only limitation on the series becomes the length of time an actor is willing to put into the part, and a stroke of genius early on even solved that problem.
Even the Doctor's enemies are endlessly reusable. Pitting him against monsters instead of villains allows writers to bring back even the most definitively-killed enemies for another go-round; when you fight entire species of bad guys, nothing short of an extinction-level event is going to stop you from coming back to challenge the Doctor again and again. (And as the Daleks have proven, even those aren't necessarily a barrier. Time machine, remember?)
The strength of Doctor Who is that its concept is so simple and elegant that it can be adapted to fit any other parts that come to mind. It's like a Universal Adaptor for stories, constantly renewing itself by learning from the things around it. One day it's Hammer Horror, the next it's Buffy with time travel. In a hundred years' time, when so many series have been forgotten, I fully expect to see the Thirtieth Doctor and his companions fighting the Daleks on some alien planet. And I look forward to every story between now and then.
Disclaimer time, here: I'm a bit biased when it comes to Doctor Who. I've been watching the series since I was two years old, I have loads of Doctor Who DVDs and videos, and I currently type this in a room with bookshelves stacked from top to bottom with Doctor Who novels, Doctor Who trade paperbacks, Doctor Who audio plays, and non-fiction books about Doctor Who.
On the other hand, a) that does make me pretty well-informed on the series, in all its various incarnations, and b) that's a lot of incarnations of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is one of those rare concepts that has been adapted to every medium; there have been Doctor Who stage plays, Doctor Who poems, Doctor Who movies and radio plays and comics and yes, a television show that still holds the record as the longest-running science-fiction series in television history. So what is it that makes the concept of Doctor Who as enduring as Superman, Batman, and Sherlock Holmes?
The key, I think, is to look at the elements that have persisted throughout its forty-five year history. Because actors have come and gone, characters and settings have changed, and the show has constantly renewed itself over the years ("regenerated", one might say.) But the constant? It's about a mysterious man with a magic box that can go anywhere in time and space.
That's a concept that doesn't need any help at all to generate ideas. The supporting cast can change, the antagonists can come and go, but any writer who can't do something with "anywhere in time and space" doesn't have any business being a writer. Every other book, every other storytelling engine can be ground up and fed into Doctor Who's mill. The Doctor can wander through any historical adventure, he can bump into any science fiction trope, and because of that, there's no end to the number of potential adventures he might have. The only limitation on the series becomes the length of time an actor is willing to put into the part, and a stroke of genius early on even solved that problem.
Even the Doctor's enemies are endlessly reusable. Pitting him against monsters instead of villains allows writers to bring back even the most definitively-killed enemies for another go-round; when you fight entire species of bad guys, nothing short of an extinction-level event is going to stop you from coming back to challenge the Doctor again and again. (And as the Daleks have proven, even those aren't necessarily a barrier. Time machine, remember?)
The strength of Doctor Who is that its concept is so simple and elegant that it can be adapted to fit any other parts that come to mind. It's like a Universal Adaptor for stories, constantly renewing itself by learning from the things around it. One day it's Hammer Horror, the next it's Buffy with time travel. In a hundred years' time, when so many series have been forgotten, I fully expect to see the Thirtieth Doctor and his companions fighting the Daleks on some alien planet. And I look forward to every story between now and then.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Meet 'N Greet #5
A little something different for this one--this is a character I actually deleted, because I didn't like the way it played, but I love the concept, so I'm keeping him alive in some small way by blogging about him here.
We all know about the famous secret bio-weapons projects the US government runs. They're well-known for concealing plans to make the ultimate living weapon, some sort of perfect killing machine with, say, razor-sharp claws, and perhaps some sort of, oh, I don't know, healing factor. Just as a hypothetical example. (Wink wink, nudge nudge.)
But what's less known is that there are also Brazilian secret bio-weapons programs. They use the molds from the American bio-weapons programs, and then repackage the resultant living weapons under a generic name because they're cheaper. Sure, it violates trademark and copyright, but nobody really cares about the kind of cheap, imported killing machines you can buy in the dollar store, ones with bad paint jobs and the chest logo put on with a sticker. (Damn, lost the subtle thread of the analogy there...)
That's what this character was--the generic Brazilian knock-off of a famous mutant super-soldier. Created from a different secret weapons program, made for cheap with a bad costume and no real personality, he's not Weapon X...
He is...Brand X!
We all know about the famous secret bio-weapons projects the US government runs. They're well-known for concealing plans to make the ultimate living weapon, some sort of perfect killing machine with, say, razor-sharp claws, and perhaps some sort of, oh, I don't know, healing factor. Just as a hypothetical example. (Wink wink, nudge nudge.)
But what's less known is that there are also Brazilian secret bio-weapons programs. They use the molds from the American bio-weapons programs, and then repackage the resultant living weapons under a generic name because they're cheaper. Sure, it violates trademark and copyright, but nobody really cares about the kind of cheap, imported killing machines you can buy in the dollar store, ones with bad paint jobs and the chest logo put on with a sticker. (Damn, lost the subtle thread of the analogy there...)
That's what this character was--the generic Brazilian knock-off of a famous mutant super-soldier. Created from a different secret weapons program, made for cheap with a bad costume and no real personality, he's not Weapon X...
He is...Brand X!
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Storytelling Engines: Star Wars
(or "Parts Do Not An Engine Make")
When the Star Wars saga resumed, in 1991, it was with Timothy Zahn's sleek thriller 'Heir to the Empire' (and with the rejoicing of a generation of grown-up Star Wars geeks.) The series picked up five years after the end of the classic trilogy, featuring a sinister, calculating general in the mold of Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin, with a plan to restore the glory of the Empire and defeat the hated Rebellion.
The "Thrawn trilogy" proved popular enough to unleash a torrent of spin-offs, from comic book series like 'Dark Empire' (featuring a reborn Emperor), to 'Knights of the Old Republic' (featuring a Sith Lord, Exar Kun, and Ulic Qel-Droma, the Jedi he seduced to the Dark Side) to novels like 'The Courtship of Princess Leia' (featuring an Emperor-like Dark Jedi named Gethzerion), to the 'Jedi Academy' series of novels (featuring a Dark Jedi whom Luke must help redeem), to 'Darksaber' (featuring an evil Hutt who is Jabba the Hutt's successor) to the "Rogue Squadron" series of both novels and comics (featuring Ysenne Isard, another Tarkin-esque figure), to the massive 'Shadows of the Empire' project, which crossed over into just about every medium other than film (and centered around a Jabba-esque crimelord...)
Do you start to see the issue, here? It's not fair to suggest that the ancillary Star Wars stories are derivative, but the villains for a lot of the spin-offs do tend to fit neatly into the mold of either being like Tarkin, Vader, the Emperor, or Jabba the Hutt...coincidentally, the four main villainous characters in the classic trilogy. The series seems to be trying endlessly to replace the villains Lucas finished off in his final movie (or, in the case of Tarkin, his first.) Some uncharitable types might say that it's because the authors who've written for the Star Wars spin-offs are unimaginative, but I think it's actually down to the nature of the universe they're writing for.
Because Lucas didn't intend for Star Wars to be a storytelling engine. Sure, he put in tons of detail--the series is known for the thousands of tiny little elements, in the dialogue, the costuming, the special effects, and the entire aesthetic of the series that all combine to form a galaxy that seems limitless and filled with potential. But Lucas didn't do that to create an engine to tell lots and lots of stories--he did it to make the one story he wanted to tell seem immersive and real. The Star Wars movies aren't open-ended; they're the tale of Darth Vader, and his fall and redemption. Details like "the Kessel run" and Krayt Dragons and bacta tanks and tibanna gas and the temples on Yavin are there for verisimilitude. Even the title, 'Episode IV', was put there originally just to give you the sense that you've entered into a story that has a history. (Lucas, of course, claims that he had Episodes I-III planned out all along. But when you have a draft of 'Empire' that has Lando being a descendant of the evil clones that the Jedi fought during the Clone Wars, it does make that claim a bit suspect.)
The key sign of the lack of a deliberate, designed storytelling engine in Star Wars is the lack of villains. Lucas designed his story to have a beginning, middle, and an end, and he neatly made sure that all the major villains of the piece got their comeuppance by that ending. And there's nothing wrong with that, of course. Nobody has to plan for a series to come out of the story they want to tell, and nobody has to think in terms of a potentially endless series of sequels and spin-offs. Lucas told the story he wanted to tell, and in a very real sense, it was the audience who demanded more stories. One year's fan became another year's storyteller, filling in every detail of the universe Lucas created with meaning. But it's much easier to fill in the background of the people, places and things that make up the Star Wars universe than it is to make entirely new stories set there. It's not too surprising, really, that they turned to the models Lucas had created as inspiration for their stories.
When the Star Wars saga resumed, in 1991, it was with Timothy Zahn's sleek thriller 'Heir to the Empire' (and with the rejoicing of a generation of grown-up Star Wars geeks.) The series picked up five years after the end of the classic trilogy, featuring a sinister, calculating general in the mold of Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin, with a plan to restore the glory of the Empire and defeat the hated Rebellion.
The "Thrawn trilogy" proved popular enough to unleash a torrent of spin-offs, from comic book series like 'Dark Empire' (featuring a reborn Emperor), to 'Knights of the Old Republic' (featuring a Sith Lord, Exar Kun, and Ulic Qel-Droma, the Jedi he seduced to the Dark Side) to novels like 'The Courtship of Princess Leia' (featuring an Emperor-like Dark Jedi named Gethzerion), to the 'Jedi Academy' series of novels (featuring a Dark Jedi whom Luke must help redeem), to 'Darksaber' (featuring an evil Hutt who is Jabba the Hutt's successor) to the "Rogue Squadron" series of both novels and comics (featuring Ysenne Isard, another Tarkin-esque figure), to the massive 'Shadows of the Empire' project, which crossed over into just about every medium other than film (and centered around a Jabba-esque crimelord...)
Do you start to see the issue, here? It's not fair to suggest that the ancillary Star Wars stories are derivative, but the villains for a lot of the spin-offs do tend to fit neatly into the mold of either being like Tarkin, Vader, the Emperor, or Jabba the Hutt...coincidentally, the four main villainous characters in the classic trilogy. The series seems to be trying endlessly to replace the villains Lucas finished off in his final movie (or, in the case of Tarkin, his first.) Some uncharitable types might say that it's because the authors who've written for the Star Wars spin-offs are unimaginative, but I think it's actually down to the nature of the universe they're writing for.
Because Lucas didn't intend for Star Wars to be a storytelling engine. Sure, he put in tons of detail--the series is known for the thousands of tiny little elements, in the dialogue, the costuming, the special effects, and the entire aesthetic of the series that all combine to form a galaxy that seems limitless and filled with potential. But Lucas didn't do that to create an engine to tell lots and lots of stories--he did it to make the one story he wanted to tell seem immersive and real. The Star Wars movies aren't open-ended; they're the tale of Darth Vader, and his fall and redemption. Details like "the Kessel run" and Krayt Dragons and bacta tanks and tibanna gas and the temples on Yavin are there for verisimilitude. Even the title, 'Episode IV', was put there originally just to give you the sense that you've entered into a story that has a history. (Lucas, of course, claims that he had Episodes I-III planned out all along. But when you have a draft of 'Empire' that has Lando being a descendant of the evil clones that the Jedi fought during the Clone Wars, it does make that claim a bit suspect.)
The key sign of the lack of a deliberate, designed storytelling engine in Star Wars is the lack of villains. Lucas designed his story to have a beginning, middle, and an end, and he neatly made sure that all the major villains of the piece got their comeuppance by that ending. And there's nothing wrong with that, of course. Nobody has to plan for a series to come out of the story they want to tell, and nobody has to think in terms of a potentially endless series of sequels and spin-offs. Lucas told the story he wanted to tell, and in a very real sense, it was the audience who demanded more stories. One year's fan became another year's storyteller, filling in every detail of the universe Lucas created with meaning. But it's much easier to fill in the background of the people, places and things that make up the Star Wars universe than it is to make entirely new stories set there. It's not too surprising, really, that they turned to the models Lucas had created as inspiration for their stories.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Zipping Off
Just a quick note to say that I'll be heading out to DragonCon tomorrow afternoon. There may or may not be a Thursday post, depending on the Net access situation at the con. Either way, normal service should resume by Tuesday of next week. (Which probably does mean a slight delay on the Storytelling Engines post, as I'll be in transit on Monday.)
If for some reason you're actually interested in meeting me at the con, I'll try (again, depending on Net access) to update this post with a list of where I'll be...but in general, assume that any kind of panel relating to Doctor Who, Firefly, or MST3K, there's at least a chance you'll bump into me.
And remember, if you plan to punch me for the 'How To Save Marvel Comics' entries, I just ask for a five-second head start.
If for some reason you're actually interested in meeting me at the con, I'll try (again, depending on Net access) to update this post with a list of where I'll be...but in general, assume that any kind of panel relating to Doctor Who, Firefly, or MST3K, there's at least a chance you'll bump into me.
And remember, if you plan to punch me for the 'How To Save Marvel Comics' entries, I just ask for a five-second head start.
Friday, August 22, 2008
The Video Game Museum
So try to follow along with my reasoning on this one. I was thinking about video games the other day, and about how many people see them as a valid form of artistic expression, just like prose, poetry, sculpture, or film. They're not just a game, they are a legitimate cultural phenomenon.
"That's true," I told myself (yes, I do argue with myself. I have a very solitary job, and sometimes I'm my own best company.) "But that makes it sadder that there's no real archival tradition in video games the way there is in other forms of art. People work to preserve old books, old sculptures, and old movies, but because video games are reliant on hardware as well as software, and because hardware progresses so rapidly, there's no real way for a new generation to rediscover old classics."
I pointed out to myself that this wasn't entirely true, because many video games are re-released for new systems and new formats. "Yes," I thought, "but that's reliant on the goodwill and commercial interests of the video game developers. Sure, they might reissue some 'classic' games, maybe even remaster and remake them. But still, the vast majority of classic games will fall through the cracks. You can't play a Super Nintendo game on a Wii, is what it boils down to. Without access to the older systems, the older games and the cultural traditions behind them can really only be passed down from gamer to gamer orally. There's no museum to--"
And then I pictured it in my head. A museum devoted entirely to video games. Starting with the first primitive Pong machines, developing through the years to the branching of genres into FPS, platformers, RPGs, MMOs, puzzle games...and the best part is, it could be made interactive so easily! You wouldn't just see an exhibit on Tetris, you'd be able to sit down and play a game! You wouldn't just see pictures of 'Resident Evil', you'd be able to see the classic cut-scenes playing out right in front of you, and understand exactly why older gamers crack up at the phrase, "the master of unlocking"! The cultural phenomenon that is video games might finally get the respect it deserves!
It'd have to involve corporate sponsorship, of course. Not only is it expensive to build and maintain the kind of museum I'm talking about, but the major video game companies have archival material that the museum would pretty much have to have, by necessity. But I think that any sane company would jump at the chance to help sponsor a museum that would promote their medium to this degree--wouldn't Nintendo love to help out with an "Evolution of Mario" exhibit, for example? Heck, even the gift shop would have synergy. Tour the museum, check out the classic games, then buy reissued editions to take home with you!
It's a huge, daunting task to even consider, and I'll admit I don't know the first thing about how you start a museum. But I think it's an idea with real commercial potential, a solid concept with an eager fanbase willing to support it, and a cool idea for a tourist destination. Anyone out there who does know how to start a museum agree with me?
"That's true," I told myself (yes, I do argue with myself. I have a very solitary job, and sometimes I'm my own best company.) "But that makes it sadder that there's no real archival tradition in video games the way there is in other forms of art. People work to preserve old books, old sculptures, and old movies, but because video games are reliant on hardware as well as software, and because hardware progresses so rapidly, there's no real way for a new generation to rediscover old classics."
I pointed out to myself that this wasn't entirely true, because many video games are re-released for new systems and new formats. "Yes," I thought, "but that's reliant on the goodwill and commercial interests of the video game developers. Sure, they might reissue some 'classic' games, maybe even remaster and remake them. But still, the vast majority of classic games will fall through the cracks. You can't play a Super Nintendo game on a Wii, is what it boils down to. Without access to the older systems, the older games and the cultural traditions behind them can really only be passed down from gamer to gamer orally. There's no museum to--"
And then I pictured it in my head. A museum devoted entirely to video games. Starting with the first primitive Pong machines, developing through the years to the branching of genres into FPS, platformers, RPGs, MMOs, puzzle games...and the best part is, it could be made interactive so easily! You wouldn't just see an exhibit on Tetris, you'd be able to sit down and play a game! You wouldn't just see pictures of 'Resident Evil', you'd be able to see the classic cut-scenes playing out right in front of you, and understand exactly why older gamers crack up at the phrase, "the master of unlocking"! The cultural phenomenon that is video games might finally get the respect it deserves!
It'd have to involve corporate sponsorship, of course. Not only is it expensive to build and maintain the kind of museum I'm talking about, but the major video game companies have archival material that the museum would pretty much have to have, by necessity. But I think that any sane company would jump at the chance to help sponsor a museum that would promote their medium to this degree--wouldn't Nintendo love to help out with an "Evolution of Mario" exhibit, for example? Heck, even the gift shop would have synergy. Tour the museum, check out the classic games, then buy reissued editions to take home with you!
It's a huge, daunting task to even consider, and I'll admit I don't know the first thing about how you start a museum. But I think it's an idea with real commercial potential, a solid concept with an eager fanbase willing to support it, and a cool idea for a tourist destination. Anyone out there who does know how to start a museum agree with me?
Monday, August 18, 2008
Storytelling Engines: Angel
(or "You Knew The Job Was Dangerous When You Took It")
At some point during Season Two of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', it became obvious to the show's producers that they had a spin-off on their hands. Angel, Buffy's boyfriend on the show, was also a fairly complex protagonist in his own right, with a story that could easily become its own series. The idea of a (say it with me now) "vampire with a soul", fighting for his own personal redemption by doing good deeds...it's clever, it's got roots in popular culture ('Forever Knight' and 'Dark Shadows', for example) and it didn't hurt that David Boreanaz has some serious screen presence.
But if there's one thing that the eighty-three columns in this series has taught us, it's that a good protagonist is only the starting point for an ongoing series. Angel needed a setting, a modus operandi, a supporting cast, and some good antagonists...and they needed to give him all that without seriously disrupting the parent series. So what did they have for him? Cordelia, Buffy's sidekick's ex-girlfriend (who serves as comic relief and a damsel in distress, early on), and Whistler, a minor character introduced as Angel's old mentor. Then they found out that they didn't actually have Whistler after all.
As a result, the first season of 'Angel' does feel like a succession of false starts. Doyle is introduced as a Whistler-surrogate, then killed off (possibly due to problems with Glenn Quinn, the actor who portrayed him, although details are murky.) Cordelia then becomes the Doyle-surrogate, and Wesley, who was the Giles-surrogate for a while on 'Buffy', becomes the Cordelia-surrogate. (It's a running trend on both series that they introduce characters to act as the helpless victim who needs rescuing every week...then slowly make them more powerful and competent as they grow progressively fonder of the character, and introduce a new character to take their role of potential victim. So Giles is replaced by Wesley, Willow is replaced by Dawn, Cordelia is replaced by Wesley on 'Angel', and Wesley is, in turn, replaced by Fred. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) About the only thing that really seems to work right off the bat is Angel's nemesis, a law firm with a never-ending supply of evil called 'Wolfram and Hart'. This is a stroke of casual brilliance--by making the enemy a faceless corporation, they can establish individual villains, then dispose of them once they're no longer useful, all without getting rid of the central antagonist.
Other supporting characters show up as Season One progresses, but some find places on the series while others don't. Kate Lockley, a cop who discovers Angel's vampiric nature, never seems to really gel as a romantic interest and fades away, while Gunn, a street-smart vampire hunter, fits in quite well as a competent sidekick. By Season Two (and the arrival of fan-favorite Lorne, a demon with a nightclub and a karaoke obsession), you can see that the pieces are beginning to fall into place. More importantly, by Season Two, the writers seem to understand exactly what they're writing about, and what the concept of "fighting for his own personal redemption" means, and Season Two's storyarc is arguably the series' finest hour. (Well, it's more than an hour, but you know what I mean.)
Season Three seems to continue that trend, with Winnifred "Fred" Burkle added to the cast to replace Wesley as the smart-but-vulnerable one, but then they make a mistake that many a continuing series has made...they introduce a baby. Connor, Angel's son, is an interesting idea...but the problem with it is that creating a truly great storytelling engine is all about finding a point of balance, a setting that can generate ideas for stories without having to change the engine itself. And anyone who's spent any time around a child knows that they grow up at visible speeds. One day they're not walking, the next they are. One day they're cooing and gurgling, the next, it's "Mommy, give me milk!" A child can't be held in any kind of stability, not without making the series unbelievable.
'Angel' tries the time-tested trick all sci-fi/fantasy series pull, sooner or later, when a kid gets involved. Connor goes to a parallel dimension (the details of this handwave change, but the next bit is constant) and comes back all grown up and ready to become a regular supporting character. And that's when everything goes off the rails. Connor proves to be an unpopular addition to the cast, and Charisma Carpenter (the actress playing Cordelia) decides to leave the series to raise her own real-life infant (her pregnancy was worked into the series, but she can't send her child into a parallel dimension and pick him back up when he's seventeen.) Plus, parent series 'Buffy' is coming to a close, and 'Angel' is drawn into the events surrounding that whole mess. (And it doesn't help that many of the series' writers and producers are a bit busy trying to give 'Buffy' the send-off it deserves, and can't spare a lot of attention to 'Angel'.) The engine gets gummed up, and seems to stall completely as Season Four never quite takes off.
For the final season, they completely revamped the status quo, in ways that can best be described as "risky". Angel takes over Wolfram and Hart, trying to redeem it from within. Spike wanders over from the end of 'Buffy', which causes a problem as his character's spent the last three seasons becoming more and more like Angel (to the point where he also has a soul. As Angel put it, "I was doing that before it was cool.") There's a sense, almost from the beginning, that this isn't going to last. Sure enough, Season Five was the last season, and they go out in a blaze of glory, with many of the characters dying, and the survivors confronting the literal armies of Hell in one last, apocalyptic battle for the soul of the human race. The final line of the series..."Let's go to work."
And then they do. Remember the 'Buffy Season Eight' comics? The concept proved so popular that IDW decided to do an Angel Season Six in the medium as well. But unlike Buffy, Angel's finale didn't leave a storytelling engine there to work with, not even a radically altered one. 'Angel' ended with the Apocalypse. It's a little tricky to have a status quo after that, and sure enough, 'Angel: After the Fall' has so far been an exercise in picking up the pieces of the shattered engine and trying to put them together into a recognizable shape. Perhaps, once that's done, they can tell stories with the character again...but some finales are more final than others.
At some point during Season Two of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', it became obvious to the show's producers that they had a spin-off on their hands. Angel, Buffy's boyfriend on the show, was also a fairly complex protagonist in his own right, with a story that could easily become its own series. The idea of a (say it with me now) "vampire with a soul", fighting for his own personal redemption by doing good deeds...it's clever, it's got roots in popular culture ('Forever Knight' and 'Dark Shadows', for example) and it didn't hurt that David Boreanaz has some serious screen presence.
But if there's one thing that the eighty-three columns in this series has taught us, it's that a good protagonist is only the starting point for an ongoing series. Angel needed a setting, a modus operandi, a supporting cast, and some good antagonists...and they needed to give him all that without seriously disrupting the parent series. So what did they have for him? Cordelia, Buffy's sidekick's ex-girlfriend (who serves as comic relief and a damsel in distress, early on), and Whistler, a minor character introduced as Angel's old mentor. Then they found out that they didn't actually have Whistler after all.
As a result, the first season of 'Angel' does feel like a succession of false starts. Doyle is introduced as a Whistler-surrogate, then killed off (possibly due to problems with Glenn Quinn, the actor who portrayed him, although details are murky.) Cordelia then becomes the Doyle-surrogate, and Wesley, who was the Giles-surrogate for a while on 'Buffy', becomes the Cordelia-surrogate. (It's a running trend on both series that they introduce characters to act as the helpless victim who needs rescuing every week...then slowly make them more powerful and competent as they grow progressively fonder of the character, and introduce a new character to take their role of potential victim. So Giles is replaced by Wesley, Willow is replaced by Dawn, Cordelia is replaced by Wesley on 'Angel', and Wesley is, in turn, replaced by Fred. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) About the only thing that really seems to work right off the bat is Angel's nemesis, a law firm with a never-ending supply of evil called 'Wolfram and Hart'. This is a stroke of casual brilliance--by making the enemy a faceless corporation, they can establish individual villains, then dispose of them once they're no longer useful, all without getting rid of the central antagonist.
Other supporting characters show up as Season One progresses, but some find places on the series while others don't. Kate Lockley, a cop who discovers Angel's vampiric nature, never seems to really gel as a romantic interest and fades away, while Gunn, a street-smart vampire hunter, fits in quite well as a competent sidekick. By Season Two (and the arrival of fan-favorite Lorne, a demon with a nightclub and a karaoke obsession), you can see that the pieces are beginning to fall into place. More importantly, by Season Two, the writers seem to understand exactly what they're writing about, and what the concept of "fighting for his own personal redemption" means, and Season Two's storyarc is arguably the series' finest hour. (Well, it's more than an hour, but you know what I mean.)
Season Three seems to continue that trend, with Winnifred "Fred" Burkle added to the cast to replace Wesley as the smart-but-vulnerable one, but then they make a mistake that many a continuing series has made...they introduce a baby. Connor, Angel's son, is an interesting idea...but the problem with it is that creating a truly great storytelling engine is all about finding a point of balance, a setting that can generate ideas for stories without having to change the engine itself. And anyone who's spent any time around a child knows that they grow up at visible speeds. One day they're not walking, the next they are. One day they're cooing and gurgling, the next, it's "Mommy, give me milk!" A child can't be held in any kind of stability, not without making the series unbelievable.
'Angel' tries the time-tested trick all sci-fi/fantasy series pull, sooner or later, when a kid gets involved. Connor goes to a parallel dimension (the details of this handwave change, but the next bit is constant) and comes back all grown up and ready to become a regular supporting character. And that's when everything goes off the rails. Connor proves to be an unpopular addition to the cast, and Charisma Carpenter (the actress playing Cordelia) decides to leave the series to raise her own real-life infant (her pregnancy was worked into the series, but she can't send her child into a parallel dimension and pick him back up when he's seventeen.) Plus, parent series 'Buffy' is coming to a close, and 'Angel' is drawn into the events surrounding that whole mess. (And it doesn't help that many of the series' writers and producers are a bit busy trying to give 'Buffy' the send-off it deserves, and can't spare a lot of attention to 'Angel'.) The engine gets gummed up, and seems to stall completely as Season Four never quite takes off.
For the final season, they completely revamped the status quo, in ways that can best be described as "risky". Angel takes over Wolfram and Hart, trying to redeem it from within. Spike wanders over from the end of 'Buffy', which causes a problem as his character's spent the last three seasons becoming more and more like Angel (to the point where he also has a soul. As Angel put it, "I was doing that before it was cool.") There's a sense, almost from the beginning, that this isn't going to last. Sure enough, Season Five was the last season, and they go out in a blaze of glory, with many of the characters dying, and the survivors confronting the literal armies of Hell in one last, apocalyptic battle for the soul of the human race. The final line of the series..."Let's go to work."
And then they do. Remember the 'Buffy Season Eight' comics? The concept proved so popular that IDW decided to do an Angel Season Six in the medium as well. But unlike Buffy, Angel's finale didn't leave a storytelling engine there to work with, not even a radically altered one. 'Angel' ended with the Apocalypse. It's a little tricky to have a status quo after that, and sure enough, 'Angel: After the Fall' has so far been an exercise in picking up the pieces of the shattered engine and trying to put them together into a recognizable shape. Perhaps, once that's done, they can tell stories with the character again...but some finales are more final than others.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Observational Humor, Olympic Edition
Rough transcript of an actual conversation I had with a friend/co-worker last night:
HIM: So have you heard about the big controversy over China's gymnasts yet? They're taking shots at them, saying that they've faked their birth certificates and they're not really sixteen.
ME: No, I've missed most of the Olympics so far. So are they supposed to be secretly younger, or secretly older?
HIM: Younger. The idea is that hitting puberty changes their bodies, and that a lot of gymnasts never recover from that.
ME: Gotcha. So sixteen is the "age of consent" for gymnasts...
HIM: Right.
ME: And they're worried China might be engaging in a little "statutory gymnastics"?
HIM: Yeah--
ME: So do you suppose the gymnastics coaches keep track of the minimum age to enter different competitions, and they're all like, "Oh, sure, for the Olympics it's sixteen, but I hear there's a competition in Canada where she only has to be thirteen..."?
HIM: Uh-huh, yeah--
ME: And they've got up posters of their favorite gymnasts, with little calendars marking off the number of days left until they turn sixteen and they can coach them legally?
HIM: Yes, yes--
ME: And 'Dateline NBC' has this segment where they get people to enter chat rooms, posing as underage gymnasts, and then when the coach goes to their house, they've got cameras and the International Olympic Committee there waiting for them.
HIM: Done now?
ME: Yeah, I don't think I can top that last one.
(Addendum: Tonight, he mentioned that China's now being asked to provide more evidence of the gymnasts' ages. I said China was going to be all like, "No, really, she told me she was eighteen!")
HIM: So have you heard about the big controversy over China's gymnasts yet? They're taking shots at them, saying that they've faked their birth certificates and they're not really sixteen.
ME: No, I've missed most of the Olympics so far. So are they supposed to be secretly younger, or secretly older?
HIM: Younger. The idea is that hitting puberty changes their bodies, and that a lot of gymnasts never recover from that.
ME: Gotcha. So sixteen is the "age of consent" for gymnasts...
HIM: Right.
ME: And they're worried China might be engaging in a little "statutory gymnastics"?
HIM: Yeah--
ME: So do you suppose the gymnastics coaches keep track of the minimum age to enter different competitions, and they're all like, "Oh, sure, for the Olympics it's sixteen, but I hear there's a competition in Canada where she only has to be thirteen..."?
HIM: Uh-huh, yeah--
ME: And they've got up posters of their favorite gymnasts, with little calendars marking off the number of days left until they turn sixteen and they can coach them legally?
HIM: Yes, yes--
ME: And 'Dateline NBC' has this segment where they get people to enter chat rooms, posing as underage gymnasts, and then when the coach goes to their house, they've got cameras and the International Olympic Committee there waiting for them.
HIM: Done now?
ME: Yeah, I don't think I can top that last one.
(Addendum: Tonight, he mentioned that China's now being asked to provide more evidence of the gymnasts' ages. I said China was going to be all like, "No, really, she told me she was eighteen!")
Monday, August 11, 2008
Storytelling Engines: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(or "Can't Stop The Changes")
So, now that we've discussed Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Superman, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Man-Thing, the Flash, the Martian Manhunter, the Legion of Super-Heroes, Captain Marvel (both of them), Thor, Captain America, and Daredevil, let's see what's on TV, shall we?
Of course, 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' isn't on TV anymore, except in reruns. It started out as a movie, then became a TV series (with ancillary books and comics), and now continues on exclusively as a comic book. Why? Why not keep going with the TV show indefinitely? The answer to that question provides a valuable insight into why it is that even the best of TV series don't last as long as a comic or book series. It's all down to the storytelling engine...and those pesky, fickle beasts known as actors.
'Buffy', of course, has one of the all-time great high concept storytelling engines. Sunnydale High is sitting, quite literally, on the mouth of Hell, and all sorts of demons, vampires, and long-leggedy beasties crawl out every week to menace the student body...opposed only by Buffy Summers, who wants to be popular and academically successful, but who has this side job that keeps getting in the way, and her loyal band of friends. Xander and Willow fill the roles of kid sidekicks, providing valuable sources of exposition and convenient sources of peril for Buffy to rescue, and Giles works well both as her mentor, and as a further source of exposition. The series also rounds out with Angel as a love interest/secondary hero, Cordelia as comic relief, and a wide range of good tertiary supporting characters. Heck, it's even got a good rogue's gallery. The Mayor, for example, is an absolutely brilliant villain.
"High school is hell." It's an idea that sells itself. Nobody was ever so popular that the traumas of high school don't have a little hold on their soul, and everyone has some sort of horror story about their teenage years. And all they need to do is ramp that horror story up with a little supernatural horror, and voila! Instant Buffy story, just add vampires.
And if this was where they stayed, it would be a perfect storytelling engine. Indeed, the Buffy comics released by Dark Horse tended to do exactly that. With the exception of a few stories written to fill obvious continuity gaps (how did Giles become Buffy's Watcher, how did the move to Sunnydale go, et cetera), most of the Dark Horse comic series tended to be set during Season Three, the period where the storytelling engine was most stable. Even the proposed animated series was going to be set during the group's high school era. So why didn't they just keep them in high school?
Because actors, unlike pen-and-ink drawings, have an annoying tendency to age. Sarah Michelle Gellar was already playing a character four years younger than her; trying to stretch her high school years out over seven seasons simply wasn't an option. So, three years into the series, Buffy and the gang graduate...and things are never quite the same after that. Which isn't unusual for a series set around a high school environment; high school works because it's universal, but we all go on to do different things after graduation. 'Dawson's Creek' never recovered from having its characters graduate, nor did 'Beverly Hills 90210'...could Buffy break that curse?
It started, in Season Four, by setting up the new storytelling engine for the series. Most of the cast went to the local college...with the exception of Cordelia and Angel, who got their own spin-off series and left big "Cordy and Angel" shaped holes in the storytelling engine. Cordy's role was filled by snarky ex-demon Anya, while Angel's part was filled by an amiable lug by the name of Riley Finn, who also happened to be a part of the secret military conspiracy on campus. The series quickly reshaped itself as a college drama with monsters, instead of a high school drama with monsters...
And then, in Season Five, abruptly dropped the concept. Over the next two seasons, they set up a new storytelling engine revolving around Buffy as caretaker of her family as her mother sickened and died and the writers introduced a new little sister (Magic. Don't ask.) Riley was ditched in favor of promoting Spike, a series villain-turned-reluctant-hero, as a new love interest (and gradually sanding off Spike's edges until he fit into that Angel-shaped hole), the supporting cast changed (Oz, Giles, and Oz-replacement Tara all left during this period), and suddenly the show was a bleak, depressing coming-of-age drama with monsters. The writers seemed to have difficulty coping with the changes to cast, the need to devote time and energy to the 'Angel' spin-off, and fundamentally, with the lack of the high school setting that was the key to the whole series concept.
So in Season Seven, it was back to the high school! Which you'd think would be tricky, since everyone graduated four years ago and the whole thing was blown up, but Buffy returns this time not as a rebellious kid, but as a guidance counselor for wayward teens. This new concept inverts the original paradigm; instead of being about how nobody understands teenagers, it's a show about how adults understand teenagers all too well, having been teenagers themselves. But by this time, Gellar wasn't interested in doing a Season Eight, and so the series finale blew up not just the rebuilt high school but the entire town, while turning hundreds of women into new Slayers.
Which is where the comic picks up. The original concept, "high school is hell", has been left completely behind for Buffy Summers as the leader of a strike team of superhuman women, dedicated to traveling the globe and wiping out supernatural evil wherever it may hide. It's a good storytelling engine, but it does lack some of the universal charm of the original series...but by this point, there's really no going back. That's the thing about changing a storytelling engine. It can be awfully hard to change back if you make a mistake. The only thing you can really do is keep moving forward, and hope you eventually find a new destination as attractive as the place you left behind.
So, now that we've discussed Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Superman, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Man-Thing, the Flash, the Martian Manhunter, the Legion of Super-Heroes, Captain Marvel (both of them), Thor, Captain America, and Daredevil, let's see what's on TV, shall we?
Of course, 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' isn't on TV anymore, except in reruns. It started out as a movie, then became a TV series (with ancillary books and comics), and now continues on exclusively as a comic book. Why? Why not keep going with the TV show indefinitely? The answer to that question provides a valuable insight into why it is that even the best of TV series don't last as long as a comic or book series. It's all down to the storytelling engine...and those pesky, fickle beasts known as actors.
'Buffy', of course, has one of the all-time great high concept storytelling engines. Sunnydale High is sitting, quite literally, on the mouth of Hell, and all sorts of demons, vampires, and long-leggedy beasties crawl out every week to menace the student body...opposed only by Buffy Summers, who wants to be popular and academically successful, but who has this side job that keeps getting in the way, and her loyal band of friends. Xander and Willow fill the roles of kid sidekicks, providing valuable sources of exposition and convenient sources of peril for Buffy to rescue, and Giles works well both as her mentor, and as a further source of exposition. The series also rounds out with Angel as a love interest/secondary hero, Cordelia as comic relief, and a wide range of good tertiary supporting characters. Heck, it's even got a good rogue's gallery. The Mayor, for example, is an absolutely brilliant villain.
"High school is hell." It's an idea that sells itself. Nobody was ever so popular that the traumas of high school don't have a little hold on their soul, and everyone has some sort of horror story about their teenage years. And all they need to do is ramp that horror story up with a little supernatural horror, and voila! Instant Buffy story, just add vampires.
And if this was where they stayed, it would be a perfect storytelling engine. Indeed, the Buffy comics released by Dark Horse tended to do exactly that. With the exception of a few stories written to fill obvious continuity gaps (how did Giles become Buffy's Watcher, how did the move to Sunnydale go, et cetera), most of the Dark Horse comic series tended to be set during Season Three, the period where the storytelling engine was most stable. Even the proposed animated series was going to be set during the group's high school era. So why didn't they just keep them in high school?
Because actors, unlike pen-and-ink drawings, have an annoying tendency to age. Sarah Michelle Gellar was already playing a character four years younger than her; trying to stretch her high school years out over seven seasons simply wasn't an option. So, three years into the series, Buffy and the gang graduate...and things are never quite the same after that. Which isn't unusual for a series set around a high school environment; high school works because it's universal, but we all go on to do different things after graduation. 'Dawson's Creek' never recovered from having its characters graduate, nor did 'Beverly Hills 90210'...could Buffy break that curse?
It started, in Season Four, by setting up the new storytelling engine for the series. Most of the cast went to the local college...with the exception of Cordelia and Angel, who got their own spin-off series and left big "Cordy and Angel" shaped holes in the storytelling engine. Cordy's role was filled by snarky ex-demon Anya, while Angel's part was filled by an amiable lug by the name of Riley Finn, who also happened to be a part of the secret military conspiracy on campus. The series quickly reshaped itself as a college drama with monsters, instead of a high school drama with monsters...
And then, in Season Five, abruptly dropped the concept. Over the next two seasons, they set up a new storytelling engine revolving around Buffy as caretaker of her family as her mother sickened and died and the writers introduced a new little sister (Magic. Don't ask.) Riley was ditched in favor of promoting Spike, a series villain-turned-reluctant-hero, as a new love interest (and gradually sanding off Spike's edges until he fit into that Angel-shaped hole), the supporting cast changed (Oz, Giles, and Oz-replacement Tara all left during this period), and suddenly the show was a bleak, depressing coming-of-age drama with monsters. The writers seemed to have difficulty coping with the changes to cast, the need to devote time and energy to the 'Angel' spin-off, and fundamentally, with the lack of the high school setting that was the key to the whole series concept.
So in Season Seven, it was back to the high school! Which you'd think would be tricky, since everyone graduated four years ago and the whole thing was blown up, but Buffy returns this time not as a rebellious kid, but as a guidance counselor for wayward teens. This new concept inverts the original paradigm; instead of being about how nobody understands teenagers, it's a show about how adults understand teenagers all too well, having been teenagers themselves. But by this time, Gellar wasn't interested in doing a Season Eight, and so the series finale blew up not just the rebuilt high school but the entire town, while turning hundreds of women into new Slayers.
Which is where the comic picks up. The original concept, "high school is hell", has been left completely behind for Buffy Summers as the leader of a strike team of superhuman women, dedicated to traveling the globe and wiping out supernatural evil wherever it may hide. It's a good storytelling engine, but it does lack some of the universal charm of the original series...but by this point, there's really no going back. That's the thing about changing a storytelling engine. It can be awfully hard to change back if you make a mistake. The only thing you can really do is keep moving forward, and hope you eventually find a new destination as attractive as the place you left behind.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Review: Cabin Fever
Someday, I hope to find myself in Hollywood. (Perhaps just visiting, the way my career's going as a writer...) But when I'm there, I hope to meet Eli Roth and shake his hand. I'll ask him, "You're Eli Roth, aren't you? The writer and director of 'Cabin Fever'?" And he'll say that yes, yes he is. And then I'll punch him in the stomach as hard as I can, and as he collapses to the ground, whimpering and clutching at his stomach, I'll say, "There. Now we're even." Then I'll kick him square in the testicles, and say, "Actually, we're not, but I don't have the stamina to keep doing this for 92 more minutes."
'Cabin Fever' is a horror movie that has the fundamental flaw of not having enough to do to justify its running time. It's very clearly a movie that was built around a couple of ideas Roth had for "really cool gory bits, like this chick is shaving her legs and the skin starts coming right off", but since each of those bits is about a minute or two long, and he doesn't have more than three or four of them, he must have realized at some point that his potential movie was about eighty minutes short of the running time of a theatrical release motion picture.
Roth solved this dilemma through a technique I like to call "pointless, rambling bullshit," in which the director films unlikeable characters saying random things and walking around deserted locations, while playing "spooky" music in the background and hoping that you'll be fooled into believing something might be happening. If you're not, those eighty minutes are excruciating torment. (Hint: I wasn't.)
And by the way, when I say "unlikeable"...wow. I'll give Roth some credit, I actually think that the lead characters were intended to be unsympathetic. I think it was a bold tack, making a horror movie in which you actually root for the death sequences, inverting the usual horror paradigm so that instead of hoping a particular character survives to the end, you'll be hoping a particular character dies a well-deserved horrible death. The problem is, he does his job too well. I found myself wanting to fast-forward the movie through to the point where everyone was dead, and I don't just mean the characters.
I'll give it some points: The special effects are excellent, Roth the director does his best to take the weak, watery gruel that Roth the writer has given him and play it out for suspense, but fundamentally, it's the bloated corpse of a 20-minute short film, made by someone who decided that 20-minute short films don't make very much money. If you're a film editor who wants to practice his/her technique by slicing out all the padding, go ahead and watch. Otherwise, avoid avoid avoid.
'Cabin Fever' is a horror movie that has the fundamental flaw of not having enough to do to justify its running time. It's very clearly a movie that was built around a couple of ideas Roth had for "really cool gory bits, like this chick is shaving her legs and the skin starts coming right off", but since each of those bits is about a minute or two long, and he doesn't have more than three or four of them, he must have realized at some point that his potential movie was about eighty minutes short of the running time of a theatrical release motion picture.
Roth solved this dilemma through a technique I like to call "pointless, rambling bullshit," in which the director films unlikeable characters saying random things and walking around deserted locations, while playing "spooky" music in the background and hoping that you'll be fooled into believing something might be happening. If you're not, those eighty minutes are excruciating torment. (Hint: I wasn't.)
And by the way, when I say "unlikeable"...wow. I'll give Roth some credit, I actually think that the lead characters were intended to be unsympathetic. I think it was a bold tack, making a horror movie in which you actually root for the death sequences, inverting the usual horror paradigm so that instead of hoping a particular character survives to the end, you'll be hoping a particular character dies a well-deserved horrible death. The problem is, he does his job too well. I found myself wanting to fast-forward the movie through to the point where everyone was dead, and I don't just mean the characters.
I'll give it some points: The special effects are excellent, Roth the director does his best to take the weak, watery gruel that Roth the writer has given him and play it out for suspense, but fundamentally, it's the bloated corpse of a 20-minute short film, made by someone who decided that 20-minute short films don't make very much money. If you're a film editor who wants to practice his/her technique by slicing out all the padding, go ahead and watch. Otherwise, avoid avoid avoid.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
The "50 Things I Love About Comics" Meme
Saw this post up at Brad Bird's website, and I liked the thought of it, so without further ado, and in no particular order...
1) Reading 'V for Vendetta' at midnight on December 31st, 1999.
2) Ralph and Sue Dibny solving mysteries as a couple.
3) Carl Barks.
4) The Silver Age story where Superman gets in trouble with the IRS for never having paid taxes.
5) "Stupid stupid rat creatures!"
6) Spider-Man's black costume.
7) Calvin and Hobbes.
8) Flash #50, in its entirety. "You've lost the advantage of surprise!" "I've replaced it with something better. Fear."
9) Stan Lee.
10) Spider Jerusalem.
11) Ego the Living Planet hitting on Earth.
12) Steve Ditko.
13) "In loudest din, in hush profound, my ears catch evil's slightest sound..."
14) The fact that some of the people reading this just finished that variation of the Green Lantern oath.
15) The Far Side.
16) Captain America back in the 1960s, when he used to trash-talk his opponents. "My grandmother could see that punch coming!"
17) The Essentials and Showcase Presents programs from Marvel and DC, respectively, for allowing me to read just about every single classic story they ever produced.
18) Jack Kirby, for drawing and co-writing just about every single classic story Marvel and DC ever produced.
19) Watchmen.
20) "I owe you pissant white trash sons of bitches all the hurt in the motherfucking world. So who wants to get his ass kicked first?"
21) All of Stan Lee's goofy nicknames for the writers and artists. Stan "The Man" Lee, "Gentleman" Gene Colan, Jack "The King" Kirby, "Dandy" Don Heck...
22) "I can think of fourteen different ways to keep you from firing that gun. Six are painful."
23) The ending of 'DC One Million'.
24) "I'm Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. And these are my toasters."
25) Crisis on Infinite Earths.
26) 'The Anatomy Lesson'.
27) Ben Grimm, the ever-lovin' blue-eyed idol o' millions.
28) Bullpen Bulletins.
29) The Guardians of the Galaxy.
30) The story where Superman introduced Supergirl to the world.
31) Peter Parker in prison (in Web of Spider-Man #18), getting rid of a group of prison toughs by squeezing one of the struts of his bunk hard enough to leave fingerprints.
32) The Heckler.
33) Kurt Busiek's run on Thunderbolts, which single-handedly kept me from quitting comics one day.
34) Don Rosa.
35) Fred Hembeck.
36) Astro City, which has never had even a single bad issue.
37) MAD Magazine. (I could probably do a sub-listing of "50 Things I Love About MAD Magazine".)
38) The final issue of Marvel's 'Godzilla' comic, which featured the FF and the Avengers fighting Godzilla in New York City.
39) The Hobgoblin's true identity. Roger Stern is one of the quiet geniuses of comics today.
40) Spider-Man.
41) The final panel of Uncanny X-Men #132.
42) The first meeting of Power Man and Iron Fist, illustrated so wonderfully by John Byrne. "Mr. Cage...turn around."
43) Barry Ween.
44) Thor and Hulk's dialog back before Marvel writers got self-conscious about writing their dialog. "Hulk SMASH!"
45) MODOK.
46) Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's run on 'Tomb of Dracula'.
47) The letter columns that were answered "in character" by different X-Men.
48) "Oh, my stars and garters..."
49) The Absolute Edition of the Sandman.
50) Writing a letter about an imaginary issue of an imaginary comic called 'The Tomorrow Syndicate', only to have it published in 1963 #6 and answered by Alan Moore with specific details about the characters I made up and the story I pretended existed.
1) Reading 'V for Vendetta' at midnight on December 31st, 1999.
2) Ralph and Sue Dibny solving mysteries as a couple.
3) Carl Barks.
4) The Silver Age story where Superman gets in trouble with the IRS for never having paid taxes.
5) "Stupid stupid rat creatures!"
6) Spider-Man's black costume.
7) Calvin and Hobbes.
8) Flash #50, in its entirety. "You've lost the advantage of surprise!" "I've replaced it with something better. Fear."
9) Stan Lee.
10) Spider Jerusalem.
11) Ego the Living Planet hitting on Earth.
12) Steve Ditko.
13) "In loudest din, in hush profound, my ears catch evil's slightest sound..."
14) The fact that some of the people reading this just finished that variation of the Green Lantern oath.
15) The Far Side.
16) Captain America back in the 1960s, when he used to trash-talk his opponents. "My grandmother could see that punch coming!"
17) The Essentials and Showcase Presents programs from Marvel and DC, respectively, for allowing me to read just about every single classic story they ever produced.
18) Jack Kirby, for drawing and co-writing just about every single classic story Marvel and DC ever produced.
19) Watchmen.
20) "I owe you pissant white trash sons of bitches all the hurt in the motherfucking world. So who wants to get his ass kicked first?"
21) All of Stan Lee's goofy nicknames for the writers and artists. Stan "The Man" Lee, "Gentleman" Gene Colan, Jack "The King" Kirby, "Dandy" Don Heck...
22) "I can think of fourteen different ways to keep you from firing that gun. Six are painful."
23) The ending of 'DC One Million'.
24) "I'm Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. And these are my toasters."
25) Crisis on Infinite Earths.
26) 'The Anatomy Lesson'.
27) Ben Grimm, the ever-lovin' blue-eyed idol o' millions.
28) Bullpen Bulletins.
29) The Guardians of the Galaxy.
30) The story where Superman introduced Supergirl to the world.
31) Peter Parker in prison (in Web of Spider-Man #18), getting rid of a group of prison toughs by squeezing one of the struts of his bunk hard enough to leave fingerprints.
32) The Heckler.
33) Kurt Busiek's run on Thunderbolts, which single-handedly kept me from quitting comics one day.
34) Don Rosa.
35) Fred Hembeck.
36) Astro City, which has never had even a single bad issue.
37) MAD Magazine. (I could probably do a sub-listing of "50 Things I Love About MAD Magazine".)
38) The final issue of Marvel's 'Godzilla' comic, which featured the FF and the Avengers fighting Godzilla in New York City.
39) The Hobgoblin's true identity. Roger Stern is one of the quiet geniuses of comics today.
40) Spider-Man.
41) The final panel of Uncanny X-Men #132.
42) The first meeting of Power Man and Iron Fist, illustrated so wonderfully by John Byrne. "Mr. Cage...turn around."
43) Barry Ween.
44) Thor and Hulk's dialog back before Marvel writers got self-conscious about writing their dialog. "Hulk SMASH!"
45) MODOK.
46) Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's run on 'Tomb of Dracula'.
47) The letter columns that were answered "in character" by different X-Men.
48) "Oh, my stars and garters..."
49) The Absolute Edition of the Sandman.
50) Writing a letter about an imaginary issue of an imaginary comic called 'The Tomorrow Syndicate', only to have it published in 1963 #6 and answered by Alan Moore with specific details about the characters I made up and the story I pretended existed.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Under the Hood: Star Wars, Episode Six
Sorry for the delay, the reasons behind it were a little...complex.
(Well, strictly speaking they were a combination of laziness and absent-mindedness, but working out the exact formula of how the two mixed together is quite, quite complex.)
So when we last left our alternate version of the Star Wars sextet, we'd left it pretty much like the classics you remember, with just a minor difference. Luke already has confirmed with Yoda that Vader is his father, but on the whole, Han is still frozen in carbonite, stolen by Jabba the Hutt, and headed for Tatooine, while Luke recuperates from impromptu surgery at the hands of his own father. We open with Luke getting ready to return to action and join Lando and Chewie in the hunt for Han, when he and Leia receive news from the Rebel leader of a major offensive--in fact, it might just be the end of the Empire. The secret clone factories of the Emperor have finally been located.
(This, by the way, is the reason for the emphasis on the "undisclosed" location of the final battle against the clonemasters of Mandalor in Episode Three. Despite the fact that I have a certain fondness for the Emperor's plan in 'Return'--"My ultimate weapon has been destroyed, due to a tiny, fatal flaw that I overlooked when creating it! You know what? Rather than just abandon that plan, I'm going to do it all over again, only this time without the fatal flaw..." I would, in fact, go with something different. And let's face it, the stormtroopers really are the big advantage the Empire has over the Rebels. Seemingly endless numbers of troops indoctrinated to be loyal unto death to the Emperor? Yeah, that's something you want to take out.)
The ground defenses of the factories are formidable, simply due to the sheer number of troops the Empire is cranking out--but the space defenses are light, since the stormtroopers are ground-pounders and the Emperor doesn't want to station a ton of troops there (due to the need for secrecy.) He instead relies on a deflection shield generated from a nearby forest moon. A sufficiently concentrated Rebel assault could smash the clone factories, and with the Mandalorians exterminated years ago, it's anyone's guess whether he could even repair them. Either way, it would be a major blow to the Empire if the Rebels could succeed. Best of all, the Emperor frequently journeys to the cloneworld, since it's the most secure location in the galaxy apart from the Imperial Palace.
But Luke and Leia want to rescue their friend. Mon Mothma, in a touching scene, lets them go--after all, one ship more or less won't mean much at the battle, but it will make all the difference in saving Han Solo. They head off to Tatooine to rescue Han.
When they get there, they find that Jabba's palace is surprisingly lightly defended--he has his Gamorrean guards, and Boba Fett, but his hordes of mercenaries and bounty hunters have been all hired away. Even so, a good deal of strategy and subterfuge is needed to get into the palace (ie, most of the opening sequence of 'Jedi' would be cannibalized here, leading up to the Sarlacc sequence.) The key difference? Leia finds out, as Jabba's concubine, exactly where those mercenaries have gone--the Emperor has hired every gun he can find, creating a secret army whose movements won't show up when Rebel spies analyze Imperial troop movements. This secret army is lying in wait to ambush the Rebels--it's all part of a trap, you see, to crush the Rebel Alliance once and for all...
At that point, Luke springs his trap, capturing the skiff and duking it out with Jabba's guards. He and Boba Fett battle--the last of the Jedi against the last of the Mandalorians, a brutal coda to the Clone Wars, but Boba's lost a step over the years. In the end, he's just a little too slow to face a Jedi in his prime, and Luke dispatches him to the Sarlacc. (Note the lack of blind guys with sticks in this battle.) They destroy Jabba, rescue Han, and now are faced with the fact that they're the only ones who know the Rebels are heading into a trap...
Contacting the fleet at this point would be difficult at best--they've maneuvered into a secure position, and can only be contacted with a pinpoint-burst coded transmitter. Flying there would give them away, and the only people who have the proper coded transmitter are the commando team on the forest moon whose job it is to take out the shield generator...and needless to say, the Empire won't just let them through that shield to talk to their buddies on Endor, Han points out. Luke, though, has a plan.
A few hours later, the Millennium Falcon arrives at the forest moon of Endor. While the others hide in the smuggling compartments, Luke contacts the garrison on the forest moon. "This is Luke Skywalker," he says, "son of Darth Vader. I have come alone to speak with my father and the Emperor." Within moments, the shield dissolves and the ship is allowed to land.
From there, the two groups split up. Luke goes to the cloneworld, to meet with the Emperor. The others sneak out of the ship into the forest, to try to find the commando group. Instead, they run headlong into a group of cute, furry little aliens (I love the Ewoks. I'd make a slight redesign to them, so that they look more sinuous and otter-like, and less teddy-bear-esque, but the whole "cute" factor would remain...because that was what was so awesome about the Ewoks, that they looked cute and fuzzy and adorably sweet and nice and friendly...and then they turned out to be this vicious, savage, cannibalistic race of guerilla warriors who fearlessly charged stormtrooper detachments and beat them to death with heavy rocks. And then ate the corpses, probably.)
The cute aliens only look cute until they smile, revealing a mouth of needle-sharp teeth, and they quickly surround Han, Chewie, Leia, Lando, R2, and 3P0. They've made necklaces and decorations out of the remains of the commando group, and it looks pretty clear that they plan to do the same with Han and company...until C-3P0 begins to talk to them. He explains their story, the plight of the Empire and the Rebellion, describing the entire situation to the chief of the tribe, and swaying the Ewoks to their cause. (Yes, it's Threepio for the win, here.) The Ewoks agree to help. Han, of course, is a little skeptical of just how much help a few cute fuzzballs can be against a whole garrison of stormtroopers...until he sees the hordes and hordes of silent, vicious Ewok warriors, their siege engines, their cunningly designed traps, and their collection of empty stormtrooper helmets (not even stormtroopers venture into the forest at night on Endor.)
As Luke prepares to face the Emperor, he is met by Yoda and Ben. Or rather, their blue ghost bodies. Yoda has died. Luke is truly the last of the Jedi...but yet, there is another hope. Yoda never told Luke, but he has a sister. If he fails, she will be the last hope of the Jedi Knights. But only by letting go of his attachment to his father and destroying Vader can Luke survive this final trial. Luke refuses. Surely, the three of them together can redeem Vader? Yoda shakes his head sadly. They cannot go into the presence of the Emperor, lest he destroy them. Luke will truly be all alone.
And here we go. Luke battles Vader, with the Emperor and thousands of stormtroopers looking on. Han and the gang attack the shield generator, with an Ewok army backing them up. The Rebel Alliance, led by Wedge, fight an army of bounty hunters, mercenaries, and the scum of the galaxy. The shields come down, the factories get bombed, Luke redeems Vader, who dies stopping the Emperor as the bombs begin to rain down upon them. Luke barely escapes the carnage, the Rebels send the bounty hunters packing, everyone returns for a celebration on Endor where Luke lets Leia know that they're family, which neatly skirts the issue of who she's going to start dating. And with the Emperor lost and the clone factories destroyed, the Empire seems to be finally on the run.
(Until the endless parade of tie-in novels, that is...)
(Well, strictly speaking they were a combination of laziness and absent-mindedness, but working out the exact formula of how the two mixed together is quite, quite complex.)
So when we last left our alternate version of the Star Wars sextet, we'd left it pretty much like the classics you remember, with just a minor difference. Luke already has confirmed with Yoda that Vader is his father, but on the whole, Han is still frozen in carbonite, stolen by Jabba the Hutt, and headed for Tatooine, while Luke recuperates from impromptu surgery at the hands of his own father. We open with Luke getting ready to return to action and join Lando and Chewie in the hunt for Han, when he and Leia receive news from the Rebel leader of a major offensive--in fact, it might just be the end of the Empire. The secret clone factories of the Emperor have finally been located.
(This, by the way, is the reason for the emphasis on the "undisclosed" location of the final battle against the clonemasters of Mandalor in Episode Three. Despite the fact that I have a certain fondness for the Emperor's plan in 'Return'--"My ultimate weapon has been destroyed, due to a tiny, fatal flaw that I overlooked when creating it! You know what? Rather than just abandon that plan, I'm going to do it all over again, only this time without the fatal flaw..." I would, in fact, go with something different. And let's face it, the stormtroopers really are the big advantage the Empire has over the Rebels. Seemingly endless numbers of troops indoctrinated to be loyal unto death to the Emperor? Yeah, that's something you want to take out.)
The ground defenses of the factories are formidable, simply due to the sheer number of troops the Empire is cranking out--but the space defenses are light, since the stormtroopers are ground-pounders and the Emperor doesn't want to station a ton of troops there (due to the need for secrecy.) He instead relies on a deflection shield generated from a nearby forest moon. A sufficiently concentrated Rebel assault could smash the clone factories, and with the Mandalorians exterminated years ago, it's anyone's guess whether he could even repair them. Either way, it would be a major blow to the Empire if the Rebels could succeed. Best of all, the Emperor frequently journeys to the cloneworld, since it's the most secure location in the galaxy apart from the Imperial Palace.
But Luke and Leia want to rescue their friend. Mon Mothma, in a touching scene, lets them go--after all, one ship more or less won't mean much at the battle, but it will make all the difference in saving Han Solo. They head off to Tatooine to rescue Han.
When they get there, they find that Jabba's palace is surprisingly lightly defended--he has his Gamorrean guards, and Boba Fett, but his hordes of mercenaries and bounty hunters have been all hired away. Even so, a good deal of strategy and subterfuge is needed to get into the palace (ie, most of the opening sequence of 'Jedi' would be cannibalized here, leading up to the Sarlacc sequence.) The key difference? Leia finds out, as Jabba's concubine, exactly where those mercenaries have gone--the Emperor has hired every gun he can find, creating a secret army whose movements won't show up when Rebel spies analyze Imperial troop movements. This secret army is lying in wait to ambush the Rebels--it's all part of a trap, you see, to crush the Rebel Alliance once and for all...
At that point, Luke springs his trap, capturing the skiff and duking it out with Jabba's guards. He and Boba Fett battle--the last of the Jedi against the last of the Mandalorians, a brutal coda to the Clone Wars, but Boba's lost a step over the years. In the end, he's just a little too slow to face a Jedi in his prime, and Luke dispatches him to the Sarlacc. (Note the lack of blind guys with sticks in this battle.) They destroy Jabba, rescue Han, and now are faced with the fact that they're the only ones who know the Rebels are heading into a trap...
Contacting the fleet at this point would be difficult at best--they've maneuvered into a secure position, and can only be contacted with a pinpoint-burst coded transmitter. Flying there would give them away, and the only people who have the proper coded transmitter are the commando team on the forest moon whose job it is to take out the shield generator...and needless to say, the Empire won't just let them through that shield to talk to their buddies on Endor, Han points out. Luke, though, has a plan.
A few hours later, the Millennium Falcon arrives at the forest moon of Endor. While the others hide in the smuggling compartments, Luke contacts the garrison on the forest moon. "This is Luke Skywalker," he says, "son of Darth Vader. I have come alone to speak with my father and the Emperor." Within moments, the shield dissolves and the ship is allowed to land.
From there, the two groups split up. Luke goes to the cloneworld, to meet with the Emperor. The others sneak out of the ship into the forest, to try to find the commando group. Instead, they run headlong into a group of cute, furry little aliens (I love the Ewoks. I'd make a slight redesign to them, so that they look more sinuous and otter-like, and less teddy-bear-esque, but the whole "cute" factor would remain...because that was what was so awesome about the Ewoks, that they looked cute and fuzzy and adorably sweet and nice and friendly...and then they turned out to be this vicious, savage, cannibalistic race of guerilla warriors who fearlessly charged stormtrooper detachments and beat them to death with heavy rocks. And then ate the corpses, probably.)
The cute aliens only look cute until they smile, revealing a mouth of needle-sharp teeth, and they quickly surround Han, Chewie, Leia, Lando, R2, and 3P0. They've made necklaces and decorations out of the remains of the commando group, and it looks pretty clear that they plan to do the same with Han and company...until C-3P0 begins to talk to them. He explains their story, the plight of the Empire and the Rebellion, describing the entire situation to the chief of the tribe, and swaying the Ewoks to their cause. (Yes, it's Threepio for the win, here.) The Ewoks agree to help. Han, of course, is a little skeptical of just how much help a few cute fuzzballs can be against a whole garrison of stormtroopers...until he sees the hordes and hordes of silent, vicious Ewok warriors, their siege engines, their cunningly designed traps, and their collection of empty stormtrooper helmets (not even stormtroopers venture into the forest at night on Endor.)
As Luke prepares to face the Emperor, he is met by Yoda and Ben. Or rather, their blue ghost bodies. Yoda has died. Luke is truly the last of the Jedi...but yet, there is another hope. Yoda never told Luke, but he has a sister. If he fails, she will be the last hope of the Jedi Knights. But only by letting go of his attachment to his father and destroying Vader can Luke survive this final trial. Luke refuses. Surely, the three of them together can redeem Vader? Yoda shakes his head sadly. They cannot go into the presence of the Emperor, lest he destroy them. Luke will truly be all alone.
And here we go. Luke battles Vader, with the Emperor and thousands of stormtroopers looking on. Han and the gang attack the shield generator, with an Ewok army backing them up. The Rebel Alliance, led by Wedge, fight an army of bounty hunters, mercenaries, and the scum of the galaxy. The shields come down, the factories get bombed, Luke redeems Vader, who dies stopping the Emperor as the bombs begin to rain down upon them. Luke barely escapes the carnage, the Rebels send the bounty hunters packing, everyone returns for a celebration on Endor where Luke lets Leia know that they're family, which neatly skirts the issue of who she's going to start dating. And with the Emperor lost and the clone factories destroyed, the Empire seems to be finally on the run.
(Until the endless parade of tie-in novels, that is...)
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