Discussion on:

Imagining a world without Star Wars

My favourite line from Flash Gordon is: "Dispatch war rocket Ajax to bring back his body"

I still use it when someone's late for a meeting.

Since latching on to movie reference from an half century before are not cool, Tina latches on to the look of 'Alien' instead and becomes a goth girl.

I remember going to see Flash Gordan at midnight and walking past all the acid stoners waiting to buy tickets - but not able to move, they were so wasted. They loved the movie. Tom Selleck might have made a good Indiana Jones - but I like Harrison Ford in it. Tom Selleck did do that "High Road to China", which seems to be a bit of a knockoff of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - even though it came out a year earlier, I think somebody got ahold of the plot.

I remember seeing a poster in the theater for the upcoming star wars, it was winter, so probably January or February 1977. We were standing in line for whatever unforgettable movie, and I was drawn by that poster.

I mentioned to someone "this movie (star wars) is going to be different. It's going to change everything." I don't know what compelled me to say that, I knew nothing of it until I saw that poster. Such is the force of advertising.

The best sci fi in the whole star wars franchise is a quick, throw away scene in the first movie, in the huge crawler of the sand people, when the scene pans across the collection of robots they have absconded with.

If you have the movie, look at that scene, and pause it to see the variety of the hardware. The suggestion is that people will build robots that resemble themselves.

There's a c3po type of robot that looks like a bee, and talks in a buzzing fashion. There's clunky r2-style units, and other unique forms. The one that hit me like a ton of bricks is a humanoid robot that has red chevrons on it's chest. It appears deactivated, but the look on it's "face" is clearly insanity. It's scary, and well done as a prop.

There's even a demonstration of a self preservation program in the robots, when the main door opens so the sand people can sell robots, several appear to panic and run from the door.

All in all, those few seconds, there are actually 2 brief scenes of these robots, blew me away like no other sci fi before. There was so much to think about; the cultures that would develop such robots, the fact that diverse cultures would separately develop robots of a universally common basic design, that there's a culture of insane people out there that fashioned a familiar face on their robots, a face that would make me drop everything and run like he11 the other way...

One question, Jay: would any of this effected the death of Elvis in August 1977?

I kind of recall one that looked suspiciously like a little bot built in fixed orbit a few years later.

I'll have to cue up the DVD and warm up the pause button. I hadn't thought of that, but now that you mention it I wonder if there aren't later robots in other venues that were influenced by that scene. (or star wars in general)

How could I miss Tom Servo? Tom, Crow and Joel obviated my need of a therapist!

In the book "Tales from Jabba's Palace" there is a story about how a driod takes pleasure (as much pleasure as a driod can get) by causing other driods pain. (As much pain as a driod can feel.) After reading you comment I think you might like that book or at least the story.

I disagree that the trek movies don't get made, because why wouldn't Paramount want to cash in on the bigger-ticket Trek income?

I also disagree that Alien wouldn't get made - it's a "serious" remake of 1974's "Dark Star," after all.

Blade Runner was also based on a literary work of the past (like Dune), so I don't see that getting passed by the studios, either. Maybe different directors would have taken the story to film, maybe it would have been more like Dick's original novel (as your revised Dune would have been), but I don't see it not getting made at all.

The other thing you've left out is that Harlan Ellison's original script for "I, Robot" would have also been made - Maybe by James Cameron, with Sigourney Weaver playing Susan Calvin.

And they would have done decent film versions of "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" and "Stranger In A Strange Land"

... at least that's how it would have played out in my alternate universe.

...but so far as Alien goes, O'Bannon's original script concept was actually a retreatment of the old sky-gremlin episode of the Twilight Zone (the one with William Shatner) set on a WWII flying fortress. It was during Dune that O'Bannon tweaked it into a space story.

If the original script does get made in the new timeline, it's probably as a historical horror film.

Point well taken on Blade Runner, though it almost certainly wouldn't have been called Blade Runner, as the the original story is "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and is much more of potboiler detective yarn than a nascent postmodern cyberpunk meditation on the nature of sentience and free will. I'll concede that Dick's source likely material gets used in the new universe, but the resulting non-Ridley Scott film would be almost entirely different from Blade Runner.

PK Dick's work is loved by Hollywood because Dick is dead and can't put up much fuss, and the material is brief enough to be easily adapted. The former, incidentally, is why a lot of Harlan Ellison material isn't being adapted; they're waiting until Harlan kicks it. Heinlein's works, excepting the juveniles, tend to be long and dense. Starship Troopers is an exception. Though if Ridley Scott pulled off a good Dune, I could definitely see Heinlein's backlog falling into fashion with producers.

There's a long alt-history novel here somewhere. Maybe someone goes back in time to "stop" Star Wars and our protagonist must correct history.

Shouldn't that be "Do Androids Count Electric Sheep"? Always bugged me.

In the late 70's, Paramount was waffling between making a theatrical release of Star Trek, or a new television series, Star Trek II. The phenomenal success of Star Wars tipped the scales. They took the best of the Star Trek II scripts and made a feature movie out of it. (Later, ST:TNG would use material from the ST II scripts to get them though the writer's strike of 1989)

I dont see why The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or the other would not be made. If, in this new timeline, they make the original Star Trek and the movies. I dont see WHY they wouldnt make The Next Generation, ect. Could you expand a little more?

I went to see Star Wars in Denver when I was going to Engineering School. I had been a big SciFi fan for years since I was a little kid reading Danny Dunn and other kid SciFi and then moving on to Asimov, Heinlein, etc. Really the only SCiFi movie I thought was any good before Star Wars was 2001 Space Odyssey, all the rest were just B-rated stuff that came on late night TV ( which I started to like on dvd's later ). So I was not counting on this being any good. But then that big starship came runbling over the top of the screen and all I could say was damnnnnn.....but The Empire Strikes Back is still the best one.

After a long career (illustrious enough to have had knighthood conferred), he realized that posterity was now going to remember him as a space-opera's 'best supporting actor', and not, say, the tortured, driven lead in 'Bridge on the River Kwai'. He felt that (due to the phenomonal impact of 'Star Wars') his defining role, as far as the public was concerned, had come to be one of a 'supporting actor' (like von Sydow after the Bergman roles dried up)....It's all I've ever heard him talk about since Star Wars.

On one side you have this great acting career yet the only thing people will ever remember is a supporting part in some sci-fi movie. On the other hand there are some actors that start as a popular character on some sitcom and spend thier rest of thier career trying to convice people they can do other things besides play that character. So I guess you have to ask yourself would you like to be remembered for playing the "silly" character at the begining or end of your career?

What true fan doesn't relish dope-slapping the uninitiated who isn't aware of the actor's vast body of Shakespearian play craft, or his Oscar for a lead in a "classic" nobody remembers?

This phenomenon creates a market of underground knowledge, and on the other hand I don't see Guinness refusing any royalty checks.

One name not mentioned yet. J. Michael Straczynski. Before Babylon 5 all SF shows were run as stand alone episodes. Then Joe Straczynski showed what you can do with arcing plot lines and overnight SF got way better. The point is, even without George Lucas, there were far too many creative forces who loved SF to stop the genre from becoming mainstream.

I don't know that Straczynski would have gotten B5 greenlighted at all if things didn't play out the way they did.

I don't see it as derivative of anything Star Wars. And more importantly, JMS's career is pretty much divorced from other Star Wars AND Star Trek show lines. The only Trek crossover I can think of is Walter Koenig, and that would have been late enough in his career that he'd probably have been available post-Trek Phase II.

Good. Then Jar-Jar Binks would never have been created. IMO the most ridiculous character in the movies and the only reason I will never buy the Star Wars DVD movies, not one of the 6.

Maybe "Rendezvous with Rama" would have finally been made. Maybe it still will. Hope springs eternal...

It'll never be a movie, it has no p l o t. Nothing actually happens, does it?

But it *WOULD* be a world with Star Trek, and that would be good!

As a kid I was a big fan of SW and thus Battlestar. I also love the Flash Gordon that was made with the awesome Queen track. I'm glad things turned out as they did however, I also love the ERB John Carter of Mars books and wish they had been done right 30 years ago also. It would have been rated R. Another great series that has never been made and should have are the Dragon Riders of Pern.

If Goerge Lucas's seatbelt had worked when he crashed during his racing days, he wouldn't have been thrown clear of the burning wreck and never lived to become a film director. Hard to imagine Hollywood getting any good SF flicks if THAT had happened.

Enough said.