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Star Wars Galaxies-Path to the Force-Episode 269

Be sure to join us next week for the last episode of Star Wars Galaxies-Path to the Force as this Gamic comes to its conclusion!

TotalFilm: How far down the line will Star Wars continue in these new incarnations?

Lucas: Clone Wars will probably go for at least five or six seasons which adds up to 200 episodes. Then we have the live-action series, which is going to be a little bit more experimental. It takes place over the 20 years when Luke's growing up, but it's not about the Skywalkers or any of that stuff. Like In Episode IV -- you hear about the Emperor, but you don't actually see him. People live in the Empire, but you don't see Stormtroopers. It's a completely different kind of idea, which is risky. But that's the only reason I'm doing it. Some people will inevitably say. "It's not what I think of as Star Wars." So who knows, it may work or it may not.

TotalFilm: Is it really a radical departure?

Lucas: I'd say so. It's kind of like Episode IV -- it's funny and there's action, but it's lot more talky. It's more of what I would call a soap opera with a bunch of personal dramas in it. It's not really based on action-adventure films from the '30s -- it's actually more based on film noir movies from the '40's!

TotalFilm: Any casting news?

Lucas: No, that won't be for a while. We've got writers who are currently working on scripts with the art department. First you've got to create the characters, because half of them are human and half of them aren't. That's the thing about Star Wars -- there's always two and half years of design work before the production stars. Nobody spends that long in television; people have a tendency to just put t-shirts on actors and call them spacesuits! Or they just use motorcycle helmets and paint them green or something. So we've been working on this for about a year now: designing sets, environments, vehicles and aliens...

TotalFilm: The Star Wars universe has expanded far beyond the movies. How much leeway do the game makers and novel writers have?

Lucas: They have their own kind of world. There's three pillars of Star Wars. I'll probably get in trouble for this but it's OK!

There's three pillars: the father, the son and the holy ghost. I'm the father, Howard Roffman [president of Lucas Licensing] is the son and the holy ghost is the fans, this kind of ethereal world of people coming up with all kinds of different ideas and histories. Now these three different pillars don't always match, but the movies and TV shows are all under my control and they are consistent with themselves.

Howard tries to be consistent but sometimes he goes off on tangents and it's hard to hold him back. He once said to me that there are two Star Trek universes: there's the TV show and then there' s all the spin-offs. He said that there's were completely different and didn't have anything to do with each other. So I said, "OK, go ahead."

In the early days I told them that they couldn't do anything about how Darth Vader was born, for obvious reasons but otherwise I pretty much let them do whatever they wanted. They created this whole amazing universe that goes on for millions of years!"

Be sure to get the May issue to read the rest of this great interview!

Every year on the MTV Movie Awards, one or more movies are chosen out of the most popular films of the year and spoofed. This usually includes a lot of sound and video montage, replacing some of the original cast with other actors (commonly, the hosts of this year's show), combining them with famous television shows, and general mockery of the film's most notable aspects.

You can find this video clip in the Television Shows section. If you have a movie clip or scene from any video game in a AVI, MOV, etc. format, please send it in! Enjoy!

In this two-hour “winner take all” episode, two contestants, Elyse McCrillis and Brad Flinchum, will duel against each other with the chance to win close to two million dollars. They will each play their own game and whoever has the highest amount at the end of his or her game will take home both winnings, leaving the other with nothing. This will make them re-think their strategy — play it safe or take the risk and go all the way — in order to be the winner.

As McCrillis gets ready to begin her solo game, she quickly sees that the models have been replaced with the classic Imperial stormtroopers. The game becomes even more exciting when she gets a surprise guest supporter — Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), to help her play her game.

Anxiously waiting to start his game, Flinchum has no idea what is in store for him. Once his game begins, Mandel reveals the models are dressed as Princess Leia in the classic slave outfit from Return of the Jedi. After getting his composure, he too gets surprise supporters as everyone’s favorite Wookiee Chewbacca and the loveable astromech droid R2-D2 take the stage.

Be sure to tune in to “Deal or No Deal” on NBC, Monday, April 28 (8-10 pm ET) to see your favorite Star Wars characters make an appearance!

Why now? Why was now the right time to bring Star Wars to animation?

This is a project we've actually been working on since the end of Revenge of the Sith, I've worked in animation before with Steven [Spielberg] in A Land Before Time, John Korty on a film [Twice Upon a Time] and a few other things. I love animation. I started out in film school in animation, and I felt it was time to explore that medium, and then at the same time be able to explore a part of Star Wars that is so vast that you can't deal with the Luke Skywalker / Anakin Skywalker saga... you get to deal a little bit more with the minutiae of the Clone Wars.

Clearly this has a different look than anything that's come before. Can you share with us the method you went ahead to do this, and the thinking behind the design of The Clone Wars and also the design of the characters?

In order to create The Clone Wars, I had to develop a whole new studio from scratch. We've really been able to advance our animation ambitions. When it comes to the look and feel of The Clone Wars project, I wanted to do something that was in the realm of anime, design-wise, but still different. So I said, "How can we do this along with a strong storytelling sensibility?"

I have a tendency that --- just like with Star Wars, which is based in the 1930s Republic Saturday matinee serials, or Indiana Jones which is based on the same thing -- I wanted to give it a look and the feel of something that's from the past. So everybody was fairly amused in the animation community that we picked Gerry Anderson and Thunderbirds to be our inspiration. It has a very stylized look. I didn't want it to look like Beowulf, which we could've done, or The Incredibles, and when you're doing animation about live action actors and everyone knows what they look like, you really do have to come up with a sophisticated and dynamic caricature of these people.

A lot of people are excited about the new characters that you've incorporated into the storyline, great new good guys and great new villains.

We added a new character. We needed to change the dynamic between Obi-Wan the mentor and Anakin the Padawan, which is where we left them. That's how they entered the Clone Wars. We wanted to make that relationship become more dynamic... sort of like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They're now equal. They're now partners. They're now working together.

But we really wanted to have that Padawan-mentor relationship, so we gave the most unlikely person a Padawan, which is Anakin, and we made the Padawan a girl. She's very feisty. She's very outgoing and independent-minded, which gives Anakin a real challenge, because he's sort of like that too. He's trying to clean up his act by teaching her to settle down and think and not be so aggressive.

She gets in her share of action.

She's a great character. She's turned out really fantastic.

Star Wars Galaxies-Path to the Force-Episode 268

Only two episodes left! What will be the fates of Gregorious and E'nac? Be sure to stay tuned for the last two episodes of Path to the Force as this Gamic comes to its conclusion!