The Wolfman’s Plea
For the next few weeks we will be running a series of flashback strips as a bonus to each new strip. Yeah, that’s right, six strips a week! The flashbacks tell the story of Grand Moff Tarkin’s activities on the Death Star prior to his first scenes in the movie and will involve a surprise guest as the story unfolds. The first of this series of flashbacks has been uploaded and back dated to May 6th, 2009 to keep it inside the strip continuity for new readers. You can view it below.
The Wolfman’s Plea
Concerning today’s strip… George ACTUALLY did this. The cantina alien replacement is called Ketwol and is so short that he wears stilts to give him a more ‘human’ height. I actually think the overal look of Ketwol (sans the stilts) fits really well in Star Wars AND I can see Lucas’ point of view. Back in the day he was pressured for both time and money and had to fill the cantina scene with as many aliens and monsters as possible. This resulted in some werewolf masks literally being taken off the shelf from other projects and thrown into the scene. Click here for the Wookiepedia article.
Now, in a perfect world, George would have had time to approve all the creature designs and have them made before shooting, so I can understand his desire to go back and do it now (after the film is done), but part of what made Star Wars what it is are the quirks. That’s what makes it extra special. The werewolf guys may have looked out of place in some ways, but the fact was that for twenty years THEY WERE THERE. We shaped our understanding of the Star Wars universe around the crazy mix of creatures that inhabited it. Now, both Lak Sivrak and Arleil Schous are effectively erased from official canon.
We don’t live in a perfect world, and although George might try to, given the freedom of his fortune, constantly fiddling with his classics will never truly satisfy him as a perfectionist. He denies fans a DVD release of a restored Original Theatrical cut because he personally doesn’t like those versions. But, those versions were what made motion picture history and put him where he is today. Those original films, with all their flaws, are classics. They should be given the same respect with a restoration and release as any other classic movie. As Arleil said in our strip last Friday, George needs to get over himself and accept that his films deserve preservation as part of our cultural history.
–EDIT 6.1.10
Sorry about the confusion. I do own the 2004 DVD which came with the Original Trilogy unedited and unrestored. The point I was trying to make is that while these are indeed the original theatrical cuts, sans all the CGI, the way they look on the DVDs is not how it looked in the theater. The quality was much better back then because the film had not deteriorated. Usually, films like this, with the resources of Lucasfilm would get cleaned and restored (I’m not talking about CGI, I’m just talking about cleaning and treating the film for its own preservation). The originals have continued to deteriorate with time and that’s what we now have on DVD.
Don’t forget to support us by voting each day this month. You can see our rank below the Boba Fett image to the right. You can vote again every 24 hours. We may add a new incentive strip soon. You might also be interested in checking out our fellow Star Wars webcomics-in-arms Star Wars Age 9, Revenge of the Strip and Star Farce.
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SIX strips a week! More Blue Milky goodness!
The strips are already completed. We’re about 30 strips ahead of today. Pretty crazy. So I actually want to offload some onto the site a bit more quickly to enable the Boba Fett cartoon parody to start by the end of May!
WOO! that be awesome!
oh, and congrats on being so ahead. i follow a lot of comics, and they’re always saying it’s hard to keep a buffer going, but you got one, so that’s awesome.
Thanks. The difference between me and those other comics is probably that I have no life. Computer pixels have become my friends. That’s what it took to get THAT far ahead. Selling my soul to a computer!
It had to become an obsession for a whole month. I spent every evening and weekend making new characters and putting new strips together. THIS is the reason it is so hard to take criticism as a creator. Anyone who invests a lot of themselves into something wants to feel it was worth it. The truth is that just because I’ve obsessed over making more comic strips with whatever help Leanne could give me, there’s no guarantee that they will have the positive affect on readers that you always hope for. I hope I didn’t go way off track with the next two months, but we’ll see what people think I guess.
Ummm…You DO remember where the Blue Milk Special comes from, don’t you? 😛
Well done Rod and Leanne – outstandingly high output!
Also, regarding your thoughts about our George and the original film: I agree with everything you say. (Thanks also for the links).
“Films are never finished, only abandoned” George Lucas.
Please George, we love you but, abandon Star Wars again, before you kill it for all of us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh, and Let someone make episonde 7-8-and 9 with the Timothy Zahn books!
okay, I’m getting confused…
how is it that I own official releases of the original trilogy that contain both the re-released and the original theatrical releases, but I keep reading posts that they original releases aren’t available on DVD? I got the entire set in Sept 2006 and have seen them for sale in the last year. How can I own them and yet no one seems to even know they were released??
Interestingly, at one point clone wars(the cartoon, not the CGI version) had a poll to see which of three jedi designs they would put in the last episode. One of the three was a wolfman.