Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 152: Star Wars

Episode Date: May 20, 2018

Play this show before you go-go In case you're planning on seeing "Solo" Jeremy, Ben, and Chris talk about the original Star Wars and the games based on it. Just the original Star Wars. None of these newfangled prequels or sequels!

This week in Retronauts, I have a very bad feeling about this. extra-galactic episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and I'm probably over-hyping this already. Yeah, so hi, it's a Retronauts East. If that offends you, go away now. Otherwise, stay tuned, because we're going to talk about movies and video games. You love them. We love them. We love you. You love us. It's just mutual admiration. It's so good. We're going to talk about Star Wars this week. And with me, to help with the discussion of Star Wars, And by Star Wars, I mean episode four, New Hope. Just that one movie and the game's based on it.

We're not going broad here because, man, if we did expanded universe stuff, people would unsubscribe left and right. That stuff is garbage. I don't have that much time. Nope. But I do want to tell you guys all about Davenfelt. He is a personal hero to me. Okay, never mind.

Go ahead. Introduce yourself, guys. I'm Chris Sims, and I am the master of, Teres Kassi. Well done. And I'm Ben Kenobi. I've been Elgin. Nice.

You, okay, yes. So at the end of this podcast, two of us get medals and one of us does not. Which two? Who gets left out? That's the mystery. Stay tuned to find out who. So anyway, we have done an episode on Star Wars' influence on video games, a pocket episode from a...

I think it was a pocket episode from a long time ago, back when we first relaunched... Far away. Retronauts like five years ago. That was long ago in Far Away. you. Good. Yeah. Okay.

I can see where this one's going. Bum. Like, that's what you do after. You wait a second after a long time ago. You got to do the punch you. So anyway, that episode, I attempted to say that video games have been heavily influenced by Star Wars. Didn't really talk about the movie itself or the games themselves, the Star Wars games.

And basically, the entire episode consisted of everyone else saying, no, not really. So that was kind of a bum episode. This one, however, is a much safer topic. It's just about, you know, Star Wars, the movie, and the games based directly on the movie. And that's a pretty specific topic. And I don't think anyone can say, no, there are no games based on Star Wars because, by God, I know that there are. I've played them. That's true.

That seems like a bold claim for someone to make. What, that I've played them? It's true. Not that you played them, just someone arguing that there are no games based on Star Wars. I mean, like I said, our episode on Star Wars influence in video games. ended with everyone saying, no, not really. So I'm just saying, like, take that to the next logical step, and you have everyone saying, no, there actually aren't games based on Star Wars.

We will attempt to prove today that there are in fact. I may be just talking out my ass. My position is that Super Star Wars is a Metroidvania. You're extremely wrong. You can't even keep a straight face with that one. So anyway, let the Fox Fanfare roll and let's get into this. Yeah, exactly. Wars, a 1977 movie owned by Fox, produced by Gary Kurtz, I guess, directed by George Lucas,

written by George Lucas, sort of, and starring many famous people who mostly are now dead in canon. And it's very sad. Anyway, so, yeah, I kind of feel like Star Wars is such a cultural institution that it's stupid to try to explain what it is. But we're going to do that Okay, so there's a little ship that's flying from the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and then a big ship is flying from the upper right-hand corner. There's some lasers involved. Then a guy goes, don't shoot that escape pod for no discernible reason. It's wasting ammo.

It's lasers. It's cost energy. They only shot like 5,000. They don't have lasers. They show us a ship the size of South Carolina. And then you tell me they don't have one laser to spare. I will know that they never actually say lasers in Star Wars. It's blasters.

Kind of like in Star Trek, it's phasers. That's phased energy. I guess in Star Wars, it's blasted energy. I don't know. In Star Trek, the phasers are the next step beyond lasers, which we know because of that episode of Next Generation, where they encounter a slightly less technologically advanced civilization. and Riker goes, they're locking lasers on us? Was that the pack lids?

I think so. Oh, boy, what's wrong with me? Oh, this is bad. Things are about to get bad. I told you I had a bad feeling about this. All right. So anyway, yeah, Star Wars was an indie movie, a quaint little indie movie, sort of bankrolled by Fox against their better judgment, produced by one of the hottest indie sensations of the 70s, George Lucas.

and it accidentally turned into the cornerstone of Hollywood. It is the template for the modern movie business. You really can divide movies into pre-Star Wars and post-Star Wars, and the same way that you can divide them into like pre-haze code and post-hase code. Like even immediately, like Superman, the Richard Donner Superman movie, doesn't happen without Star Wars and doesn't happen in the way that it did. It certainly doesn't open with words zooming across a Starfield.

With John Williams music. Yeah, John Williams. Yeah, like even something, you know, to the opposite end of the spectrum, alien doesn't happen without Star Wars. That idea of a lived-in universe where, you know, it's not a glorious utopian future in space where everything's shiny and chrome, but it's a bunch of like working stiffs using broken down equipment and just kind of struggling to get by.

Like that's a very Star Wars idea. I don't know. I'm thinking, like, what about Black Hole? It's kind of broken down. Black Ale was like seven. So that was also just after. That was post-Star Wars, yeah. Yeah, okay.

Before Star Wars, you didn't really see a lot of sci-fi in the theaters. Yeah. Because 2001 came out in 1969, I want to say, and it lost a lot of money. It took, it took like six or seven years for that movie to become profitable for Fox. Of course, this was before Home Video, so it was just like reissues, midnight showings, and that sort of thing. But still, like, they lost a lot of movie, a lot of, a lot. lot of money initially on that movie. And 2001 was, you know, a pretty big, expensive movie to make and was very high concept based on a very successful novel. Great special effects, a very

cutting edge story, a very trippy ending. And audiences just were like, um, sci-fi, I don't know. Well, like the pacing of it, you know, it almost get classified as an art house flick if it came out now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, the, the Hollywood of the 60s and 70s, was very different than it is now. You had like kind of low-grade, low-denomination trash, and then you had like very high-brow artsy movies. And in fact, like I said,

you know, George Lucas was the indie darling of the 70s. He graduated from UCLA film school around the same time as Francis Ford Coppola, and they were good buddies. They established, before Star Wars happened, the studio American Zoetrope

in San Francisco to create like indie films. and they didn't have a lot of success in that front. Lucas directed a movie called THX 1138, or 1138, I don't know how you pronounce that. And it was a very weird sort of clockwork orange kind of movie in a lot of senses, and audiences are like, what the hell? And still, you know, like it was kind of a, it had some buzz, and that's why Fox decided, hey, we should, we should jump in on the Star Wars film because, you know, this Lucas guy seems to be going places. And very shortly after Lucas signed the contract for Star Wars, he came out with his second movie, American Graffiti, which was a sort of experimental film in a different sense. It was like a slice of life about, you know, American teenagers on the cusp of the outbreak of the Vietnam War or America's involvement in Vietnam.

And so it was a little bit backward facing. And it spoke to teenagers in a way that movies really didn't. Like, it was, you know, youth culture was the big thing, the underground movement, the growing demographic in America, all the baby boomers, basically. And American Graffiti spoke to them. And all of a sudden, Lucas became very wealthy, which is good because otherwise Star Wars would never have happened. He ended up bankrolling like a million dollars of the movie out of his own pocket based on his success from American graffiti. Because Fox was like, special effects. You guys are kind of going over budget.

Maybe you could do this for like half of what we agreed originally. So, yeah. So Star Wars was, in a way, sort of an independent film. It was artsy. It was weird. No one knew it to make of it. It was, you know, like, kind of Buck Rogers-ish. Flash Gordon.

Flash Gordon-ish. Kind of the direct inspiration. But also, like, a World War II movie, but also, like, Akira Kurosawa. There was a lot happening. I honestly think, like, Lucas's greatest gift as a filmmaker is that he's extremely good at synthesizing the things he likes into something new. Like, Star Wars is very, you know, it's, it's the plot is basically hidden fortress. It's got all the hammer horror stars in it.

It's got, you know, Peter Cushing is in the house, uh, doing an amazing job. Uh, it's got like a little bit of like Western stuff involved with it. It's got a little bit of Flash Gordon in it, a lot of bit of Flash Gordon in it. And it also has like the Dam Busters. It's like all these World War II movies. It's got Stormtroopers. Yeah. you know like it's it's it's an unstoppable war machine against a group of scrappy resistance fighters it's

very world war two movie so it's all this stuff that he liked put into this blender and made into a new kind of movie which i think is like a really impressive thing and i think that's why to skip ahead a little bit i think that's why there's a problem with the prequels in that he's not synthesizing something he's building on something that's like he's making more Star Wars instead of making something new at Star Wars. Yeah. And I think one of the reasons this movie had such a hard time finding, like, a receptive studio executive audience is because Lucas had this vision in his head, but he had a really

hard time explicating it and trying to just tell them, like, here is what I'm visualizing. So he would give them, like, concept drawings of weird, furry animal people and robots. like one of them looked like a garbage can. And Lucas has said himself, I am not a good writer. I am good at structure. I'm good at ideas. But when it comes to actually writing scripts, I'm not that good. And he wrote so many drafts of this movie.

There's like six or seven drafts, all of which have been preserved. And they start out, like, I would not want to watch those movies. I mean, they make the prequel trilogy look pretty elegant in terms of writing. But, I mean, his initial concepts, you know, like talking about these big empires and you just have to read the summaries of these plot synopsies, the initial scripts, but they're very opaque and very, like, there's no, there's no human element to them. And that only came out gradually as he refined the story over and over again, over the space of almost a decade. And with a lot of help from other people along the way. Definitely. I mean, it's good that he was friends with Francis Ford Coppola, who gave him a lot of advice, friends with Steven Spielberg, who gave him a lot of advice. One of the biggest assets for this movie was Ralph McCre, a man who had, you know, done a lot of concept and background painting for movies and somehow managed to take all these crazy, lurid ideas that Lucas kept describing and turned them into these beautiful paintings, concept illustrations.

and some of this, you know, his take on Chewbacca's a little weird. But he gets, like C3Pio, like Lucas said, you know, the robot from Metropolis, Fritzling's, you know, black and white movie, I want that, but like a used car salesman. And that's what he gets. And he turns R2D2 from like, it's going to be a cylinder that moves around to, you know, the little guy we know now. He's a little smoother, a little slicker, but, you know, they added the, the greebling, the details and the, the, the, the, production process, and there you have it, like X-Wings, Star Destroyers. Like, he came up with all these things. Joe Johnson was the production designer.

He came up a lot of vehicles. McCrory would take those concepts and refine them and put them into settings. And you look at these paintings of, like, you know, a tie fighter shooting in an X-wing in the Death Star trench. This is, you know, early on the production process, and you're just like, that's it. And, you know, the story process went through a lot of revisions. and, you know, some of the scripts are pretty weird. So you get Macquarie paintings that are really fascinating based on those where, like, Luke Star Killer is actually a girl wearing, like, a space mask and fighting with a laser sword against, you know, Darth Vader who still looks more like a samurai in, in like these crazy cloud city settings.

It's just, it's fascinating to look back on it, especially when you know so well what the movie turned out to be. but it took a long time to come into this forum and a movie like this would never happen now because it's so different from expectations like a studio would never bankroll it and no no one would have so many years to put together a movie like this and just keep hashing at it until it finally came together. Yeah, well, and at the time, I think, like you said, the studio environment, then you had like these, like, cheap pulp stuff and then, like, higher concept things. And this was sort of both. Like, he wanted to, he wanted to. throw all these resources at what was really at its core a pulpy adventure, but with all these high concepts in it that are going to make it expensive and make it weird and make it hard to

pull off. And yeah, somehow he managed to get everyone to get on board. Yeah, he wanted a space fantasy movie that at the same time took place in a world that was quote unquote unremarkable. He wanted, he wanted people to watch the movie and come away and, you know, for someone to ask them so like, what was the hero wearing and him not, you know, not to be able to answer. Like, I don't No, he was just, you know, wearing clothes. No zippers, no buttons. Right? That's part of it.

But, I mean, you know, like, you look at the backgrounds and they don't look earthly, you know, like the scenery and the desert. The scenery and on the tattooing, the planet Tattooing, the desert was filmed in Tunisia. And it was specifically chosen for that location because the architecture there is just very unusual. You don't see it anywhere else in the world. It's not something that's familiar. to people. They also looked at shooting in Monaco, but the production designers were like, yeah, everything here just has like that traditional, you know, Arabian feel to it. And that's not, like, you see that and it's grounded. I was like, you know what that is. So they wanted

something that, you know, felt functional and utilitarian, but also unfamiliar. Yeah, it's otherworldly, but it's still, it's like, it's just this place, this place where people live. It's kind of the first time that sci-fi looks bad, like on purpose. Like, the millennial. Like, The Millennium Falcon is a bad design. It's very appealing, and I think we all like it, but it's on purpose. Like, the cockpits in the wrong place. Well, the first thing Luke says when he sees it is, what a piece of joke. Yeah.

And it's supposed to be. Yeah, well, I mean, I really like, I don't know if I'm going to like the movie Solo, but I love the trailer where you see the Millennium Falcon when Solo first takes possession of it. And it looks like the inside of the Corellian Corvette at the beginning of Star Wars, where everything is white and crisp and, like, pat it out. And it's just beautiful. look because then you look at, you know, what the falcon is in a new hope, and it's gross. It's disgusting. Like the only things in the falcon that are not filthy and disgusting looking and beaten down are the control surfaces in the cockpit because Hans Solo is a hot rotter. He has souped up this thing and he has like all these custom components that he's installed and he cares

very much about the ship's performance, but he doesn't care about the look. Like that, that ship probably smells like a gym sock. Like, you know, when they're hiding, And beneath the floor, they're probably like, there's probably like soda or beer down there that's just like sticking to them. I remember seeing someone on Twitter when the solo trailer came out, talk about how it was going to be the story of Han Solo, filthy trash boy and how he ruins the ship. But yeah, like, you know, you see like tie fighters are very identifiably aircraft, right? Like the wings are in the wrong direction. Like they're vertical instead of horizontal. Right, but it has a cockpit.

It has a cockpit. It is a coin. That's all it is. It's a cockpit. And then you see, like, the X-Wings, which are much more, like, easily identifiable as aircraft, but they're dirty. You know, like, they look, there's all those rough pieces on the outside. It's a really interesting aesthetic to bring to film. Yeah.

I mean, you look at the land speeder that Luke is driving around in early in the movie, and it's, like, kind of rounded and rusty and just totally run down. The family's old beater, yeah. But if you look in the garage scenes where he's doing. maintenance on the droids. There's another land speeder in there and it's all like angular and sharp and it's a lot cleaner. So you're like, oh, that's, that's his uncle and aunts, you know, that's their new land speeder that they drive around. They're not going to let a teenager drive. Then the one he has is the hand me down. Like, it's such a subtle detail and, you know, it's just like a background detail that they never talk about. But they, the production designers

put thought into this and really wanted to make a convincing world. And so you have, you know, inside the Imperial Death Star, which is a brand new military installation where everyone walks around in uniforms. Everything is shiny and well lit. There's these really cool lights. They're like oblong and rounded at the end, just along the walls. It's basically an Apple store. It pretty much is, except, you know, like literally capable of blowing up planets instead of just figuratively. And, you know, like the control systems are all like painted black and red. it's like the fascist imagery and color schemes here are very on point. But at the same time, like, it's also just very new. It's all very clean, except, you know, the garbage section.

But everything else is, is totally sparkling and clean. And you also see that same sort of aesthetic, but brighter and less oppressive in the, the Corellian ship that the Star Destroyer captures at the beginning. Like, everything in there is more white and shiny. But it's, you know, clearly, like, this is an official vehicle that's used by government officials and, you know, like envoys and stuff. So it's kept in good shape. But then, like, you go down to tattooing or you see the rebel equipment and it's all, like, whatever they can scrounge it. It's people trying to, you know, survive in a desert environment where there's no water and, you know, like, everything is just kind of beaten up and they go to a saloon. And it's like the space equivalent of an Old West saloon, the canina.

And I think there's a really, like, an underrated part of Star Wars in the way it presents its universe is that there's a very identifiable visual strata that casts the empire as not just like Nazi analogs in terms of like uniforms and in terms of like the very brutalist design, but in that they're racist in a very literal sense in that they're all humans. And then the next thing you see, they all have British accents. They all have British accents. There's a cultural stratification that goes along with it. And then the next thing you see is Tatooine. You know, you go to the bar and it's full of aliens. Like, it's full of these people, like, people who are just literally down in the dirt. I think a big part of what makes Princess Leia so successful as a character and what

Kerry Fisher brings to it is that when you first meet Leia, she's using this affected British accent to kind of... Through your fingers. I'm surprised you had the courage to... shoot the audio yourself, that sort of thing. Like, she affects this British accent and acts very, uh, she uses like proper decorum because she's, you know, representing her planet as royalty. But then when they actually, you know, like you meet her, you know, in the detention center,

she's like basically doing everything except belching and farting. Like she's, you know, she's very, all of a sudden shifts to like, like, not quite a Midwest accent, not quite New Jersey, but it's very like sort of tough, no nonsense, American an accent. When we first see her, she talks like a princess, and then when they get her out of attention, she talks like a soldier. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, oh, so she's the princess who has to be rescued, but she's kind of taking care of herself now. Like, she's not just this this fainting violet. She's actually able to kind of roll up her sleeves and get dirty with everyone else. And so, yeah, like, again, it's more of like the idea of here is a world that

has to function, and here are the people who function within it, and they put on these alternate personalities for these personas, you know, that are appropriate to the settings they're in. So, yeah, I think it's a, there's a lot, a lot going on here that happens sort of below the surface that you don't really notice until you're really watching for it. And it does make this more than just like a goofy sci-fi flicker kids. I also really like this idea. I also really like this idea that the, like, tattooing is part of the empire. It's part of the galactic empire. But nobody cares. Like, it's a very abstract thing for

them to be ruled over by this fascist government because day-to-day life is continuing. It's not like there, you know, there aren't stormtroopers on Tatooine, usually. Well, no, I think there are usually some, but they're just like a presence kind of lurking the background. Minor police presence. Yeah. We never seen until they show up. There's probably like an aura of, you know, like, you know, big brother, like, you know, be careful about what you say because you never know when the guy with the penis schnauz is going to report on you. Well, the bigger, the bigger thread is Java. The bigger threat is like crime as opposed to this government. But one, maybe the only deleted scene that I wish was put back into Star Wars of

all the deleted scenes that have been put back in is Luke and Biggs, which, you know, made it into the Allen Dean Foster novelization, which was credited to George Lucas. When Biggs talks about joining the empire and how he's going to join the empire, become a pilot, get away from Tatouine, and then he's like, yeah, but then I'm going to jump ship and join the rebellion, like, obviously. Like, I think that is a really, like, interesting scene for for Luke to know that that is a possibility that is denied to him. Right. Because he has responsibilities at home. He, he's got a work. He's got a job. Yeah, this whole, this whole conflict between them, Harderle, and it's just kind of abstract to them on the ground there.

They know it's happening, but it's out there somewhere. Meanwhile, the only Survivor of Order 66 is like three blocks away. I actually, I'm glad they haven't put that scene back in because I think the movie works better the way it does. It's like, what did I put in the notes? It is 17 minutes until you meet Luke Skywalker. You see Darth Vader, you see Princess Leia, and of course you see R2D2 and C3PO. They're kind of like the point of view characters through most of the movie. movie. I think if you dropped that scene with Luke and Biggs and Cammy and Fixer,

calling those too. Yeah, calling him wormy. Like, I don't need that. Like, you get all of this anyway. Like when Luke discovers that C3PO and R2 have, you know, seen combat in the rebellion, he's very excited. He's like, wow, it's the real universe out there and not this crappy little hellhole that I'm living in. Like, you get that. When you get it. When you get into most icily, and you see the imperial presence and, you know, the constant patrols and the informants and just the general sense of, you're like, oh, yeah, we have to be on the lookout from the imperials. The fact that Han Solo is really reluctant to take on passengers who are being sought by the empire. Like, all of those get the point across that, yes, like, the empire

is this constant presence, and yes, there is a glamour and a lure to being in the rebellion. And like, you get that across. And I think it's very effective the way the movie is constructed where you don't meet Luke immediately. And at the very first, like, the first 15 minutes of the movie are kind of disorienting. Like, stuff is happening and you're not really sure what's going on. And who's the main character here? Like, is it the princess? No, I guess it's the robots.

But, like, then the robots get split up and then they get put back together. What the hell? And then they get split up again. Oh, but then they're back together. And now there's this kid. And then from that point, you know, it becomes Luke is the point of view character and it becomes his story. But there is this kind of like lead in that's building up the movie's universe in a really sort of interesting way by showing all the things that are happening, you know, on the grander galactic scale before showing like, hey, here's a farm boy who happens to be really good at piloting and also is the main bad guy's son. Yeah, when we come back to good old Luke S, and good old Luke S is, we sure do like him and he sure is good at everything, old Lukeass.

Yeah, not so subtle. Yeah. He was originally going to be Star Killer. Star killer. Still Luke S. It's not subtle. Actually, the, it occurs to me talking about through it like that, that the Force Awakens kind of does that too, and that you start with Po going and visiting Max Fonsido, whatever's character. name was. I have no idea what his name was. Yeah, because you never see him again. And so there's this sort of peripheral action going on for quite a while before you get to like Ray and some of the other main characters that you end up sticking with for most of the movie. Meanwhile, the Phantom Minnis starts with Obi-Wan and Quaghan. And trade disputes. That's, that is gripping right there. I have said this. I don't know if I've said it on this podcast, but I am I am of the mind that the Force Awakens is.

we do not need anything prior to it anymore. I think you jump right in with Force Awakens, and it's perfectly fine. It has rendered everything else obsolete. I don't know about obsolete, but you certainly could start that. Look, I know not all everybody agrees with it, but that's the way I feel.

So we've been talking about Star Wars and around Star Wars, but we really haven't just explained what it is. I mean, obviously a movie, but it is kind of the classic archetype. of good versus evil. The movie sets up very early that there is an evil empire, which is like the most evil thing you can imagine. It's an empire. They're crushing everyone. That's right.

And the movie actually, like, I didn't really realize this until I watched it again as an adult. But it takes place at, I guess, a crucial juncture in galactic history where the empire has basically said, yeah, we're putting aside all pretense of being a Republican, more of representing the people. We are now just like a military hegemony. We are crushing everyone with the iron fist of our planet-sized battle station that can

blow up other planets. And if anyone doesn't like it, that's too bad. We'll blow them up. Yeah. Well, in the beginning of the movie, Leah's a senator. And then there is no more Senate. And then there's no more Alderan. Right.

They are simultaneously the British colonizers and the Nazis. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you want to put that. that on it. But it is kind of the idea of basically the point in history at which the bad guys have consolidated so much power that they can put aside the pretense of caring about what anyone else thinks. They don't have to pretend they're not bad guys. They don't just destroy Alderon because they destroy Alderon, which is not a planet in rebellion.

and it has no weapons. Like, it is, like, the only thing we know about it on, they have no weapons. Which, you know, is the, like, again, like, it's not a subtle movie. They literally commit a genocide. It's, like, one of the first things we see the empire do. So.

Yeah, and like I said, because they have no weapons, it's not even, you know, it's not a strict military move. It's a symbolic move. Yeah. It's to, you know, don't cross us because it doesn't matter. There are no boundaries anymore. There is no peace. now there is only obedience

there's Pax Imperial if you if you obey the rules then you don't get blown up yeah that is the truest piece of all yeah so of course you know that's pretty pretty crucial to note that Leia doesn't break at that moment

when she watches her planet explode like she still gives them the fake information it's pretty dope did I derail you're trying to thought Jerry I apologize I just got really excited about Princess Leo for a second. She's great.

We can forgive you for that. Yeah, so a big, you know, basically the movie begins, you know, the first half hour by setting up all the stakes. Like, there is a galactic empire. Apparently they control the whole galaxy and they do it

with a moon that is actually a space station that can fly around anywhere in the galaxy and just blow up other planets. Like, that's pretty much, you know, the highest stakes imaginable. And you then follow the path of a kid who really just wanted to get away from home.

I mean, Luke is basically the through line from American graffiti to Star Wars. He is, you know, one of the kids from American graffiti, just he lives on Tatooine. And instead of wanting to cruise around with his friends and go to the malt shop, he wants to go to Tashi Station to pick up power converters and eventually get off the planet to join the Rebellion or go to the Imperial Academy or something, just not be stuck on a desert planet growing moisture or whatever his hunt and uncle do. As long as he gets to fly something cool, that's what he wants. Basically, he spends a lot of time with a T-16, which apparently is a thing that flies

around. It's in his garage in the back if you look in that scene, but I don't know exactly. Like, what is the equivalent of that? It's not like a hot rod. It's like a dirt bike. A dirt bike, sure. He's like a dirt mic with a gun on the hemel bar. A little four-wheelery, tool around.

So, yeah. So he's the kid who dreams of getting away, but he gets in way over his head because it turns out that the weird guy who lives down the block is actually a former general who fought against the empire in something called the Clone Wars, which I have to say watching this movie again to prep for this episode reminded me how much cooler the Clone Wars Clone Wars were in my head than they were on the big screen. There's so much in Star Wars that just sounds cool, like moisture farmer. Oh, what's that?

That must be like, if they got a farm with moisture, that's going to be some serious farming. Clone Wars. Yes. Some things are better off not explained. But in the original Star Wars, much of it is left unexplained, much of it is left to your imagination. It is evocative of a bigger world, like a huge universe, and we are seeing one kid stumble into the conflict at the center of this galaxy. It's literally what Obi-Wan tells him, you know, first steps into a larger world. Exactly.

Which I like, because it does do a good job of indicating that there's so much more, not just in the present, but in the past. Like, Luke sees a lightsaber, and he doesn't know what it is. And you would think, if people had laser swords, I feel like it would be the only thing we'd ever talk about. But I'd never heard of it. But I would say this is one of the things that the prequels don't ruin because, yeah, the Jedi are there on Corrassant. And they are kind of like the special police force for the galaxy. But there's only like, you know, a couple hundred of them. And the galaxy is really big.

So your chances of seeing a Jedi are pretty slim. Like they might be, you know, you hear rumors about them. So I'm okay with that part. It's pretty clear that, you know, at this point, 20 years or so after the downfall of the Republic and the rise of the empire, that the empire has done a lot to kind of push those memories away and sort of erase, you know, what had come before. they've been specifically dismantling the old power structures to replace them with their own, which is something that sounds distressingly familiar right now. But, sorry, no, go ahead. I think it's, it is a weird part of that timeline where, you know, like everybody knew about the Jedi 20 years ago.

Like, essentially 1998. And then Hansel was like, yeah, ancient religions. like, and they call, like, Uncle Owen calls, it doesn't he call Obi-Wan a wizard at one point? That wizard is just a crazy old man. Yeah, that's what he says. Which is, like, on the one hand that it seems really quick for people to forget that there were like a holy order of people with laser swords who could move stuff

with their brains, but also, like, I love the idea that the empire is so all-consuming that it has, like you said, it's replaced everything. Like, there are no Jedi anymore. There's nothing. Well, and also, like Jeremy said, it's not like there were a lot of Jedi, and we're tattooing, we're here on the outskirts. It's not like there was going to be a Jedi in town, you know, at the... Well, they've been there before. They had, but in people's dead...

In that town, in fact, wearing those clothes? Right. No, that was a different town. All right. But in general, on the outskirts of the galaxy, they weren't, like, a day-to-day presence. You didn't... People would not have known about, like, the Jedi Order teachings in detail or anything. it would have been something that, you know, happened far off.

But it works because it does give Luke sort of something that makes him unique is that he does have this innate instinctive connection to the force without necessarily realizing it. But Obi-Wan gets it. And Obi-Wan, you know, is sort of, again, the last survivor of the Jedi order. And even Darth Vader doesn't realize that he's alive. He's like, wait a minute, I thought that dude was dead. and clearly he's not

well not for long it is it is kind of weird that no one actually knows about the time july visited 20 years ago but but and then one of them came back and lives there lives there but that was in Moss Espa

it was in Moss Islay and it wasn't an unusual thing for them to be doing you know to be out in this backwater doing stuff but you know people saw them yeah I mean they don't have pod races but okay but the point

the whole point really was that even during the prequel era, the, the Jedi were in decline. Like they, they, they, you know, had, I don't know, their influence was waning and so on and so forth. It is, I think, it's okay. Let's not get hung up. It is one of the positive things about the prequel is that I think it presents the Jedi as being a very ineffective organization because it, it's crucial that they, that this is their mistake. Like, they were the ones who were supposed to keep this from happening. The last Jedi builds back around on that. But, like, Luke is like, you know what, we really blew it and we just need to go away. The whole philosophy was not holding together. Yeah, exactly. The more I found out, the more it turned out that it pretty much sucked back then. Yeah. But, again, you know, at this point, you know, no one really knows what the force is.

Like, the empire is like, that's stupid and dead. And Darth Vader is weird because he still believes in it. And, okay, so he can choke me with his brain, but still, like, who else can do this? that no one. So what's the point? Let's just blow up planets. And, you know, Han Solo is like, whatever, this is goofy. I travel around a lot. I've never seen the force in use. So I think it's a load of Hocum. So, you know, it's something that I think, I think, you know, as sort of like a coming of age story, it works for Luke because he is this sort of young, naive, you know, this kid always looking to the future, looking to new adventure, like dreaming of far away

places and a life that isn't his. So yeah, it makes sense that he would be kind of uniquely opened to the idea that, hey, yeah, I can, I can learn to block laser shots with my mind and, you know, I don't need a targeting computer to blow up space stations. I can just use my, my, you know, my connection to God or whatever. Like that works because that is sort of who Luke is. And I think, you know, it kind of gets into the whole technology versus faith thing. And while clearly science and technology have a very important place in the Star Wars universe, this is kind of saying, like, there's value in faith also. And that becomes less, less, I think, meaningful as the prequels come out because they're like, oh, yeah, it's your mitochondria.

But before that, it's this very weird. weird attempt at bringing space fantasy in line with hard sci-fi, which Star Wars just flat out does not work as hard sci-fi. Like, no one's going to figure out how the hyperdrive works. What does it mean 0.5 past light speed? Yeah, 0.5, you know, things. But parsecs. Yeah, I mean, at least Star Trek tries to explain, like, oh, yeah, the warp scale is algorithmic

or logarithmic or whatever. But, but, no, they, um, Heisenberg comment too. Yeah, they don't even bother with that in Star Wars. They're just like, you know, whatever needs to happen happens. So you get stuff like, apparently you can travel across the galaxy in a matter of hours. But then you have like agonizingly slow space chases in The Last Jedi where like, I don't know. Like, it's just goofy. It's fine.

You just kind of have to say just whatever. They're telling a story. You can go from Tatooine, which is on the outskirts of the galaxy. to Alderon, which is a big-time core world with a senator and a royalty in, you know, a day. But then it, but then you got to have a real long time for that Death Star to come around that moon and get in position. Can't just fly it over to where it needs to be. There's a big disconnect between, between warp navigation and non-warp. But, but, but basically what it comes down to is all travel is plot-based.

Yeah, it's, it's space fantasy, which is, which is its strength, I think. think. It's, it gets to do the weird, you know, like, warrior monks and, and, you know, all the cool stuff that Lucas liked from other stuff. And I think that ties into the, to the thing where, where a lot of people don't know about and don't believe in the force, too, is in this sort of fantasy milieu. Wizardry is this rarefied subject. Only some people know about it. Only some people even believe in it necessarily. And I think this goes through all the way into the new movies, too, where even we see in different worlds, after all this stuff has gone down with the rebellion. still the idea that, um, you know, the rebellion won because of people who were strong in the force and this is kind of this fairy tale. And so, you know, we have Han coming in and telling people, yeah, this is actually true. This actually happened. Whereas it's not, it seems like that's maybe not commonly believed. Well, yeah, I think we're, we're getting way into the weeds.

And what, what really matters here is that, yeah, it's, it's goofy space fantasy and you can't really think about it too hard. But it works, especially in this first movie, because it is grounded by that sense of, you know, like down-to-earth realism where everyone is kind of dealing with their broken down, you know, droids that stop working and little tiny sand people, sand Jawa people who drive around in gigantic vehicles that clearly they, you know, borrowed from someone else or stole from someone else or inherited or something. Like, I don't think those little guys built that themselves. They're scavengers.

It's a very, very dismissive view of the Jawa's. It is very dismissive. But, I mean, have you ever heard them talk about it? It's just like, Ootini, like, what are they saying? You don't speak the language, Jeremy. That's not their fault. That's on you, bro. Sorry, my universal translator does not work for Java.

I mean, they're good at what they do, but what they do is scaveni. They take what's already there and keep it running. They're the best they are. What they do is scaven. Clearly, you need a droid who speaks botchy. Right. But, yeah, you have this kind of down-to-earth sense of the universe. And, you know, it's kind of taking high fantasy archetypes and, you know, concepts like Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces and combining it with, you know, a farm boy who gets caught up in a war.

Like, it's taking things, like you said, synthesizing and pulling them all together. And it really works. And initially, Luke doesn't have that, like, inherited connection to, to, to, to, to, to, to the central conflict of the galaxy. Like, his father was a great pilot. So, yeah, he inherited that. But you don't know that his father is Darth Vader and that also he inherited mitochondria or whatever, midi-chlorians.

So, yeah, so I think it really works. And also what really sells Star Wars is the very, very impressive visual effects, which in 1977 were mind-blowing. Like, one of the great things about this movie, one of the important things about this movie is that it really pushed forward technology in terms of filmmaking. And you can argue that that's a bad thing because every movie after this had to be a blockbuster. And it's gotten to the point now that a lot of movies are just like, they're basically cartoons where everything is computer generated, except there's some

people acting occasionally. But at the time, it was basically taking the little props of Flash Gordon or Republicans, Republican, Republican, Republic cereals. And, you know, instead of having like a little toy rocket with sparklers behind it, you had very, very impressive combat sequences. And this, you know, really pushed forward the idea of using computers in filmmaking. They use computers to basically guide their cameras so they could have these very dynamic visual shots. I mean, if you, if you go and watch some of the dogfight stuff in, you know, the final Death Star attack, there's some really amazing visual effects that you you definitely know had never been seen in science fiction before that, or just in film,

because effects just weren't up to that point. There's too many moving parts. You can't have a way to control all those at once in real time. Yeah, if you wanted to have, you know, spaceships flying around or something, basically the camera had to stop so that you didn't have to worry about tracking and misaligning things so you could have these composite shots. But because they use computers to basically program the camera to move at certain angles at certain times, they could be certain that they were always going to be shooting a certain scene the same way through every single element of the composite shot.

So they could get, you know, the Millennium Falcon and fly underneath it while then, you know, compositing a tie fighter flying around it and coming in at a crazy angle or, you know, like an X-wing in the foreground or the tie fighter behind it over the Death Star Trench. And they use really great effective editing. in this. The editor, I can't remember his name, but he is one of the all-stars of this movie, because you know, the way they cut together scenes, especially like the final dog fight, it's just so immersive. Paul Hirsch. Yeah. Yeah, like this is a movie that really, I think, came together sort of after it was all shot. Yeah. Marsha Lucas, George Lucas's now ex-wife, is considered pretty much the woman who saved Star Wars because she went in and humanized the dialogue

and she really did a lot with the story treatments and there's a book and I can't remember the name but it talks about the role that she had and after she and Lucas divorced in the early 80s the quality of his work really suffered and I think it's because he didn't have her as a sounding board. John Williams is another person who really helped save this movie

because the grandeur that his music brings to each scene, something like Luke walking out into the desert and looking at sons, you know, twin sons setting in the distance, I mean, that's a pretty good shot. Like, it's a very nicely composed shot. And also a very cool, subtle science fiction shot because there's two sons out there. That's not something they shot on Earth.

Clearly, it's a special effect shot, but it doesn't read as one. But then on top of that, you have, you know, the John Williams force theme and it's very moving and very you know there's a lot of light motifs in the movie and the character themes that appear throughout and they

really really add a lot to the film I mean certain pieces are iconic you know like the main theme or from Empire Strikes Back the Imperial March but it's all the other parts of the music the you know the the the ones that play behind scenes

and almost get drowned out by the sound effects like in the Death Star battle like they are just perfectly timed and perfectly composed to really drive the action and the meaning of these scenes home. So it's a lot of moving parts in this movie that make it really great. And then you hear about the actress contributing a lot, too, just to the dialogue and to the naturalness of it, you know, they would improvise things and suggest edits. Yeah, I heard Terry Fisher, especially, who would go on to do a lot of, a lot of script doctor. Yeah, fixing, fixing up other people's stuff to make it sound better. She famously said at one point that, like, okay, you could write these words on the page,

but that doesn't mean they make sense coming out of someone's mouth. You sure can't say it. I think I've seen that quote attributed to everyone who's worked on Star Wars. Probably. I've read that to Mark Hamill. I've read that attributed to Harrison Ford. I've heard that attributed to her. I think everyone agrees, like, Lucas, you are not good at dialogue.

Yeah, just stop. Yeah, and Harrison Ford definitely did a lot. Like, if you read the Alan Dean Foster novelization of Star Wars, it's very similar to the movie, but the dialogue is really bad. Yeah, it's so noted. And I read that novelization when I was like 10

and I noticed. It's like what's up with hi? He talks like he has a stick of his butt. Yeah. And I think Harrison Ford like very famously he ad-libbed I know in Empire, which is one of the most memorable lines in the series. Yeah, because it was supposed to be something like, you remember that because I'm going to come

back for you or something like that. Don't worry baby. I'm going to be back in the next movie. Return of the Jedi out in 1983. But that's the great thing is that the actors got their characters. And I think a lot of a lot of Carrie's good stuff came from this too, because I also saw her talking about how Harrison would ad-lib lines, but then those lines that he changed would impact the other characters. And so she had to be on there in order to not, you know, not end up having her get walked all over by his character. She would then change her lines to come back and keep up with him. So that sort of like fiery tension between the two of them probably had some

probably actual basis in reality, yeah. Which is amazing to think, like, just on a, on a pure, like, movie-making level to imagine, you know, we talked about how, like, this movie wouldn't get made today. And I know that, like, a lot of people, you know, will add live lines and work on scripts, but can you imagine, like, three relatively unknown actors, like, making up their dialogue on the spot because they think, they think what's in the script is bad on this. movie that's going to become like one of the biggest things of all time. Yeah, I mean, even in the in post, I was reading an interview with Anthony Daniels, the actor and voice of C3Pio, where he was talking about how it's really hard to do like ADR, you know, additional dialogue recording and improvise with that because it's like specifically timed and you have to pay attention to cues. But he still went in and added a lot of just like little weird, or not weird, but little goofy. asides for C3PO that give him a lot of personality, like things that weren't necessarily in the script. Like when, you know, Uncle Owen tells him to shut up, he's like, shutting up, sir,

and it's like you barely hear it, but it's just like these little, these little asides he makes. And, you know, it's things like that that add a lot to the movie. Really the only known actors in the movie when it was created were Alec Guinness, who was a very, very respected British actor, who was pretty much ready to retire at that point, but he was really intrigued by the script and was like, this is, this feels like a modern movie. This feels like something new that's going to speak to young people and I want to be part of it.

And his deal was like, he got like 15,000 pounds a week plus I think like 3% of the total net of the movie. He must have been so rich off of this movie. And, you know, he had a reputation for hating Star Wars later in life, I think because people were just like, he's Obi-Wan Kenobi, and it overshadowed the rest of his career, but he did not suffer from this movie. Peter Cushing obviously had, you know, as Chris mentioned, a career, long-storied career

in Hammer Films. He was Van Helsing in the Hammer Dracula. And he does a great job of being like this. It's interesting, the byplay between him and Darth Vader. Darth Vader is massive and armored and cloaked. He is just a presence in every scene that he appears in. Peter Cushing is wiry, and then he. he's almost like a skeleton. He's so much smaller than Darth Vader, but you get the

impression right away that he is the one who is the dominant, you know, has the dominant position versus Darth Vader, even though Darth Vader is like the bad guy. He's still kind of an underling. And Peter Cushing is clearly the guy in charge. And it takes a lot of presence to be able to one up Darth Vader. A eight, seven foot tall dude in jet black armor with a laser sword. Also, Cushing, I think, like the single best line delivery in the movie is, is effectuate in our moment of triumph. He's, like,

he thinks it's the dumbest thing he's ever heard. Like, why would I leave? The hubris of the entire empire encapsulated in that line. The only thing about Peter Cushing that bugs me is I watch this in HD on a big

TV for the first time a few days ago. And in many of the scenes that he is in, he has this one stray hair just like sticking off of his head it's just one hair but like

because he's you know silver hair and it catches the light and in every scene it's so distracting and I never noticed that before but watching it you know in in high definition on a 50 inch TV I'm like whoa someone needs to pull that thing out like what was this even film on that actually

picked up I actually I actually can tell you why the original effect for the lightsabers before they went in with computers and added the actual, like, glowing effect that were reflective. And so they would point them at the camera so they were essentially invisible and then move them slightly to the side so that the light would catch from the hill going up. So that's why you can see Peter Cushing's hair very clearly.

Because that's the technology they were using on set for lightsabers. Yes. So anyway, that's, I watched a lot of making of documentaries when I was a kid. Clearly. That's a, that's a sidebar, though. It's just something I noticed and was like, whoa, what's with that one hair? The other known actor at this point was Harrison Ford, who had been in American graffiti, and brought that sort of, like, he really saves that character. It's interesting to see all the people who could have been Han Solo. I saw a list, and I can't remember who well, but it's like, I think Christopher Walken was a possibility.

And if he had been Han Solo, then Jody Foster was going to be Princess Leads. It's weird to imagine this alternate reality version of Star Wars, but Jody Foster. She was probably like 14 or 15. She would have been a little young, younger than Carrie Fisher, but not that young. Like, she was supposed to be like a 16-year-old in the script. Wasn't Bert Reynolds in the mix at one point? I think so, yeah. I think anyone and everyone read for this part.

That would have been bananas. And, you know, Carrie Fisher obviously, Debbie Reynolds's daughter, but she didn't really have that many movie parts under her belt at this point. Mark Hamill was a nobody. Um, you know, Peter Mayhew, David Prouse, uh, all of people who were in costumes and hidden away from the camera. Like, they, they, they didn't necessarily get their faces on screen, but they all, um, I don't know, they, they, they, it was a, just kind of like good chemistry. Um, I, I was really kind of surprised watching back over this movie again, to notice how physically into, they, they, they, they, it was a, just kind of, intimate Han Solo is with Chewbacca.

And I don't mean that in a sexual way. It's just like they're very comfortable together. Han's always like rubbing his head or, you know, in the scene when they're planning to go into the detention center, Han just like leans back against Chewy and uses him like, you know, a big soft wall or something. And like it really, that sort of insouciance that Harrison Ford does so well really works for this character and really sells him as like someone who just does not give a crap. Like Chewbacca is almost as scary as Darth Vader, but Hans's just like,

oh yeah, he's my big fuzzy buddy. You can see this chemistry if you go and see like behind the scenes photos from shooting the movie. Like the whole cast is always just paling around. They're clearly having a great time. It really helped. Yeah, I think so. The All-No-N-W-N-W-N-W-N-W-N-W-N-W-N-W-N-W-E-ROW-W-E-ROW-W-E-ROW-E-ROW-E-ROWs, what if? at the same time. Introducing a car that's got style and substance to spare. The all-new RAV-4 Limited, featuring a sophisticated, muscular new exterior,

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Back by the global resources of the Associated Press's sports department, join Jim Litke and Tim Dahlberg as they break down the latest news and events throughout the week. And they'll be podcasting from all major sporting events on the site throughout the year. Check out Podcast One Sports now at Podcast One Sportsnet and Apple Podcast. Also remember to rate and review. any additional thoughts in the movie i heard there might be some video games based on it i had heard that um so yeah um so yeah Now that we've talked about the movie, and I don't know that we've added anything to the cultural discourse on Star Wars, because I don't know if that's possible at this point.

But now that we've set the stage, let's talk about the movies based on Star Wars. And by that, I mean, or the games based on Star Wars, there are lots of movies based on Star Wars. The games based on Star Wars, by which I mean games specifically based on A New Hope. And I isolated, how many is that? We're not counting the Jedi Arena game or whatever for Atari, 20, 600 because that's kind of non-specific. I guess it's based on the lightsaber training, but it's not really.

So there's one, two, three, four, five, six. Six games, and these basically break down one of two ways. It's either a platformer action game or a first-person shooter that takes place on the attack of the Death Star, against the Death Star.

An X-Wing's-in, more or less. Which? Oh, I. I was just going to segue into including the first one, which is pretty damn great. And that honestly makes sense, because if, you know, as much as the movies are based on that kind of serial, like, cliffhanger, like, idea and set pieces, like, there aren't, I really love Super Star Wars for the Super NES. I remember, like, playing the bejesus out of that series of games. But, like, those set pieces are so far removed from how they work in the movie. movies, like any kind of faithful adaptation would be like, you stand there while somebody

blows up the, blows a powder on, and then you wait around in a ship for a while that nobody's really flying. Like, the real actionable piece of that movie is the attack on the Death Star. Right. Yeah, I mean, you only see lightsabers three times in the movie. You see them when Luke tests it out to be like, what the hell is this? I'm going to cut my face off. Whoops.

Then you see very briefly, Obi-Wan. cut down Pondababa and Dr. Evazahn in the most icely canteena. God, what is well-in-me? Have I told the story on the show about the Marvel Comics version of that scene? Oh, I think maybe. Go ahead. I feel like I have. But Marvel got the Star Wars license in 1977, which essentially saved the company.

Because Star Wars was hugely popular. And, you know, like Fox, they got in on the ground floor before it was going to be a big thing. they were just going to do a movie adaptation. Yeah, they were just, they just did movie adaptations back then. So they're very clearly working from not the final version of the movie. So they're very clearly doing a Marvel comics version of Star Wars. And I think it's the second issue, like the cover to number two. Let's be clear, Marvel 70s B-tier.

Yeah, 70s like Bill Mantlo, Marvel Comics. Didn't Howard Chikin? Chakin did the art for, I think he did that first arc, yeah. I know he did the covers. But there's that cover for number two is the scene in the bar. But it's Luke standing behind Obi-Wan as Obi-Wan is like making a huge arc as all these aliens are closing in on them. And the dialogue is, swing that lightsaber, Ben, or we're finished, which is a very 70s Marvel Comics version of that scene that is nothing like what. it is in the movie. Also,

lightsaber has misspelled. Excellent. Anyway, so then the third scene is, of course, the big duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, which is where you see the most action for the lightsabers. But that's it. Like, there's not a lot of lightsaber action in this. Luke definitely never has any lightsaber action. He looks at a lightsaber and it's like, uh-huh.

Yeah. Oh, and I guess he also, there's a fourth scene where he's, you know, he's trying to defend himself against a robot drone. Yeah. Which they did make into a video game. I guess, the Jedi Arena game. So there's that. I feel like the Pondababa part could have been a great

quick time event. You just said great quick time event. I'm sorry, that does not compute. But yeah, and even the lightsaber stuff that is in the movie, I mean, the Pondababa bit is like one stroke. And then the Kenobian invader fight is actually really pretty slow and stately. If you go back and watch it now, like they did,

yeah, it's more like a slow-paced duel as opposed to the prequels where it's just like, whoa, slow down, Yoda, why are you spinning so fast? But even in between, you know, like, yeah, I mean, the people stuff is kind of ridiculous. But that's the scene that made me hate Star Wars for 10 years. But even in like, you know, Return of the Jedi and in Luke versus Spader, you get this much more involved and faster-paced and moving around more choreographed fights. Just, they just weren't there in the first movie. Yeah, I mean, it's basically a man with no limbs and a senior citizen.

So what do you want? Come on. A lesson they would not learn in the prequels when an 80-year-old man fought a puppet. Yeah. It works in the movie, but it's not a lot to base an action game off of. Right. Yeah. So basically, like I said, the Star Wars games break into two categories. The first of those is the Death Star Trench Run, basically.

And that got a start in 1983 with the first Star Wars game. Actually, was it the first Star Wars game? the Empire Strikes back for Atari 2,600 come out first? I think it might have. That might be 1982. The first good, the first Star Wars game where you're like, this is like the movie. And that is the Atari Star Wars game. And it is really good.

I don't think we've talked about this really on Ritter Nuts. We might have, we touched past one of the arcade episodes. Yeah, maybe a long time ago. Talking about, no, the one where you and me and bench were talking about being in arcades back in the day. Yes, okay. We touched on it in there. Yeah, you're right. But yeah, it's really, so, I mean, one of the things about this,

is it has a really timeless look to it because it's vector graphics. So instead of being really old, barely discernible pixels, it's got these nice, clean lines, and they can draw a lot of cool stuff with them. It does take a few liberties. Like, tie fighters shoot fireballs at you, which look like basically the things that come up the lines at you and Tempest. They look kind of like Christmas ornaments.

Because you can't really draw a fireball with vector graphics, so it's just like these starbursts that are connected together. The idea is to create obstacles that, you know, like targets that pose a threat to you, but you are able to target them. You couldn't do that if they were shooting lasers at you. Like laser beams would basically disappear in the vector graph. Yeah, so they wanted to be able to shoot down the incoming danger.

So, yeah, the shots are much slower moving. Right. So they basically turned this into a three-prong game, or three-phase, I guess. So you have the Death Star approach, which in the movie is just like the ships fly in, and there's not really any obstacles or anything because the empire is like, really, guys, those things, you're sitting those after us? But here, in the game, you're facing off against waves of tie fighters, and they come in, like, groups of three,

kind of like based on, you know, Darth Vader's squadron at the end, where he's got the two wingmen. It's honestly kind of more like the Return of the Jedi scene, where you have a whole bunch of tie fighters coming out on the approach to defend. Yeah, okay, I guess you're right. So I guess, you know, Return of the Jedi was 1983, so they probably looked to that for some inspiration. there's a little bit of that going on. And that's something you see in all of the sort of Death Star approach games is that they do take some liberties and draw from the other movies. But you have the Death Star approach,

and then you have kind of like a run over the surface where you're shooting and flying past towers that are firing back at you. And then it finally ends with the trench run, which, of course, is where most of the cool action takes place in the movie is the memorable scene. And you have to cap it off by firing a torquire. Pito, which is a separate button, just the right time.

And then you get to watch the Death Star explode without rings, no rings, no, no practice effect. Well, it's kind of all rings, but in a vector graphics. But the other interesting thing is that about this game is it does, so it does multiple waves of this, right? Because the actual, the actual time through that set of action is only like a couple or four minutes, yeah. A couple minutes, yeah, especially the first time it actually leaves out the surface run.

You go straight from Thai fighters outside to the trench run. Oh, really? The first time it leaves out the surface entirely, the trench has no obstacles in it. It just has a few laser. I think it depends on which difficulty you select. It was one of those games like Tempice where you could choose to select to start at a later difficulty level. It may even depend on your dip switches. I don't know.

Yeah, it could be. So I think maybe like if you pick the most basic level, it skips the surface run. But I think a more advanced difficulty level gives you all three phases. Well, so even when you start with the two phases, once you succeed it, immediately ramps it up. And then the second time through, you have, you have all three phases, the Thai fighters shoot way, way, way, way more often. You've got, now you've got like blockhead obstacles in the trench run that you have to go over and under in addition to the things shooting at you. And then it's by like the third phase, really, it just gets ridiculous, like way more things coming at you than you can shoot down. And that's when you put all your quarters in.

Yeah, the, you know, the arcade games were capable of more flashier effects, I think, by 1983. but the choice to go with vector, I think, was really smart because, like you said, it's timeless, like that, those stark lines of color against pure black. They definitely look old, but in a kind of cool way, like they never get, it never seems bad dated. It's just like retro. It also lets you do things like scaling in a way. It was much more natural than anyone had achieved with pixels. That's really the value there is that it's basically like a 3D polygon game before such things really exist. in. So it is very immersive. It really does feel like you are in the cockpit of an X-Wing

fighter. And it helps that you have, like, voice samples of R2D2 beeping at you, and Ben Kenobi's voice saying, who's the force, Luke? It also doesn't hurt that that's what the computers look like in Star Wars. Right. So it has that feel of authenticity. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's the closest thing you can have to the tracking computer in the X-Wing. Or, yeah, or the Falcon with the little grids, yeah, even the Falcon with the little grids, yeah. lining up the shots of the tie fighters. Little triangles. But yeah,

and so the tie fighters look kind of similar to what they do there and you get, you get something that really believably looks like a display of a tie fighter

at like any scale. Yeah, so, I mean, it's definitely one of the most memorable licensed games ever to appear in the arcade. You don't usually think

of like good licensed games in arcades, but that one was so, yeah, it's still fun. It also had like a cool control yoke that you could... Dual yokes with two buttons on each.

Yeah. So you can control each of the four turbo blasters or whatever it is on the outsides of the X-Wing, yeah. Yeah, it was just a very thoughtfully designed cabinet, a great use of the technology that was available at the time, and a great use of the license. So even though it's an extremely limited game,

it's super satisfying. Like, even if you only play, like, two loops of the game, that's still, you know, five minutes of fun for 25 cents. It's great. Thanks. Yeah, so obviously Star Wars made quite a splash, and that survived in arcades for like a decade. I mean, you would see that game just randomly pop up from time to time. basically it made money until the vector monitor is burned out because those things are

really difficult to keep alive. It was one best-selling games from that whole, like, center of the 80s thing. Yeah. And finding the sit-down version. I remember just being... I never saw that one. Yeah. Like, if you, like, I've seen one or two on like, you know, road trips. Man. Not in my town. Did they have like a moving cabinet? Like, you know, see a sign-out. That's too bad. Ben, I think you added a note here that it started development as an entirely different space game from the maker of Battlezone? Tell me about that. Tell me about that. I just saw that when I was reading up on it. I don't know that much about it.

That's pretty much it. But yeah, that's pretty much it. But I bet, you know, Battlezone's similar vector graphics kind of deal. And apparently the guy who had programmed that was making a space game when I guess they got this license and said, okay, we're just going to turn this into Star Wars. Interesting. So that was the, you know, the first game based on Star Wars landed around the time of Return of the Jedi. And after that, Star Wars kind of fell off a cliff, but people still kept making Star Wars games. There was one that appeared in Japan for the Famicom, the Japanese NES, that came from Namco, and it's a weird one.

It's a really strange little game. This was the first of the, you know, turn Star Wars into a 2D platformer because it was 1987, and that was two years after Super Mario Brothers, and that's what every game was. I had actually never seen this one in action until I got here today, and you and I were playing it for a minute. It's bananas. it's pretty crazy. It's, it's, it's kind of impressive for a 1987 game. It actually looks great. Yeah, like this was, it came out around the same time as stuff like the original Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Rigar, um, Goonies 2. So it's kind of impressive in, in that regard. Like, they did a good job of the graphics. It's Namco. Namco put their hearts into it. I think, I think it kind of helps that it's got the kind of, um, cute, slightly super deformed style that a lot of. Yes. Yes. Yeah, those adorable.

little Jawa is carrying off a tiny little R2D2. So, like, it's clearly not going for, you know, screen realism here. It's got its own design thing going on. And I think that helps. It kind of look okay. Yeah, I don't know if anyone has ever made it past the second stage of this game because it's really hard. But everyone who has heard of this game is aware of it because it takes some liberties

with the source material. So it understandably says, like, hey, let's, you know, basically turn every scene in Star Wars into a platformer where Luke is, you know, like running around shooting stuff. Okay, that makes sense. I like that. That's, or actually not shooting stuff. He's stabbing things with a lightsaber. He has a Yoder lightsaber.

It's very short. But you actually, as Luke have the lightsaber before you meet Ben Kenobi. You meet Ben Kenobi in the cutscene between the first and second stages. And Ben's like, Obi-Wan des. So he introduces himself, hajima-maste. And then you fly off. into space and the Millennium Falcon, but somehow Luke has his lightsaber before that. So clearly, taking some liberties.

The Jawa, the game begins with Jawa's two Jaws, abducting R2D2, not from the desert, but from the Lars Homestead, taking it back to the sandcrawler, where they're promptly captured by Darth Vader and Stormtroopers. Yeah, I feel like it's very weird that you went with talking about the continuity era of Luke having his lightsaber first instead of Darth Vader. I was building up to it. I was building up to it. Okay.

Because that's when it gets really weird. You get to the sand crawler and, yeah, you get inside and you're not fighting Jawa's. Because Jaws, I guess, are your little bug-eyed friends, a little glowing-eyed friends. They're basically the black mage from Final Fantasy. But brown. They're the brown mage. So, yeah, so like the sand crawler is patrolled by stormtroopers. And at the end, you faced Arthur.

But after he, he, like, talks to you and then he turns into a big scorpion. I don't. No, it's after you hit him a bit, isn't it? I think you hit him once and then he turned into the scorpion. Well, if you die against him, then he's automatically a scorpion. Yeah, a six-foot-tall scorpion with the face of the snail from Labyrinth. Whoa, you're right. Yeah.

Oh, geez. Come inside, have a spot of tea. Meet the misses. Oh, she's dead. Okay. Anyway, yeah, it's pretty crazy. I think it's interesting that when you kill enemies, the power. up that it drops is a crystal. I really want to believe those are Khyber crystals, which are a plot

element from the original drafts of the Star Wars, which were dropped in favor of just the force. But yeah, like you have, when you pause in this game, it's actually pretty involved. You have all these power-ups you can use. I guess they're like force power-ups and the Khyber crystals power up your force abilities. So you can freeze time. You can move faster. You have like, you have like, like a Gucci symbol. I don't know what that is. You said there was a pregnancy test. There was something with the lightsaber. Yeah, I think the, I think the, Chris, I don't know, maybe it's just where his mind is at.

Saw the lightsaber extension power up as a pregnancy test. It's a little blue stick. Yeah, someone peed on that lightsaber. Yeah. Anyway. Good news. It's twins. Okay. Anyway, yeah, this is a, this is a really. interesting game that would be a lot more enjoyable

if it weren't so darn hard. It's really, really tough. Yeah, it's like you get three lives and then you're dead. Do you think that's why it wasn't released in America? Do you know why it wasn't released in America? So, at the time that this came out, Namco had had a falling out with Nintendo. So they didn't release that many more Famicom games after this, I'm not mistaken. But Namco didn't publish in the U.S.

on NES until like 1993. Any Namco game you saw in the U.S. came from Tengen who was basically like hey, all you people who hate Nintendo will publish your games on Nintendo Entertainment System for you without a license. So

Atari, Sega, and Namco published most of their games through Tengen in the U.S. Bondi picked up a few. Mindscape picked up some Atari games, but for the most part, Namco games either didn't come to the U.S. or they came through Tengen unlicensed.

So I'm thinking that probably they didn't bother to pick up the Star Wars license, which was probably pretty expensive even at that point when it was kind of like the nadier of Star Wars popularity because, like, you know, paying that much for a license for a game that wasn't going to be licensed by Nintendo didn't make a lot of sense. It's just so weird because it seems like, you know, this is 87. The next Star Wars game for N.S wouldn't be out until night. 1991. It seems like this would have been like a guaranteed moneymaker as a platform game that is recognizably Star Wars like lightsaber, Darth Vader, Jawa's, droids. Yeah, again, there is just the

the difficult relationship that Namco had with Nintendo at this point, into Nova America. So that probably accounts for it. Although now that I think about it, Tengen did publish Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, which was a Minescape game, Atari, so they did like bring it in from that direction. And also they published a Roadrunner game. So I don't know. I guess they could have picked up the license. But again, it was a Namco. So you're like dealing with an American publisher publishing a Japanese developed game with a license that came from an American. So it just, it's, I think probably the logistics were just put it off the table. So in any case, we didn't get this. And also, it's a really weird take on Star Wars. Weird, but again,

recognizable. It is. But I will say that in a lot of ways, it's more enjoyable than the actual Star Wars game we did get for NES, which came out from JVC four years later. It played a little bit of that one today, too. I think one of the most unfun Star Wars games I have ever seen, like, and that's across all the Star Wars films. I mean, the JVC Star Wars game for NES really kind of drives home, the tendency that Western developers had to make games that were not very

thoughtful in terms of like enemy placement and level design. There was just a certain design discipline that you saw in Japanese developers at this point that American and European developers really didn't care about. And I don't know why that is,

but there was just a different approach to... Some of it seems to be like design sensibility coming from, like, the computer desktop game worlds, which you can see in, like, the structure of it in that you're, like, wandering around in this land speeder finding caves to go into where you have the platforming levels. And that seems like kind of more of a computer game sort of thing.

But what it's also true, what you say, that just the design of the levels themselves is just really not good and not, it doesn't draw you in. There's like, so, like, the first level you find inevitably in this game is this empty cavern with, like, some nasty platform jumps that dump you on to spikes if you screw them up. and, like, acid dripping from the ceiling, you know, all your, all your favorite things in platforming, I'm sure.

And all it is so, difficult jumps, yeah. Yeah, there's difficult jumps, right? Yeah, the jump physics are not great. The jump physics are not great. And all it is is this empty cavern with a gunpower up at the end. So there's, like, nothing even into, I mean, you know, the cavern looks nice, but there's, like, nothing there to look at and nothing to interact with. And that's your introduction to this game.

And, you know, then you make it to the sand crawler eventually, and you have these javas that shoot, like, three big shots in a row at you are really hard to avoid. And there's some things that, we're really hard to avoid. And there's some things that we ran into when we were just playing that look like background elements, but then drop on your head and hurt you. Yeah. In the way that like a good game like Mario or Metroid will like use visual cues to teach you how to play it, I thought like you have like a dark reddish background and then these

orange moving elements to it. And I thought the first time I saw one that it was going to be something I could interact with like a platform or whatever. And it wasn't. It's just part of the background. So when the third one you run into drop. on you and kills you. It's a bit of a surprise. Yeah. Yeah, like there's not a lot of discipline in terms of the use of color palettes and in terms of the design. Yeah, it's just, this is not really

that good a game. I'm sure that people have good memories of it. And, you know, it is the kind of game that if I were 11 years old and it was the game my parents got me for the next two months to play, I would play it and I would master it and I would look back on it fondly with some resentment, but yeah, not having played this back in the day, I can't say I have any affection for it. We would not recommend digging this up if you've never played it.

I mean, when this came out, I did not have a super NES at that point. So I just didn't pick it up because I was like, this doesn't seem good. And I was right. You know, an NES? Super NES. Oh, the super NES one I think is much better. No, no, no. I'm saying like I, I, okay, so I stopped

I stopped buying NES games after a while because the super NES came out and I got one. Right. Right. Okay. But that wasn't until 92. So this game came out. I still had an NES, not a super NES, but I still didn't pick this game up even to rent because I was just like, Let's count. Speaking of... Yes, but then there was Supranias, and it was better.

So, yes. Oh, also, also, the opening, uh, crawl looks bad. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, um, the NAMCO game just uses the system font scrolling up the screen. Yeah. But it, it perfectly republishes, the opening crawl text from the movie, and it uses the, like, the text is in the correct color

against black. So even though it lacks the scaling into the distance, you're still like, okay, I get it. Yeah, that's cool. It's, you know, it's recapturing that movie thing. And then JVCs begins with the same with the stuff, like, you know, the Correllian Corvette vanishing into the distance and the Star Destroyer flying overhead and then the text crawl. But the text crawl instead of being yellowish orange letters, on the black of space, they're, like, heavily shaded. There's a gradient, right? Yeah.

And there's a gradient on the, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away part, too. Yeah, it's like, just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do a thing. Yeah, they do that in, they do that in Super Star Wars, too, where they give it a gradient for no reason. But at least the long time ago part is correct. Yeah. So then we have Super Star Wars, which, I admit, is not that great a game in hindsight. and even at the time, like the land speeder sequences and some of the vehicle sequences,

I was just like, this is boring and stupid. I loved it. At the time, I loved those, the mode seven sequences. Where you could like strafe and drift. Yeah, the controls were kind of fine. You'd see the sand crawler in the background. If you drove towards it, it would get bigger and bigger. I thought that was cool.

But I would say that of all the games to adapt Star Wars into a platformer, Super Star Wars definitely does the best job of it. it really, like, it has really great graphics. They look really nice. And they really put the Super NES's sample-based audio capabilities to their limit. Like, you can kind of recognizably hear chip tune renditions of Star Wars music in the NES games. But this is like, how do they get John Williams into my system? And also, like, the hum of lightsabers and the shriek of blasters and the tie fighters.

like all of it is just like thanks um all of it just sounds exactly like the movies and i feel like that goes a long way toward making up with the fact that it it's kind of a long grueling tedious game that involves just a lot of like you know now luke is shooting sand people instead of jawa there is some kind of bullshit in the levels but but yeah it's definitely one of those relatively early super nintendo games that i picked up because it just looked and sounded so amazing yeah i i did not buy it myself, but I did rent it a few times. And every time I was like, oh, this is so cool. So I own this one. And I play the hell. I remember playing the hell of it. But one thing I noticed, um, going back and looking through long plays of this is there's a lot of bits in the middle

that I really don't recognize. I'm pretty sure I died a hell of a lot and started using level skip codes. Because there's, probably. There's bits I remember like scattered through the whole thing. And then there's bits I don't remember. I just, I think I just never got there. I have to admit all the... It starts pulling a lot of bullshit on it. All these games kind of blur together in my head, but I do remember in the first one, you mostly play as Luke and... You can switch after you pick up other characters at certain points.

Yeah, you acquire other characters throughout. But you can also switch between blaster and lightsaber, which is nice, because the JVC game, you start out with just a blaster. The Namco game, you start out with just a lightsaber. But this one is like... I think, don't you have to pick up the lightsaber? I think there's an intro level. You've got to get it from Ben.

You got to get it from back. Unlike in the Namco game. Unlike in the Namco game, yeah. But it also, I mean, one of the kind of weird things about this game is there's such an emphasis on the blaster power-up system. So you start with this P-shooter and then you turn it into like flame shots. Well, you can play as fun? So can you play as Chewy in this one? Yeah.

Yeah. So you got a power-up as bowcaster. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those guys don't have access to lightsaber. So obviously there's going to be more focus on. But yeah, there's this four or five-stage system. And it gets, you know, by the end, you have these like homing missiles basically coming.

coming out of your blaster somehow, but which has, of course, a huge impact on gameplay. So it's one of those kind of like arcade-y-feel things where, you know, if you die, you're just kind of screwed depending on where you are. Yeah, kind of screwed depending on where you are, being back to this pea-shooter, and then suddenly everything takes forever to kill. And the bosses have way too much of all that time, like, and especially if you don't have a fully power down plaster or a good way to hit them with a lightsaber. Yeah, I admit I never beat this game because it's really hard and really,

really just like, oh, so, so drawn out at times. Yeah, there's a lot of it. But it's very cool. I absolutely racked up days and days of late fees from Blockbuster Radio with this guy. But I think, like, for all its flaws, I think it, in a way, makes up for them with, like, a lot of really cool aesthetic touches. Like, your health bar is a lightsaber. You do get to play as, as Han, Chewy, or Luke. You can switch to the lightsaber, which if your blaster is powered up enough is pointless.

But it's a cool thing that you can do. Yeah. And it does the cool, like, you know, Sam a Saran spin, invincible spin, jump spin with the lightsaber, you know. It's just, it's fun. And it takes all those set pieces and translates them to a side-scrolling platformer in a way that doesn't really make sense, but is fun. Like, let me tell you, if this, if the movie was what is in Super Star Wars, Luke has murdered

about 6,000 people by the time he joins up with the rebellion, like just cutting them down. He's the Nathan Drake of a galaxy far, far away. Yeah, so it's hard for me to recommend this game wholeheartedly, but there is something about it that just, it really, it is a uniquely super NES take on Star Wars from LucasArts. It's unique. And I don't know. I think part of my affection for it stems from the fact that it landed right around the time that they were starting to make Star Wars attempt a comeback. So around the time that I was playing this game, you know, like 92, 93, I was also reading Air to the Empire and Dark Empire.

So, you know, those first novels and really determined, cool, beautifully drawn graphic novels from Dark Horse. like all of a sudden Star Wars was on the map again and I was like oh if I want a Star Wars fix I don't have to like sneak to the bookstore and read the tabletop game uh supplements you know the the what is it um something in uh I totally forgot what they were called but the company that produced West End Games yes West End Games yes

like reading all about the the corporate galaxy aspect of Star Wars um yeah it was nice to have you know, um, more accessible media for Star Wars. And this was part of that. It was a reminder like, oh yeah, these sounds like they, they trigger something in the back of my brain. I think a lot of what makes it compelling is that it has that LucasArts attention to detail. So, you know, it goes through all the environments and they all look really good. And they've got tons of details in the background, just a unifying aesthetic to each different place that you're

in. Um, and the character animations are great. everything. Unlike all the other games we talked about, most of the things actually look like they came from the movies in terms of the design. Yeah, it's not, it's not a masterpiece of game design, but visual and audio design, like, it really nails it. And it's good enough in terms of being a video game that you're like, yeah, I can go for this. I think that's about right. And before YouTube, this was really the only place where you could get an endless loop of a canteena theme. That's true. Very important. I mean, where else are you going to go for your is wailing.

Had to get that in. Someone had to. So one final game to talk about, there's actually another game in here which, you know, is always listed separately called Attack on the Death Star, but it's not a separate game. It is just a Japanese PC conversion of the Atari arcade game. And it is by far the most faithful and accurate. It is by far the most faithful and accurate take on the Star Wars arcade game from 1983 that ever showed up on a home system.

You know, it ran on, I think, Sharp X1, the X-68,000, and the PC-9801. So they were all pretty powerful home computers of that era, all with a very strong orientation toward gaming. And they all sound great, they look great. They managed to get the vector graphics style in there pretty well. And that wouldn't be topped until 1993 when Sega put together Star Wars Arcade, which we've talked about in the Sega episodes, but we can touch on briefly here. I'm trying to remember, this is the one where, yes, yes, it's the one where Admiral Akbar is giving you mission orders and the middle level instead of being an attack on the Death Star is an attack on a superstar destroyer.

Yeah. But it basically does the Star Wars 1983 thing, but with proper polygons and better audio and voice samples and so on and so forth. So pretty impressive. A good way to spend a dollar. I'm pretty sure it was like an expensive premium game. Oh, I'm sure it was. was at the time, yeah. Yeah. So, yes, that's Star Wars. The movie and the games. It was kind of a scattered, um, rambunctious discussion, but I guess that's okay. Um, if people don't know why I get directly looked at when the word rambunctious comes out. You are rambunctious. Uh, no, I was looking to you for verification for, for, for confirmation of what I did. Yes. Okay. Well, then we, there we go. Uh, but I, I enjoyed talking about Star Wars. And I,

enjoyed the experience, the excuse to revisit the movie. I am looking forward to revisiting more Star Wars movies and their games, if such a thing is not loudly decried by our audience. So I guess we'll have to see what the reactions to this episode are. But it's been fun. I like Star Wars, in case you couldn't tell. Lots of good childhood memories and more recent memories, too. I like the way the new movies are going.

I still have my doubts about solo, but we'll see. Anyway, for Retronauts, this has been Jeremy Parrish. who is a person you can find on the internet at retronauts.com and on Twitter as GameSpite. Retronauts, of course, you can find at retronauts.com, like me. But unlike me, you can also find the podcast on iTunes or on the podcast one network. And Retronauts itself appears in many forms of social media where you can have us basically promote our content to you directly. Who doesn't want that? Anyway, guys, promote yourselves directly. You can find me, Chris Sims, at my website, which is T.

H-E-I-S-B-B-com. That's The Invincible Superblog. My old comics website that now has links to all of the columns that I write online, the podcast that I do like War Rocket Ajax and Movie Fighters, Sailor Business, and the comic books that I write, like Dead Pool Bad Blood or Sword Quest, or the upcoming Dark Hawk book tying into Infinity Countdown. That's very exciting. And that's also where you can find all of my Gizweiler recordings.

If you want to give those out. Check those out. Giz Whaler is someone who plays Giz music. I thought the Gizueler was the specific ingredient. An ingredient? Instrument. No, it's, oh, is it? Maybe.

I thought it was. Anyway, it's all giz, baby. It's the Star Wars word for jazz. They called it that for real. Yeah, that was in the Tales from Moss Isley Cantina novel or a short story collection. And at the time, I didn't think anything of it because I was young and innocent. But then I got older and I was like, did they really? Oh, yeah, and they haven't retconned them.

It's still in there. All the expanded universe things to leave in there. They left that. I'm sorry, everyone. Yeah, T-H-E-S-B-S-B-com. Ben, save us from ourselves. I'm Ben Elgin. I'm afraid I don't have any wailing for you or cool comics,

but you can pipe me on Twitter, Kieran, K-I-R-I-N-N at Twitter. And I also have a blog of retro stuff from the 80s and 90s at Kieran's retrocloset. Tumblr.com. That's with one end. You can find the old stuff from where I grew up. All right. Well, that's it. Thanks, everyone, for indulging us in our stroll down memory lane to a galaxy long, long ago, etc. We'll be back next week talking about actual video games, just video games, not things that are video game related and also some video games. Totally different than this episode. Anyway, I don't know. I'm sleepy. I need to go to sleep. Good night. Thank you. The all-new Toyota RAV-4 asks, what if?

What if your ride was refined and rugged at the same time? Introducing a car that's got style and substance to spare. The all-new RAV-4 Limited, featuring a sophisticated, muscular new exterior, and available options like a premium JBL audio system and panoramic roof. The all-new RAV-Ford Limited. Toyota, let's go places. JBL and Clarifier registered. trademarks of Harmon International Industries Incorporated.

The Mueller report. I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins, says she would vote

for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervise. of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others.

The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. Ed Donoghue.