This is one scene that I wish the prequels didn’t undermine. It was cool when the Jedi were some mythological idea rather than people that everyone should’ve known from a decade or two ago.
It’s been a while since I watched the prequels, but the idea I got was everyone knew the Jedi existed: they were major players in the galactic senate as you referenced. But very few people would ever get to see Jedis use force powers. They might see them brandish a lightsaber. Which to a culture who had space ships, blasters, and the ability to block lightsabers (even if the materials were rare), laser swords might have seemed antiquated and quaint.
And the powers the Jedi seemed to use in populated places the most often were mind powers which aren’t necessarily observable: even Luke watching Obi-Wan mind-trick a stormtrooper was baffled. Seeing Yoda throw ships around might be a thing only a handful of people saw in a century and became little more than legend.
Ooor I might be rationalizing a lot of plot holes without realizing it. :)
But very few people would ever get to see Jedis use force powers. They might see them brandish a lightsaber
Approximately 10,000 Jedi were in the Order at the start of the Clone Wars. At that time the galaxy was home to over one hundred quintillion (100,000,000,000,000,000,000) sapient beings. Almost no one ever saw a Jedi during their lives.
At that time the galaxy was home to over one hundred quintillion (100,000,000,000,000,000,000) sapient beings.
That…seems like too many. Earth will probably cap around 10B people. That’s 10B planets with Earth-like populations. A search says Coruscant has 1T people on it, so that’d be 100M Coruscants. But I have to assume Coruscant is on the outer edge of population densities. Most would probably be lightly colonized like most of the world we see in the movies.
But then Star Wars is well known for just being waay out there will numbers and not being even close to realistic. :p
Honestly, it may not be enough. People, including sci-fi writers, chronically misunderstand the scale of space and how populations could fill in that space in a true galaxy-wide civilization.
Estimates place the number of stars in the Milky Way at 100 billion. This would work out to 10 billion lives per star in the galaxy. That doesn’t seem unreasonable, when we know that ecumenopoli exist and smaller versions of them exist in much larger numbers. We also know that terraforming of otherwise non-hospitable worlds is readily achieved in the SW universe. On top of that there are 5-25 million different species of sapient life, bringing even more classes of planets into this calculation.
Space is big, bruh. I’m not sure if there’s a source on the size of the SW galaxy, but for the milky way, it’s estimated to have upwards of 400 billion stars. Assuming most of those have planets, that’s plenty of worlds for life given a galactic ecosystem like SW’s.
You’re not rationalizing anything they pretty much spell that out in the movies.
That and everyone seems to underestimate how much effort the empire had been putting in to hunt down remaining Jedi. Even saying the word Jedi was enough to be thrown into an interrogation cell and be subjected to who knows what kind of torture. When there’s that much fear around something it can fade into memory within a single generation.
I agree with you on the bad writing, and destruction of cannon built through movie and book in the 70s and 80s. But it’s Disney’s bitch now, and will do whatever daddy Disney needs for money.
I’m probably in a minority, but I honestly think that whatever Lucas would have done for sequels would have been no better than what Disney did. I thought the prequels were god-awful and the best Star Wars movie was Empire, which was not his movie. Even Star Wars would have been nowhere near as good without Marcia Lucas’ involvement in the editing process.
Don’t get me wrong, George Lucas had some good ideas, but he’s had a whole hell of a lot more bad ones since then.
Lucas was good at special effects, writing and directing were never his thing. Star Wars is only a thing because of the pioneering methods he used to make people feel like they were part of this saga, not watching an episode of lost in space. He killed it all with the rereleases, and then erasing his original films from history.
Thankfully, there are still ways to see the original films. Lots of “despecialized editions” and the like are out there. One of the most interesting are the 4K77/80/83 restorations which bring back the original film grain. It’s a little less watchable as a movie, but very interesting to see how different scenes used different film stock for different reasons, without modern color correction, etc.
97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print so if it goes from blurry to sharp, grainy to not grainy, bright to dark, that’s because it also did that in 1977. Color correction was a single correction per reel – the optical audio track was used to white balance the image, and the contrast adjusted to ensure that there was no clipping of the highlights or crushing of the blacks, so if the color changes from shot to shot, or it goes from very dark inside to very bright outside, that’s how it is on the print. Film has a greater contrast range than home video, and of course was graded for viewing, reflected off of a giant silver screen.
Star Wars was shot on four different types of film stock, some grainier than others. (Kodak 5243, an intermediate, probably for composites, 5247, a fine grain 100 EI tungsten stock that the live action must have been shot on, and 5253, an intermediate used as a separation stock that all visual effects elements were shot on, plus the CRI stock [Magid, Ron. “Saving the Star Wars Sequels,” American Cinematographer, February 1997.])
The Effects, the music, the editing all continued right up to the last possible moment. Some scenes were shot out in the deserts of tunisia, where the sand got into everything including the film stock. Some scenes were also filmed with nylons over the lens, others were not. Scenes filmed outside, particularly in the desert, that are supposed to be only moments apart in the narrative, may actually have been filmed hours or even days apart, with the sun and clouds in constant motion and the lighting conditions changing greatly. Color correction and film printing back then was a photo-chemical process, so not all of these shots match as perfectly as they might if shot today and corrected using Davinci Resolve, watching the scopes and turning the color wheels. This also meant that no two prints would be 100% identical, and that the alignment of the Cyan, Yellow and Magenta layers of the Technicolor prints was not always perfect – which is why you can often see green or red fringing on objects in project 4K77.
Many of the visual effects shots were created using a technique called “optical printing”. Each element of the shot (starfield, X-wing, Y-wing, Tie fighter, laser blast) would be shot separately, with the ships against a blue screen. They would be combined by projecting all the images at once onto a new piece of film, a process that often allowed additional dirt, dust and hairs to be baked into the film, softened the image, and added additional layers of grain.
All of these factors mean that scenes filmed on set at Elstree, where Vader and Tarkin are just chatting in a room, are a heck of a lot cleaner, sharper and less grainy than those of R2D2 and C3P0 wandering about in the desert. It’s easy to forget that this is how it was for twenty years – all of these flaws can still be seen on the Betamax, VHS, CED and laserdisc releases of the 1980s.
There were millions of planets in the Republic, and only about 10k Jedi at any one time. The vast majority of people would never have seen one. The vast majority of planets would probably go generations between having one visit. It is entirely believable that most wouldn’t think that Jedi were real.
Part of the impact of that scene is that up to that point, the Death Star was not under Vader’s command, but he kind of comes in there and starts bossing everyone around anyway.
I think the idea was that they were so rare that most people had never met one in their entire lives or even heard of one being active. Then too they didn’t take credit for stuff they did, and while people like Padme knew, yet they were also the ones most likely to be killed during the transition to the new order).
But the big one is that the Emperor did a strong active disinformation campaign - e.g. COVID is fake so don’t worry about it, just get back to work in the sun and that’ll protect you - altogether leading people to believe, or at least say, that the Jedi were “fake news”. As in not really, but in an authoritian world, it had better be, or else, capiche? That’s the part that I worry we all need to learn, as in soon, to deal with our new reality: that Truth no longer matters, so much as adherence to authority/compliance.
This is one scene that I wish the prequels didn’t undermine. It was cool when the Jedi were some mythological idea rather than people that everyone should’ve known from a decade or two ago.
It’s been a while since I watched the prequels, but the idea I got was everyone knew the Jedi existed: they were major players in the galactic senate as you referenced. But very few people would ever get to see Jedis use force powers. They might see them brandish a lightsaber. Which to a culture who had space ships, blasters, and the ability to block lightsabers (even if the materials were rare), laser swords might have seemed antiquated and quaint.
And the powers the Jedi seemed to use in populated places the most often were mind powers which aren’t necessarily observable: even Luke watching Obi-Wan mind-trick a stormtrooper was baffled. Seeing Yoda throw ships around might be a thing only a handful of people saw in a century and became little more than legend.
Ooor I might be rationalizing a lot of plot holes without realizing it. :)
Approximately 10,000 Jedi were in the Order at the start of the Clone Wars. At that time the galaxy was home to over one hundred quintillion (100,000,000,000,000,000,000) sapient beings. Almost no one ever saw a Jedi during their lives.
Imagine you think you see a jedi and you find out it’s just a Nightsister…
That…seems like too many. Earth will probably cap around 10B people. That’s 10B planets with Earth-like populations. A search says Coruscant has 1T people on it, so that’d be 100M Coruscants. But I have to assume Coruscant is on the outer edge of population densities. Most would probably be lightly colonized like most of the world we see in the movies.
But then Star Wars is well known for just being waay out there will numbers and not being even close to realistic. :p
Honestly, it may not be enough. People, including sci-fi writers, chronically misunderstand the scale of space and how populations could fill in that space in a true galaxy-wide civilization.
Estimates place the number of stars in the Milky Way at 100 billion. This would work out to 10 billion lives per star in the galaxy. That doesn’t seem unreasonable, when we know that ecumenopoli exist and smaller versions of them exist in much larger numbers. We also know that terraforming of otherwise non-hospitable worlds is readily achieved in the SW universe. On top of that there are 5-25 million different species of sapient life, bringing even more classes of planets into this calculation.
Space is big, bruh. I’m not sure if there’s a source on the size of the SW galaxy, but for the milky way, it’s estimated to have upwards of 400 billion stars. Assuming most of those have planets, that’s plenty of worlds for life given a galactic ecosystem like SW’s.
You’re not rationalizing anything they pretty much spell that out in the movies.
That and everyone seems to underestimate how much effort the empire had been putting in to hunt down remaining Jedi. Even saying the word Jedi was enough to be thrown into an interrogation cell and be subjected to who knows what kind of torture. When there’s that much fear around something it can fade into memory within a single generation.
Misinformation and propaganda can make a society forget a lot…
Maybe, but after that film, it seems like everyone’s heard of the Jedi and the Force.
I agree with you on the bad writing, and destruction of cannon built through movie and book in the 70s and 80s. But it’s Disney’s bitch now, and will do whatever daddy Disney needs for money.
I’m probably in a minority, but I honestly think that whatever Lucas would have done for sequels would have been no better than what Disney did. I thought the prequels were god-awful and the best Star Wars movie was Empire, which was not his movie. Even Star Wars would have been nowhere near as good without Marcia Lucas’ involvement in the editing process.
Don’t get me wrong, George Lucas had some good ideas, but he’s had a whole hell of a lot more bad ones since then.
Lucas was good at special effects, writing and directing were never his thing. Star Wars is only a thing because of the pioneering methods he used to make people feel like they were part of this saga, not watching an episode of lost in space. He killed it all with the rereleases, and then erasing his original films from history.
Thankfully, there are still ways to see the original films. Lots of “despecialized editions” and the like are out there. One of the most interesting are the 4K77/80/83 restorations which bring back the original film grain. It’s a little less watchable as a movie, but very interesting to see how different scenes used different film stock for different reasons, without modern color correction, etc.
https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
Not downloadable directly, but if you don’t mind sailing the high seas or can figure out the Internet Archive’s archaic search, you can find them.
Well thank you for adding to the list of stuff I need to do once I get home
There were millions of planets in the Republic, and only about 10k Jedi at any one time. The vast majority of people would never have seen one. The vast majority of planets would probably go generations between having one visit. It is entirely believable that most wouldn’t think that Jedi were real.
You’d think a guy wouldn’t get into Vader’s inner Death Star circle if he didn’t believe in such things.
Sycophants and idiots are exactly who end up in leadership in dictatorships. Admiral Motti probably believed all the propaganda.
Part of the impact of that scene is that up to that point, the Death Star was not under Vader’s command, but he kind of comes in there and starts bossing everyone around anyway.
Really? We always seem to circle back to the same three.
I think the idea was that they were so rare that most people had never met one in their entire lives or even heard of one being active. Then too they didn’t take credit for stuff they did, and while people like Padme knew, yet they were also the ones most likely to be killed during the transition to the new order).
But the big one is that the Emperor did a strong active disinformation campaign - e.g. COVID is fake so don’t worry about it, just get back to work in the sun and that’ll protect you - altogether leading people to believe, or at least say, that the Jedi were “fake news”. As in not really, but in an authoritian world, it had better be, or else, capiche? That’s the part that I worry we all need to learn, as in soon, to deal with our new reality: that Truth no longer matters, so much as adherence to authority/compliance.