I don't know if it is really revisionism... I mean, Lucas' "vision" has always been very fluid. The first draft of Star Wars is nothing like the shooting script that actually got put in front of cameras. The only common element between all of the drafts, outside of general themes, is the line "I'll be careful./You'll be dead!"

The twelve part saga exists in his notes; after the runaway success of Star Wars, he was probably throwing ideas around for some time, and there was never really a firm plan in place until it started going into active development. But it was the general shape of the thing at the time; so carried over and some didn't.

Even the nine-film Kurtz outline is vague in the details. I don't think there was much story developed for VII-IX at the time than "Luke finds his lost sister in another part of the galaxy and they confront the Emperor in part IX."

Much like Tolkien's development of Middle Earth, I find Lucas' process for the development of the Star Wars story to be fascinating

Well, the revisionism is Lucas and Lucasfilm presenting the 12-film "plan" as something firm, instead of likely one of many possibilities Lucas was playing with at the time.

The evidence for this "plan" are two very sparse, undated notebook pages. The official site implies the notebook outline was made "around this time" of the 1978 Time magazine article where Lucas first mentions 12 films total. But what's "around" 1978? Does 1979 count?
https://www.starwars.com/news/the-lo...es-vii-viii-ix
https://screenrant.com/star-wars-geo...12-movie-plan/

By 1979, he was talking about 9 films. To me, the thing that makes the most sense is that when he was working on another draft of Empire and came up with the idea of episode numbers, he jotted down that 12-episode outline real quick. Then, as he thought about it, realized he didn't need a Prelude or Epilogue/Prologue film between the trilogies, and then once those were cut, it made sense to wrap up with another 3-movie trilogy instead of 4 more episodes.

But it's about the timing and how firm Lucas's plans were at the time, which were basically not firm at all until scripting Empire.

Have you read The Secret History of Star Wars? It's unofficial deconstruction of the myths Lucas built around the creation of the films provides a fascinating look into the actual creative process Lucas underwent.

Once they realized that TLJ did not move the plot along enough, or perhaps didn't like the direction it went in, they should have abandoned the "trilogy" concept and made an episode 9 and then 10 instead of trying to rush it all in episode 9.

In fact, they should have just kept it a secret. making everyone believe it was going to be another trilogy... and then have episode 9 end in a cliff hanger, cut to black, then a big yellow EPISODE X logo pops up. End. Crowd would have gone nuts.

Yeah, because what the world needed was more TLJ and TROS in a fourth film. What did humanity ever do to you?

Not sure if that’d had worked. They may have gone nuts but in a bad way. I don’t think the sequels could have been saved by extra movies or runtimes. They’re just not good once you get away from the safety of Force Awakens. Can’t save bad writing with more bad writing. Rise of Skywalker didn’t feel rushed it was just lame altogether.

They could've gone the routes of other film franchises and split the final story in half.

• Episode 9 Part 1
• Episode 9 Part 2

Honestly though, they probably didn't realize Episode 9 was a disaster until way too late. And if we're armchair quaterbacking and looking back to say what "should've" been done, why stop at Episode 9 ? They should've came up with a much more consistent story and vision for the trilogy before filming Episode 7.

Final Skywalker trilogy.

Yeah, I feel like calling the episodic films the "Skywalker Saga" is a bit of retroactive bs anyway.

Also, I didn't find any official statements that it'd be the final "Skywalker" trilogy either, especially not on day one when Disney bought Lucasfilm

While it definitely is true that the "plan" was always fluid, the way Lucas presented himself and his ideas is what makes us feel the constant revisionist history. At no point did he ever say, "Well, this was my plan, but then we came up with . . . " He always presented the flavor of the day it as "This is the way it has always been." It's the same crap that creates my disdain tor Ridley Scott -- can never admit they changed their mind or were wrong. That was always the plan.

I revisited TLJ and TROS this past week. They hold up better than I remember. Perhaps that is revisionist on my part -- I have come to grips with the bad and am able to overlook it to pull out the good story ideas that are present in both. The ideas may not be well executed on (looking at you Canto Bite, and most of TROS), but there are good messages buried in the lack of a plan mess. I would have gladly taken a fourth film IF they had planned this out and coordinated it. In fact, they probably already had the material for a fourth if they had planned and parsed among the three films. I'm convinced "trilogies" are the modern epitome of lazy filmmaking. Don't tell me it will take three films when you have no clue what those three films are.

I'm betting the wolves pulled some Holdo Maneuvers . . .

The population of Coruscant is in the billions and billions, it being abandoned over 30 years is simply unfeasible. I could see some of the areas like around the Jedi Temple or the Senate building could be cleared out, and some wolves from a local zoo get out and take over.

As for The Holdo Maneuver, the reason it can't be done is because it requires extremely precise math to calculate when your ship is moving as close the speed of light as you can get it before actually entering hyperspace so that you hit the enemy ship with a multi ton object moving at near the speed of light.

If you want to understand this a little better, go re-watch Rogue One. At the end, when the Battle of Scariff is wrapping up, you see some Rebel ships jump into hyperspace away from the planet and get away but then a microsecond later the Star Destroyer drops out of hyperspace into realspace and the rebel ships run into, collapsing into debris against the Star Destroyer's shields. So that's obvious, but think about those ships that jumped into hyperspace moving in the exact opposite direction that the Star Destroyer comes from without any issue - no collisions (apparently). What this tells me is that there must be a moment in between those two states where a ship is moving near the speed of light but still in realspace and would thus have a massive amount of kinetic energy.

This is supposed to be the logo for the 20th anniversary of Revenge of the Sith this year. I hope we see a re-release in theaters.

Maybe George will give a Special Edition and put back the scenes of Padme and Mon Mothma starting the Rebellion. Or slip in the scene from The Mandalorian showing Grogu's escape from Order 66.

Are those supposed to be the wolves that were in Rebels?

Does the word "somehow" mean nothing to you?

Milo also missed my sarcasm about the Hobbit's boner for mass suicide.

Do such scenes exist? Very interesting if they do. I wonder how cool it would be to have extended editions of the prequels or if they’d had been fleshed out further? I like them enough as is but it feels like there was so much more there to explore.

The Mon Mothma scene was included on the 2005 DVD.

It's one of those cases where I can understand why it wasn't in the final cut -- it doesn't do much to move the plot of the movie forward, only supplies connective tissue to the OT -- but I would have liked to have seen more of that kind of connective tissue than, say, including Chewbacca as fan-service.

Chewie probably would have made more sense to include with Kenobi; in Star Wars (77) you could almost get the impression they knew each other. Kenobi and Yoda should have swapped Kashyyyk and Utapau in that movie.

I hate relitigating this for the nth time, but I also hate this part the most in TLJ and the explanation for why it can’t be done again in TROS. If this is so astronomically impossible to do, then why did Holdo even attempt it? And if your answer is, well she was desperate and she got really, really lucky, then why did Hux get so scared when she turned her ship towards them as if he knew she were going to succeed on some maneuver that has an infinitesimal chance of working?

Right? Like, where is the scene where the Senate parliamentarian rules on the point of order objection by Valorum’s political allies against the untimely introduction of the no confidence motion?

Agreed on Holdo. It was a viable choice and could be done because the ships were right there and she was desperate enough to give her life. In TROS they turn sacrificial suicide into a terrible joke just to give a failed actor turned glorified extra a totally dumbass speaking line because his buddy directed it. Then that creates this ignorant kriffing debate.

As for the Senate scenes, I am hoping they re-implement the full "voice roll call vote" scenes!

This movie and this scene in particular suddenly seems more relevant.

It's been so long since I last watched the PT. All that CGI has aged poorly. It'd be great if they were to redo it, if it weren't for the fact that the live action footage of Episodes II and III were shot on HDCAM at 1080p/24. The CGI would have to still be dumbed down to match.