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| So in this video, I'm going to explain why I am completely indifferent to the new Star Wars movie coming out. | |
| And ultimately, I think it'd be best for all of us if we just put Star Wars down finally. | |
| Now, don't get me wrong. | |
| I was the biggest Star Wars fan as a kid. | |
| I could probably quote most of the movies, the entire script to you. | |
| I love those films so much. | |
| And they were absolutely amazing films. | |
| In fact, honestly, the best way to describe what was so great about Star Wars is to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, who said, never try and be original. | |
| You know, don't try and be original. | |
| Just try and speak the truth as best you can. | |
| Or in this case, just try and write a really good story, even if it's been done a million times before. | |
| And if you dedicate yourself to speaking the truth or telling a good story, you might just accidentally become original in the process. | |
| And that's the case of Star Wars. | |
| Everything was completely derivative of the whole thing. | |
| It's got a basic, very simple story structure. | |
| All of the aliens and robots and ship designs were lifted from other places. | |
| The plot was, you know, the fact that it started with episode 4 was based upon those old serials that when Lucas was a kid, they'd have a short little adventure story before the main feature. | |
| And usually you never saw the first episode. | |
| You know, it didn't even come to your local town until episode 10 appeared and it started getting popular. | |
| So you started at episode 10, and it was designed, they were written in such a way, like the old TV shows from the 90s, where you don't need to see every episode. | |
| You don't need to watch it from the beginning. | |
| You can tune in whenever and have a roaring good time. | |
| That was Star Wars. | |
| The most absolutely derivative IP ever created and because of that, one of the most original. | |
| It was just absolutely brilliant and wonderful what they did with those movies. | |
| And I think we should acknowledge that and let it go. | |
| Now see, here's the thing with IPs. | |
| Here's the thing with settings that you create to tell a story. | |
| When the first Star Wars movies were being crafted, and now I think we can all agree that Lucas did not have that much creative control. | |
| We've all seen Red Litter Media. | |
| This is not an excuse to attack Lucas at all. | |
| But whoever was involved in creating these things, the universe that they created around them was there to serve the story. | |
| It was there, well, initially for one movie, but they expanded into two more that were just absolutely perfect. | |
| Everything that occurs in those films is there for the sake of the story, not because it makes sense. | |
| Not because there's innate reasons for it. | |
| Not because this is a well-worked out, thought-out reality. | |
| The reality is there to serve the story, which is a simple hero's journey. | |
| And the longer, the longer a series goes on, the more baggage it accumulates. | |
| Let's take Star Trek as an example. | |
| And I say this as an ex-Trekkie. | |
| You know, as a guy, I just absolutely loved Star Trek. | |
| I still watch SF Debris reviews because they're wonderful nostalgia for me. | |
| But then we have the recent movies, the 2009 reboot, which was, yeah, okay, it was mediocre. | |
| It rebooted the series, which is what it was supposed to do. | |
| And then you had the number two, which was just The Wrath of Khan, but a lot stupider. | |
| And Star Trek, Star Trek is an IP that has simply built up too much baggage over the years. | |
| So let's look at the series one by one. | |
| And we can see this baggage growing the entire time. | |
| Now, the original series. | |
| The original series, Gene Roddensbury, Gene Roddenberry's Wagon Trail to the Stars. | |
| Now, right off the bat, we have all of these ideas that are put into this, which some of them were forced on it by the production standards. | |
| Others were contemporary ideas that were cool at the time. | |
| But a lot of them, see, they're all ideas that it becomes canon that you can't contradict. | |
| You can't go against these anymore. | |
| The big one that stands out to me is the teleporters. | |
| The teleporters in Star Trek, why are they there? | |
| Why do they have teleporters in Star Trek? | |
| Is it because, you know, the signs of Trek, we discover tunneling wormholes of nanoparticles. | |
| No. | |
| The reason they have teleporters on Star Trek is because it saves on the budget of having to use a shuttle to visit the alien planet each time they want to visit an alien planet. | |
| You know, if they didn't have teleporters, they'd be stuck on the ship the whole time because there's no budget to have a shuttle going all over the place. | |
| That's a simple fact of it, is that it's a production decision. | |
| Teleporters are absolutely ridiculous technological wise, but from a production standpoint, they give you versatility with the story that wouldn't otherwise be there. | |
| So, teleporters, absolute nonsense science, but we have to include it in Star Trek because it was in the original series and it's foundational to the show. | |
| Be me up, Scotty. | |
| Never actually said once, but everybody thinks it was. | |
| Next, rubberheaded aliens. | |
| Humanoid-looking aliens. | |
| Once again, even as recently as 10 years ago, trying to create CG aliens, Voyager did it a couple of times and you could tell that they were CG. | |
| I mean, still kudos to them for actually using something that wasn't a humanoid. | |
| But realistically, these are TV shows. | |
| These are about acting. | |
| These are about human narratives. | |
| Now, if you are a reader of science fiction, you probably like reading about really different aliens, you know, starfish, squid aliens, who eat their own young and have completely different political systems than that. | |
| You want something interesting, something different. | |
| When you're making a TV show, though, with a plot that has to be resolved in 40 minutes or less, you don't have time to explore these vast weird concepts. | |
| Furthermore, you need actors. | |
| You need people with faces that can emote. | |
| And if you're going to have that, you are going to have humanoid aliens. | |
| So once again, the Star Trek universe is absolutely absurd because of all these rubber forehead aliens, but it's because of the production. | |
| Then you have other aspects. | |
| You have things like the fact that aliens can interbreed. with one another. | |
| Again, this is patently absurd if you know anything about biology. | |
| Back in the 60s, it was a little bit more plausible, but it also served the purpose of the show, which was to show humanity in 400 years' time how much more advanced we will be. | |
| That we won't have the petty saber-rattling and bickering that we have nowadays. | |
| You know, as, hey, real world, yeah, you need a standing army to defend your country, but wouldn't we all like to live in a world where we could be a little bit more mature, a little bit less ideological and reactionary about all of these things? | |
| Because I certainly would. | |
| And this was meant to paint that picture. | |
| And so Gene made, he made a point. | |
| Cold War's going on? | |
| Russian on the command deck. | |
| You know, black woman, black and woman, treated just like everybody else. | |
| A fundamentally decent society where people are actually weighed by that, they're treated by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. | |
| You know, certainly the egalitarians nowadays are completely out of control, but the basic concept of treating people decently is one we can all get behind. | |
| And so you have aliens, you have Spock as half human, half Vulcan. | |
| Made sense back then, although it becomes completely absurd when you look at the progression of Star Trek over the years. | |
| Psychic ability. | |
| That's another one. | |
| 60s, you have the New Age movement, the human potential movement, all of this stuff. | |
| Psychic ability seems like, okay, yeah, we'll have psychic ability. | |
| You'll notice that in the modern Trek series, this is one of the things they really toned down. | |
| They really start to say, okay, a little bit less of the psychic aliens. | |
| You know, we've got the Bezazoids, they can read emotions, and of course we have the mind meld, whatever that is. | |
| But for the most part, they toned down the psychic ability because it's not science, it's magic. | |
| It's absolutely absurd for a science fiction series. | |
| I mean, the force in Star Wars at least had some limitations. | |
| Only Jedis and Sith could use it. | |
| But no, in Star Trek, it was every other alien had it. | |
| No explanation why we don't find it on Earth, but it's in Star Trek, so it has to stay in Star Trek. | |
| And finally, time travel. | |
| The fact that they used a spaceship to fly in the, what was it, the third movie, they flew back in time to go save a whale, because we all know how popular whales were back then. | |
| So they can just go back in time whenever they like. | |
| Or for that matter, all the other times that they've traveled time throughout all of the series, and yet time travel mechanics constantly contradict themselves throughout the series. | |
| Once again, that's because this is about storytelling. | |
| Star Trek III was a great story. | |
| It was a fun romp in the park. | |
| Great movie. | |
| Not part of an established, realistic, futurist prediction of where things are going. | |
| And so the TOS happened. | |
| It was great. | |
| It was fun. | |
| And it was over. | |
| Then we get Star Trek the Next Generation. | |
| And yes, there was the animated series in there too, but we'll just group that with the original series. | |
| You get Star Trek the Next Generation. | |
| And after stumbling a bit, they reinvent the formula a bit. | |
| And they establish some new characters. | |
| Instead of the Cold War that was going on with the Klingons, we now have a political competition with the new Soviet Union. | |
| In this case, the Romulans. | |
| But once again, it was anomaly of the week. | |
| You know, let's have a cool little science fiction mini short and just explore the universe. | |
| And Star Trek the Next Generation took that premise, took the premise of, you know, Starship Enterprise, Can't Beam Through the Shields, Proton Torpedoes, Android Buddy. | |
| They took that premise and basically did every story you could with it. | |
| By the seventh season, the well had been tapped dry and there are very few good episodes. | |
| And so they ended it. | |
| Then you get DS9. | |
| DS9 takes Star Trek and flips it on its head. | |
| Instead of these humans that are so wise and noble and they have everything figured out, you know, because the original series was a little bit sexist at times. | |
| It was a little bit patriarchal. | |
| So in Star Trek the Next Generation, perfect equality. | |
| For some reason, none of the main characters have any children. | |
| Aside from, you know, Crusher, but let's not talk about that. | |
| DS9, they flip everything on its head. | |
| This wise, enlightened federation gets embroiled in a massive, nearly genocidal war. | |
| This wise, noble federation that doesn't need money, constantly needs money. | |
| And this federation that's above religion winds up getting involved with religion. | |
| They flip everything on its head and do the anti-Star Trek. | |
| They invert all the tropes of Star Trek. | |
| They flip it on its head and do something new with it. | |
| Awesome. | |
| Then you get Voyager, which is just the poor man's next generation. | |
| And as for Enterprise, the less you say about it, the better. | |
| Star Trek was great. | |
| Star Trek was wonderful. | |
| But I think it's time to put it down. | |
| Like, we've done everything we can with Star Trek. | |
| We have these teleporters, which are nonsense. | |
| We have humanoid aliens, which is nonsense. | |
| How about? | |
| How about if we take all that creative energy that's been put into Star Trek, which, remember, build itself as the more scientifically accurate science fiction series, even though it had plenty of magic in it. | |
| How about we take that energy and we draw inspiration from Star Trek and we create a new series in this modern day of HBO with their season-spanning plots. | |
| What if we introduce some truly Starfish aliens, some aliens that really think differently than us, and a crew on a spaceship that's actually very heavily based on real science as opposed to the pseudoscience that we get in Star Trek? | |
| You know, the warp drives and the teleporters and shields. | |
| What's a shield? | |
| Like, are you kidding me? | |
| How about if we get a new series exploring different science fiction concepts, using modern technology to have really weird-looking alien races that live entirely different from us? | |
| How about we move away from the silliness that was in Star Trek and do something new? | |
| But instead, everybody's going to see Star Trek 2009, Star Trek 2, and they're mildly disappointed in them because they're not very good. | |
| You know, where Star Trek, Star Wars. | |
| Again, we did everything we could with that story. | |
| The premise, the setting is actually quite absurd. | |
| There's a lot of internal logic that's wrong with it. | |
| How about we put it down? | |
| How about we say we had a good time watching that? | |
| And if we feel like it, we go back and watch it again. | |
| But we don't remake it. | |
| You know, we don't put the Millennium Falcon in another movie. | |
| You know, we don't take Harrison Ford, who's getting older by the day, and put him back as Han Solo. | |
| You know, we don't need to see another X-Wing. | |
| It was cool, but the X-Wing's actually a pretty silly looking ship if you get right down to it. | |
| The longer a series goes on, the more baggage it accumulates. | |
| You know, there's nothing that frustrates me more than seeing people trying to rationalize the inconsistencies between different Star Trek episodes or different iterations of Star Wars. | |
| Or, like, listen, folks, it's one thing if you're arguing this stuff for fun as a form of mental masturbation. | |
| You know, you're just doing it. | |
| That's fine. | |
| Alright, we all have our things that we like to do, like to imagine. | |
| But there's people that are deadly serious about trying to find any realism in these universes that the longer they go on, the more they contradict themselves, the more absurd they become, the harder it becomes to write in them. | |
| The story needs to come first. | |
| Even with science fiction, you can do a science fiction series, but it needs to end at some point. | |
| It's going to get too much baggage, too much stuff going on, and it's time to put that down and write something new. | |
| The setting served its purpose, it created a great story. | |
| Now let's tell the next great story, instead of trying to relive our childhoods and being mildly disappointed that it's never quite as good as the first time. | |
| Anyway, that's why I'm not going to see the new Star Wars movie, and that's why you shouldn't either. | |
| As long as we keep going to see this rehashed crap, they're going to keep making it. | |
| Or you could feed the machines, you sloppy cunts. |