Hi, Guys…
by TheRealMoriarty Aug 11th, 2008
04:25:38 AM
… to those asking, I’ll try a new tact in this thread. Harry took his CLONE WARS review down at the request of Lucasfilm, who have chosen to enforce an embargo on reviews on our site. There may, in fact, be other outlets who have reviews up currently. That is not something we can control. Harry will repost his same review when he is able to. I hope that explains it, but if you have further questions, I’ll try answer them. I’d really rather this talkback were about the great Bernie Brillstein, though.”

Here’s the original review:

“Harry hated THE CLONE WARS!

I’ve never hated a STAR WARS film before. I have weathered Jar Jar and any number of Ewoks. I survived Hayden and a wooden Portman. I even accepted Jake Lloyd. I handled all that because it felt like STAR WARS.

I can accept all of Lucas’ flaws, so long as at its heart it felt like Star Wars. I can deal with politics in Star Wars. I can deal with trade skirmishes in Star Wars. I can deal with musical numbers, breathing in the vacuum of space. Basically – so long as it feels like STAR WARS – I can watch any of it.

Was I looking forward to STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS (2008)?

******** A!

I was dying. After Genndy’s CLONE WARS – I felt that perhaps Lucas “got it” – and that this new animated series was taking a lead from Tartakovsky’s brilliant assembly of pieces. Genndy’s CLONE WARS got STAR WARS better than anyone has got it since Lawrence Kasdan and Irvin Kershner. Genndy took designs and characters that folks were dissatisfied with and made them cool. He did this by using and adapting the themes created by John Williams, the wholly perfect entity involved with Star Wars along with… the sound effects of Ben Burtt. He understood speed and motion – not just with action, but in editing. He understood classic film composition and iconography. And he knows what BADASS is.

The folks behind this STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS movie… you could tell, they looked at what Genndy did – but they didn’t understand any of it. There’s a ****load of battles and ***** going boom. There’s noise everywhere – fury everywhere… but none of it is directed. The music by Kevin Kiner is criminally bad. Why they didn’t employ Paul Dinletir and James Venable is beyond me. No, no – let’s hire the composer of WALKER, TEXAS RANGER. Ahem.

Now – I made excuses for this film as I was watching it. I don’t think you understand how much I love STAR WARS. Maybe you do, maybe you do too.

Before the movie started I was firing myself up to go out after the film and buy that new $200 Hasbro Millenium Falcon. I really wanted to go buy it, and I wanted this movie to empower my brain to go through with that. Instead, I found myself at home – putting on Genndy’s THE CLONE WARS – to try and rebuild my passion – so I can go get that new Falcon.

Instead – I’m thinking I’ll just be here at home enjoying this and that’ll be all I need.

Anyway – as I was watching the film, I was excusing the sloppy shots, the sloppy use of the Clone Troopers and Droids – undoing all the awesome work that Genndy had done – and the droids are silly again. The Clone Troopers are limp. And the Jedi – they’re at 25% power from the mind of Genndy. But I was accepting that. I figured that was Lucas dialing back so that the animated series wouldn’t overpower his features.

Then they introduced Baby Jabba aka Rotta the Huttlet aka Stinky. At the point of this character’s introduction – it officially became, the worst character in the history of STAR WARS. If you hate George Lucas cutsiepoo bull**** – oooooooh boy. You’re gonna have a field day of venting and hatred directed at this unbelievably ****ing awful little ****.

Oh – but wait… Little Stinky the Hutt isn’t the worst character in the history of STAR WARS… because Stinky got introduced earlier in the film. As much as I hated lil Stinky… I was weathering Stinky. I seriously was. But later there was a character of such immense **** – offensively bad. The character was so bad, so incredibly awful – that it was a slap to the face. It woke me out of my ****-accepting stupor and made me angry. SUDDENLY my “inner fanboy rage” was awoken.

As I watched this terrifyingly awful character named Ziro the Hutt. A seemingly female Hutt – with tattoos and make-up that sounds like a racist take on a Black New Orleans Crack-Dealing Whore. Because this Hutt speaks ENGLISH – and it is many times worse than I’m actually describing. This character was actually too much for me. So bad that every flaw I was looking past, was now a road sign to inadequacy and mediocrity. All of a sudden my brain realized that Asajj Ventress’ voice no longer was acceptable – and sure enough – the amazing Grey DeLisle, who originally voiced the character back in 2003 – had been replaced by a Nika Futterman – and that voice was missed. The character didn’t have that snarling menace anymore.

I realized that nothing in this animated film felt right. I felt time expanding. It seemed that the film was dragging – nevermind that lots of **** was firing all over the place – and stuff was going boom and things were being revealed. I just didn’t care because this wasn’t what I wanted.

I hated the score, the animation, the shots, the characters and most of all the retarded ******** idiot story.

I hated the film. HATED IT. REALLY HATED IT.

Does this mean the whole Star Wars Animated Series is doomed? No – but it isn’t a good sign. So much of this is awful because of the Hutt plotlines and character. I also feel that Dave Filoni must be a hack. His work here is sloppy – and depending on writers and directing talent – individual episodes may be better. This film was several episodes all strung together – my prayer is that the individual episodes will be both great and awful – and we’ll discover which talents are responsible for each.

That said – the audience did have light applause. My father liked it. My sister felt too much was going on. Me nephew really liked it. That said – Yoko was complaining right along with me. She thought it was **** too. I know Moriarty liked it. Wonder what Quint and Massawyrm thought.

****. I hated a STAR WARS. That ****ing sucks.”

Annalee: "So, if you had to get out of that Stormtrooper outfit really, really fast what would you start with?"
Stormtrooper: "My helmet!"
Annalee: "Okay, then... what next?"
Stormtrooper: "Uh... my chestpiece!"
Annalee: "Okay, but what if you had to go to the bathroom? Is there any way to get out of there?"
Stormtrooper: "No!"

We left him to his Nerds and heard him whimpering for mommy. Did the Stormtroopers use catheters or something?

In the history of the Internet, no video has earned more views than "Star Wars Kid" — an awkward boy swinging a stick to imitate a Jedi. As of late 2006, the Viral Factory marketing company estimates it's been seen 900 million times. (The total includes an estimated 600 million e-mailed copies, millions of TV views, and over 90 million views on video sharing sites; even a skeptical reading guarantees well over 100 million views.) The most popular YouTube clip this year is Avril Lavigne's music video for "Girlfriend." It has 62 million views — under a tenth of Star Wars Kid's audience. (YouTube favorite Lonelygirl15 gets more buzz, but her most-seen episode has under two million views.) It's not just that the older video (and the all-time runner-up, "Numa Numa") had more time to catch on, but the context in which they rose has disappeared. The way we view video now has ensured that no one will ever again get as many online viewers as these two classics.

In 2003, out-of-shape high-schooler Ghyslain Raza recorded himself imitating light saber moves. Shortly after, his fellow students found and uploaded the video, and Raza became Star Wars Kid.

Why did this clip beat out so many other videos to get so popular? There are plenty of theories: Star Wars Kid captured the joy of a fan of a power fantasy, winning over the compassionate and fellow geeks and making him a simple source of mockery for everyone else. The concept was simple; it was easily (and often) parodied. But most importantly, there just wasn't much else to watch.

At this point, web video was still a new world ruled by grab-bag sites like Ebaum's World, which made money by copying images, articles and videos (often without permission), slapping on their own watermark, and showing them on an ad-filled web page. These sites resembled a Bob-Saget-free version of "America's Funniest Videos," with more emphasis on public humiliation, pranks, and video games. Viewers were mostly young males (a demographic that still dominates online video), but the enthusiasm for short-form video was spreading as the clips got more mainstream and the early viewers spread them to high school and college friends. It was inevitable that something would break out into a runaway hit and become the first online video that casual Internet users had ever seen.

But these outbreaks were flukes. Watching online video was still a fringe activity largely confined to young males. Uploading video was even rarer; it was novel that this amateur content was even available to the public. A well-informed Internet user could stay abreast of every major fad. At the time of Star Wars Kid, these were a short animation named "Badger Badger Badger" and the beginnings of a Photoshop in-joke named "Little Fatty," as well as a few long-running favorites. (I was a college freshman, sharing all the old fads as they found their way onto my school's unofficial chatroom and file-sharing forum. Every day for the first month of school, I could hear someone on the hall seeing "All Your Base" for the first time.) Star Wars Kid offered something more authentic: it gave a peek into someone's life, at that time a rare opportunity in a media world dominated by TV.

Over a year after Star Wars Kid broke out, another portly young man recorded a similarly exuberant performance, chair-dancing to a Moldovan pop song named "Dragostea Din Tei." Unlike Raza, Brolsma uploaded his performance himself to an entertainment site named Newgrounds, thus proving that reluctance wasn't a necessary factor for viral success. The video, named "Numa Numa," became a sudden hit, thanks again to the joy of peeking at someone's private nerdy exuberance. Though Brolsma didn't quite anticipate the attention and avoided the press for a few months, he was back with more videos by 2006.

This was still a pre-YouTube era, and Brolsma's video was shared through Quicktime and Windows Media files on Newgrounds and its competitors, as well as e-mail and Kazaa. Even without a one-click way to view the video, "Numa Numa" spread much quickly. In under three years, this video has earned an estimated 700 million views.

Two things kept online video from exploding: difficulty of publishing, and difficulty of viewing. Digital video, introduced in 1994, was still replacing tapes in the home camcorder market, finally putting the computer ahead of the VCR. Webcams were still evolving. And publishing to the web, or even to a file sharing network, required more computer knowledge than that of the average Internet user. Once a video was online, it was still difficult to view. Even the relative ease of accessing videos on Ebaum's World and Newgrounds required downloading plug-ins for specific video formats.

But as I explained in Slate this year, YouTube simplified the process by letting users upload any type of video with a simple web interface, then converting it to a universal format that required the already common Macromedia Flash plug-in. Now the average Internet user could create, share, and watch online video. And they did. Which should have meant a thousand new stars bigger than Star Wars Kid, right?

Hundreds of monster hits on YouTube get played over a million times. (Over 100 have topped 6 million views each.) But even the most popular video of all time, earning just over 55 million views in its 16-month existence, has no hope of touching Star Wars Kid's 900-million-view record.

Even assuming it's been viewed another hundred million times in copies on and off YouTube, "Evolution of Dance" can never catch up. Unlike its predecessors, it has competition. The interest in web videos has increased, but not nearly as much as the ease of publishing them. As of November 2006, YouTube claimed 65,000 uploads per day; thousands more videos are loaded on sites like Vimeo, Blip, and Veoh. There is an unprecedented flood of content being pushed online. Who could watch it all?

Star Wars Kid and Numa Numa had novelty. But novelty is easily reproduced. This fall alone has included viral videos like the much-parodied Soulja Boy Crank That, "Leave Britney Alone," Chuck Norris's endorsement of Mike Huckabee, a televised standup routine called "Achmed the Dead Terrorist," and a cartoon song about "Internet People." Four years ago, any one of these fads could have become the Internet's sole sensation for a whole season. Now they're just drops in a torrent.

Online video is obviously not the first medium to balloon and diversify. TV did the same thing over the last half-century. The total audience for TV grew every decade. Audiences for single shows, however, peaked in the 50s. The 2004 series finale of Friends and the 2000 finale of Survivor earned about the same audience as the 1983 finale of M*A*S*H. The viewers went from millions to more millions, but the channels went from three to hundreds, so the most-watched show still shared an audience with hundreds of concurrent shows. The competitive effect may be why only one film from the last ten years has entered the top 20 box office hits of all time (adjusted for inflation). The new Internet star faces the same effect on a vast scale, competing with the millions of videos past and present.

That isn't to say no one's getting famous. The most obvious example is Andy Samberg and his comedy group, The Lonely Island. The group posted videos on their site and at a video competition site, Channel 101. Their videos stayed pretty underground, but they got the team hired by Saturday Night Live. Lonely Island then made the immortal "Lazy Sunday" and "Dick in a Box" for SNL, then released the feature film "Hot Rod," establishing themselves as mainstream stars.

Samberg and his friends, though, weren't the average online auteurs. They went to film school; they pitched shows; they shot a rejected pilot for Fox. Since then, Hollywood has been looking for stars online, though most only make it to the B-list. YouTube user Lisa Donovan (LisaNova) won a job at MADtv. YouTuber Brooke Brodack (Brookers) signed a deal with Carson Daly. Web show Ask a Ninja earned sponsorships and sells DVDs, proving there's a living to be made online. That living is built through a long, concerted effort, not with one stunt. The same rules of competition will apply: Hope is Emo, a second project by the Ask a Ninja team, never found the same popularity.

Star Wars Kid has been off the radar for years; last year he settled a lawsuit with the students who made him famous. As for Gary Brolsma, he came back online in 2006 with an uninspired follow-up, "New Numa." Did it work? Well, for anyone else, 7 million views would be a breakout success. For the Numa Numa guy, it means fame has fizzled out. But he does do a good impression of Star Wars Kid.

Photo by amarillopollo_QUIT at Worth1000. Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. In 2000 he almost put a video on the Internet of himself dancing in his underwear. Let's all be glad he didn't.

Jarjar? Jango? Qoop? Favoor? Is LucasFilm naming the next generation of dot-coms?

Yes, yes, it's an Internet quiz. But it's one clever enough to reference TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.

Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character? [cerado.com]