Two dimensional fun in Mos Eisley

Have had cause to watch Star Wars a couple of times recently, and what has really stuck out has been the utterly unecessary tinkering George Lucas did for the updates. The TV version on ITV a few days ago was presumably the 2003 rejig, the Gold Edition VHS I have is from about 1997.

In both of them, the new CGI and composite inserts are truly horrible to behold in the Mos Eisley sequence.

Mos Eisley is a desert town, where many would shelter out of the daytime sun by siesta-ing the day away in those little dome roofed buildings pimpling the sandy surface of TAttooine. But no, George decided it had to be a bustling, busy, diverse metropolis; a hive of activity. To achieve this, he decided to comp in losts of people and ...er...things, walking directly sideways across the shot, horrendously out of scale and blocking out what we really want to see.

For example, Lucas and Co reckons the scene where we first see "The Fore" being used, on the Stormtroopers, is best served by being totally obscured at first by walking giants, passing speeders, and leather beast of burden lizards.

When flat as pancake people aren't walking past getting in the bloody way, we are treated to hideous slapstick robot and creature vignettes - ooh look, the creature fell of the dew back, ooh look at the little robot get hit - setting us up for Jar Jar Binks. Ugh, why did they bother?

Let us have the original vision George! 

Tourettes and the Tunnels of Work

I work in a land fit only for escape; fit only for dreams day and night, dirty plastic floors delivering static shocks into the bodies of the otherwise waking dead. Cockroach traps are insectoid death trap christmas decorations in dark corners; sometimes a bird arrives through the lorry doors and can never get out again.

In the middle of is am I, stressed to the thirteens let alone the nines by the awfulness of it all, body flailing sometimes as somekind of electro chemical surge breaks the barriers of restraint and people try and ignore it and I'm not sure what kind of reaction I want. Not laughter. But not studied ignorance, the pretence of not being bothered.

I don't know what my own head is telling me, and I don't know what I'm trying to tell it.

So I head for the maze, the caves, the world in the racking created by creaking unsafe girders racked by the weight of stores and spares and topped by a thick caking of dust. You stand in the main aisle, it's like The Mines of Moria, stretching way into an artificially lit distance.

Within here the mind wanders and people can be hidden from until the crisis passes. Worlds are visited, words are written on invisible paper with invisible ink and stored until you can go home in a slanting rain. Imagine Maximillian from The Black Hole chasing you down here looking to gut you with his propeller fingers; can you find a turn off in time he'll ignore?

Vader may be awaiting next to the floor cleaning machines, and you won't know if he's being good or evil. Cryogenic suspension tubes litter the top of the racking and you wish you can climb in until the job, or more likely the world, ends in a salvo of violet lightning.

Fight the mech warriors, hide from demons of the darkness.  Or just stand there rocking back on your heels and looking at the radio speakers on the ceiling waiting for the escape route to be broadcast.

Here there are no managers, just other worlds far far better.

I'm creating them every minute.

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Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17/10/2012

STORY - To the Centre, Rosas!

Instant story written at the library, inspired by the music of Steve Reich and the dancing of Anna Terese de Keersmaecker

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/10/2012