Giles

does anyone know if this documentary that aired on History Channel is slated for release on DVD?

side comment: in the doc, C3PO and R2 are referred to as the comic relief, while that's partial true, the people who are interviewed make this point but disregard the fact and never mention that both also move the action along R2 moreso: R2 carries the plans of the death star, R2 also discovers the princess inside the death star, etc, etc, - I thought the two were severly downplayed for this doc.

Thunderball

My girlfriend and I(she being casusal, and me hardcore) both Star WArs fans, were incredibly disappointed in this movie.

Star Wars, as great as it is, did not need to be compared to the biblical stories and making it seem like this is the new testament.

Its a great sci/fi fantasy type movie, but the documentary was a little over the top dont' tyou think?

Giles

I do agree partially that it did get a tad over the top in places, but I do think the way mythology and biblical stories can and does get integrated into popular cinema is always fascinating (to me at least)

rdclark

Its value, to me, was as a way to defuse the "this rips off Star Wars" and "that rips of Star Trek" type arguments. This documentary makes clear that every story has roots in the archetypes, that the fundamentals of plot and basic character ingredients have been established long ago, and that what's new is in the execution.

It was good to see academics and filmmakers have a chance to be seen applying their expertise to something familiar to everyone, even if the final product became a bit superficial in the editing.

I haven't heard anything about a DVD release of this, and I wonder if LicasFilm granted the rights to distribute all those SW clips on DVD.

r

JackBurton

I too, was very under whelmed with this doc. I guess its my own fault as I didn't really see any previews before hand or read up on what exactly it was about. But from the title, my expectations were for a look behind the actual movie and the pop-culture "legacy" aspect of it in recent history, not the loose parallels in world history that they tried to draw. It was somewhat interesting, but not something I would want to watch again.

nateman

It might get a DVD release because the 2 Amityville Horror doc's (Amityville: Horror or Hoax? & Amityville: The Haunting) that originally aired on the History Channel were released on a bonus disc called Amityville Confidential which was part of The Amityville collection which included all the movies (The Amityville Horror (1979), Amityville II: The Possession (1982), Amityville 3-D (1983)) minus Amityville 4: the evil escapes (which is underrated in its own respect) & the 2005 remake of the 1979 original.
There were apparently Amityville's 5, 6 & 7 but I have never seen them.
Anyways Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed might get released when the ninth million Star Wars DVD (30th ann.) which is supposed to have all 6 films is going to be released.

Drexl

Don't hold your breath on that.

What are the other documentaries they had? There was one about history I didn't get to see, where they compared it to WWII and other events. That's not this one, is it? There was another about technology and weapons that was really good.

Lestat2

I thought it was one of the better Star Wars docs I've seen, and was happy NOT to see another "behind the scenes" story of Star Wars. We've seen enough of those over the years. I've always thought the mythological and political references in Star Wars would make a good doc, and now it seems like someone went ahead and made it.

Sure, there was some stretching, that's a given, but even as a teenager I noticed the similarites with things as disperate as the Wizard of Oz and Nazi Germany. Did lucas have ALL these things in mind when setting out to make the film in 1975? Probably not, but I imagine a good deal of it was there. We all know the man read Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" over and over....knowing that, It's crazy to think it wasn't a huge influence when writing Star Wars.

One thing this barely touched on was the similarities with Arthurian Legend. In Arthur Myths, Arthur's father was Uther Pendragon, who was a powerful and brave King who was undone by his own lust for power. His son is spirited away at birth by Merlin and is given to peasants to be raised, until he is a teenager, when Merlin returns to reveal to him his true destiny. Sound familiar? Shockingly this aspect was never brought up in the show. ( King Arthur also screwed his sister, and we all know Luke had dirty thoughts about Leia, don't we? )

And again, just because Lucas didn't mean for the connections to made, doesn't mean that some of those things can't be interpreted a certain way. I HIGHLY doubt that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were thinking of the stories of Moses or Jesus when creating Superman, but it's easy to see why someone like Richard Donner could make those correlations when making the original Superman movie. All the stories that we geeks love ( or the ones that last anyways ) have these kinds of layers. The ones that don't tend to be forgotten.