Let Me Ask a Really Dumb Question Posted By: Jeff Stein Date: 5/20/05 00:11 GMT

Why change now? ;-)

Seriously, the only dumb question is "Are you busy?"...

In Response To: Jack Heuer and George Lucas (shaun)

great topic!! I'm so glad our guys take the initiative to address topics that are bound to be of interest to the OnTheDash crowd.

Absolutely, we don't have an "entertainment and lifestyle" or a "Anything Goes" forum and likely never will, so it's ok to talk about other topics of general interest when they come up.

having only seen one or two of the Star Wars movies, I am left with the question of why the "original" is called "Episode IV"?

Well, it's kind of common in Sci-Fi and Fantasy literature for an author to create a story and get so facinated by the "BackStory" or the background that occured before the main story that after their initial piece of literature is sucessful, they go back and flesh out the historical story.

In JRR Tolkien's "The Hobbit" AKA "There and back again", Bilbo Baggins found a magical ring that was at one time Gollum's, the Lord of the Rings covered the creation of the ring, it's early history and final disposition.

So it was with Star Wars. Lucas created the Star Wars story and hoped it'd make enough money that Fox would let him make another movie instead of cutting him loose. In fact Fox executives were hoping Star Wars would break even because they banked on their other Sci-Fi Movie of the year to be their blockbuster.

You remember Fox's other Blockbuster Sci-Fi film of 1977? Damnation Alley... Oops!

So Star Wars made enough money for Lucas to buy Skywalker Ranch and do nothing the rest of his life if it wanted to. In fact he could probably have set the second movie at Knott's berry farm if he had wanted to and it'd have made back the studio's initial investment.

So Lucas struck while the iron was hot and said "I have plans for two sequels to SW already roughed out, and I have the basic idea for three prequels that could be done after the two sequels (or not depending on how things went). I remember reading that at one time Lucas had planned for there to be a trio of triology's... The "Clone Wars" era which was referred to in SW being the first trio, involving the story of Darth Vader and young Obi-Wan, the "Middle 3" involving the story of Luke and Leia, and the final three which would involve the next generation which would allow for cameo's of the original actors since they would have aged enough to fit their parts (picture Han's with a beer belly, Luke with a cane/limp and Leia with osteoperosis, etc.)... But by now Lucas has devoted something like 20 years of his life to these 6 movies and he probably wants to move on to something else.

I will apologize in advance if this is common knowledge among the Star Wars guys or within the realm of general culture, but I'm puzzled.

Similar things happen in SF&F literature as I mentioned above.

Of course, we could also ask why Heuer and its partners (Breitling, Hamilton and Buren) called the first automatic chronograph movement the Cal 11? Had Cal 1 through 10 already been used?

and why did Valjoux move from c.72, 721, 724, etc. to 7736 and 7750. Lemania has certainly been all over the map too: 2310, 873, 1341, 5100, 1874, etc.

Jeff