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Post by impulse on Mar 29, 2024 10:34:22 GMT -5
I loved the Zahn trilogy back when they came out. I've read them again since, maybe 15 or so years ago now. I'll have to check out this audiobook you're talking about. It's on Spotify, right? What's the guy's name who reads it? It's on US Spotify at least. No clue if it's there across the pond. The reader is Marc Thompson and he is exquisite except for a handful of non-human characters, though to be fair I'm not sure anyone else could have done a lot better. It's really only on the first novel that it's a little hard to listen to, and it's only for a short part of the book. My strongest memory of the Thrawn trilogy was this one time my father was looking for me and didn't realize I was sitting next to the bookcase in the basement reading Heir to the Empire instead of in my room playing with action figures. He got very frustrated that I wasn't upstairs because we had to drive somewhere, and when he finally found me he shouted, "You were READING?!" It was the first and only time I was yelled at for reading. He had most of the early EU stuff like the Thrawn books, Truce at Bakura, the Jedi Academy and Corellia trilogies, and my older sister had the Young Jedi Knights books that were probably the first Star Wars books I read, though it might have been the books with the 3-eyed guy who claimed to be Palpatine's son and Jabba's father wanting revenge on Leia. The current stories when I was really getting into the EU were the New Jedi Order books. I dropped the EU in high school not because of other interests but because the Legacy of the Force series was so awful and destroyed everything I had enjoyed about the EU. That was one of the other ones. I read The Truce at Bakura, the Jedi Academy trilogy, and one about the Suncrusher? No idea if that was in Bakura. It's been so long. I think I read or started the first Corellian book but fell off. And yeah, I don't plan to consume every piece of media released in the EA. I know there's a crap load and a lot of it IS crap. I basically want to read the ones that are considered really good and key to the overall story of the main OG cast. At least the Zahn ones. This trilogy was so enjoyable I'm willing to look into basically anything with his name on it for now. And imagine a kid getting in trouble for reading lol.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 29, 2024 10:41:33 GMT -5
The Sun Crusher was in the Jedi Academy Trilogy.
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Post by impulse on Mar 29, 2024 11:38:59 GMT -5
Well there you go! LOL
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Roquefort Raider
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Mar 29, 2024 17:00:16 GMT -5
I really enjoyed the novelization of the first film. The short description of the way the empire worked was much better, IMO, that anything that came later. The concept of the emperor as a politician out of touch with the people and dominated by a ruthless and self-serving bureaucracy was much more interesting that a cackling super-villain.
Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson went the same comic-booky route with their fan-fiction granted an official imprimatur in the Dune universe.
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Post by thwhtguardian on Apr 5, 2024 12:27:13 GMT -5
Coming just in time for Star Wars Day(May the 4th Be With You) the sequel to Tales of the Jedi is due to hit Disney+...but this time it goes darker:
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Roquefort Raider
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Apr 11, 2024 18:01:16 GMT -5
This is just so cool!
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Post by moviefan2k4 on Apr 13, 2024 5:03:09 GMT -5
I like the first six Episodes, that George Lucas either oversaw or was directly involved with. But after he sold to Disney, the franchise quickly went down the drain...mainly starting with "The Last Jedi". That movie is one huge mess, and seeing it in 2017 completely sickened me so much, that I abandoned "Star Wars" afterward.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Apr 13, 2024 9:21:18 GMT -5
I like the first six Episodes, that George Lucas either oversaw or was directly involved with. But after he sold to Disney, the franchise quickly went down the drain...mainly starting with "The Last Jedi". That movie is one huge mess, and seeing it in 2017 completely sickened me so much, that I abandoned "Star Wars" afterward. Yeah, The Last Jedi was a threshold moment for me too in which I decided I was basically done with Star Wars. I still haven't bothered to watch The Rise of Skywalker. Though I have enjoyed The Mandalorian series, pretty much all the other Disney+ TV shows have left me cold. I adored the Rogue One movie (I consider it the best SW movie since ROTJ), but the Andor TV show was a horrible, bloated mess...over-long and ill focused; that story could've been much better told in a 3 hour movie. That said, I also consider George Lucas's prequel trilogy to be pretty badly flawed. There are good moments in each film, of course, but too much of it is embarrassingly childish, badly acted, or crammed with as many offensive racial caricatures as possible.
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Roquefort Raider
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Apr 13, 2024 9:50:29 GMT -5
I like the first six Episodes, that George Lucas either oversaw or was directly involved with. But after he sold to Disney, the franchise quickly went down the drain...mainly starting with "The Last Jedi". That movie is one huge mess, and seeing it in 2017 completely sickened me so much, that I abandoned "Star Wars" afterward. Yeah, The Last Jedi was a threshold moment for me too in which I decided I was basically done with Star Wars. I still haven't bothered to watch The Rise of Skywalker. I actually liked that one a lot, even if with the benefit of hindsight I see many problems with its nonsensical plot. My initial enthusiasm was mostly a reaction to how bloody awful The Last Jedi had been; anything that erased that sorry episode would have been welcome. I also appreciated how the writers managed to pen a story that managed to cap the most recent trilogy and also the entire nine part opus. It could have been done in a less whimsical way and fewer fake deaths, but after The Last Jedi that didn't seem to matter so much. (Fan service was also very high on the list of priorities in that film, which can be both a blessing and a curse. I cheered to see old Wedge still kicking butt, but references to obscure EU characters were lost on me). I like it even more than RotJ! Hear, hear! Maybe it's a generational thing. I had students who preferred episodes I-III to the original trilogy, which is their prerogative; but to me, that's like preferring Prometheus to Alien. Those three episodes made the universe much smaller by having everyone connected to everyone else, and motivations were reduced to simplistic and often childish ones (good guys good, bad guys evil). Star Wars, the 1977 one, was simple but not simplistic; the prequel trilogy is simplistic and convoluted.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2024 14:59:19 GMT -5
I just today watched this, this is SO cool, I've already forwarded the video to so many people. I think "human face" Chewbacca may be my favorite moment, though there are so many. Brilliant video, thank you for posting this! I kind of even wish there was a "real" movie to go with this, I think it would be a blast to watch.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Apr 13, 2024 16:59:30 GMT -5
I'd probably prefer that to recent Star Wars material, to be sure!
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Post by impulse on Apr 13, 2024 22:21:50 GMT -5
I enjoyed The Last Jedi somewhat at the time, but it's soured since. Rise of Skywalker was a beautiful, gloriously polished turd. Incredibly well-produced and visually pretty garbage. The Force Awakens was good as a reintroduction and the unspoken promise of the next two films to tell a compelling story, but seeing how the other two went, it's largely pointless at best now. I'm sticking to my recently rediscovered EU . At least the good early ones. I've heard Andor is incredible, but knowing what happens in Rogue One it just seems kind of pointless to watch. I'm sure that's silly. I liked the first two seasons of Mandalorian. I haven't watched the third yet, but I am turned off at how they instantly walked back the big status quo change at the end of Season 2. I may eventually check out some of the animated shows since I've never gotten around to them, but aside from the now-legends EU novels and the OT, I'm over the Skywalker era for a bit. Maybe someday I'll go back, but no SW content I've seen aside from the Thrawn/Zahn Heir to the Empire trilogy comes close to capturing the feel of the originals. Granted I've not seen all of it.
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Post by Confessor on Apr 13, 2024 23:18:20 GMT -5
I've heard Andor is incredible... Incredibly slow and drawn out, yeah. For me, it's not even in the same league as Rogue One. Not by a long shot. Plus, I tend to agree with you that I'm not sure it was even a story that required telling. I guess you could legitimately say the same about Rogue one, but the proof of that was in the pudding and for my money the pudding was fantastic cinema. That said, Diego Luna was great reprising his title role in Andor and the production values are predictably high...and I also enjoyed the fact that, like Rogue One, it showed us the morally grubbier underside of the early Rebellion. But by far its biggest sin for me is that the story is unnecessarily stretched out, almost to breaking point, just to get 10 episodes (or whatever it was) out of it. It needed a good editor with the balls to say, "there's really not enough story here for a full series. Let's turn it into a feature-length TV movie."
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Post by impulse on Apr 14, 2024 11:14:30 GMT -5
That’s similar to how I felt about the Obi-Wan show. Especially with the flexibility offered by streaming, it would be much better to make the content length fit the story rather than try to fill any arbitrary number of episodes or duration.
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Post by thwhtguardian on Apr 14, 2024 11:42:35 GMT -5
That had me right up until that laughably bad Darth Vader, but the 50's look was cool.
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