Category: Film and TV

Toy Story 3 – Pixar = ???

Now that Disney drove off Pixar with their heavy-handed negotiating tactics, they have decided to exercise their right to make additional sequels in the Toy Story series. Pixar will not be involved.

TOY STORY 3, COMING UP.

My money is that it won’t live up to its two precedessors. Steve Greydanus and I have discussed the intrinsic difficulties in making a third film that would live up to the first two, and it’s not clear that the characters have within them another story as powerful as the two they’ve already given us (though I have an idea for one that might come close). Without Pixar in the picture, I don’t have confidence in Disney’s ability to come remotely close.

EARTH TO LUCAS: “Less Is More”

I really want to like the new Star Wars films. And I do, but not near as much as I’d like to like them. The second of the new films was, in fact, much better than the first, but the flaws in the films are all too obvious to me. (The flaws in the original trilogy are also obvious.)

One major flaw in the current trilogy is that there is no equivalent to Han Solo. Han was an irreverent, skeptical, selfish smart-aleck whose presence helped keep the first trilogy from bogging down with everybody on screen taking the Jedi so seriously and going around acting so grave and noble. Subtract a Han figure from the first trilogy and everybody ends up taking themselves waaay too seriously.

Lucas has said that the new trilogy is much more like what he envisioned the first trilogy, but he didn’t have the tech (or the money) to make it the way he saw it.

Not everything Lucas says in this regard is true. He makes it sound as if the story of all six movies was clear in his mind when he made the first, and that patently isn’t true–at least if you read the original scripts (also available in an easier-to-use book form). Lucas had all kinds of stuff in the originals that indicate his vision of the story changed in midstream–repeatedly. Yet the original series ended up clicking in a way no previous movie trilogy had.

Despite the alterations to the plot, I think that Lucas is telling the truth when he says he originally imagined a much more lush, detail-rich universe for the original trilogy, yet for budgetary (and non-budgetary) reasons, he ended up cutting it way back.

As the years have passed, he has now begun adding back the missing detail, in the "Special Edition" of the original films that was released in theaters, in the Extra-Special Super Chocolate Fudgy Edition that has now been released on DVD, and most notably in the films of the current trilogy.

As he’s added more detail, fans of the original series have been complaining, and loudly.

There are some circumstances in which adding detail hurts a work of art, situations in which less is more.

That’s the message fans of the original Star Wars movies have been sending to Lucas, but he doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.

HERE’S ONE OF THE MOST INSIGHTFUL ANALYSES OF THE PROBLEM THAT I’VE READ.

EARTH TO LUCAS: "Less Is More"

I really want to like the new Star Wars films. And I do, but not near as much as I’d like to like them. The second of the new films was, in fact, much better than the first, but the flaws in the films are all too obvious to me. (The flaws in the original trilogy are also obvious.)

One major flaw in the current trilogy is that there is no equivalent to Han Solo. Han was an irreverent, skeptical, selfish smart-aleck whose presence helped keep the first trilogy from bogging down with everybody on screen taking the Jedi so seriously and going around acting so grave and noble. Subtract a Han figure from the first trilogy and everybody ends up taking themselves waaay too seriously.

Lucas has said that the new trilogy is much more like what he envisioned the first trilogy, but he didn’t have the tech (or the money) to make it the way he saw it.

Not everything Lucas says in this regard is true. He makes it sound as if the story of all six movies was clear in his mind when he made the first, and that patently isn’t true–at least if you read the original scripts (also available in an easier-to-use book form). Lucas had all kinds of stuff in the originals that indicate his vision of the story changed in midstream–repeatedly. Yet the original series ended up clicking in a way no previous movie trilogy had.

Despite the alterations to the plot, I think that Lucas is telling the truth when he says he originally imagined a much more lush, detail-rich universe for the original trilogy, yet for budgetary (and non-budgetary) reasons, he ended up cutting it way back.

As the years have passed, he has now begun adding back the missing detail, in the "Special Edition" of the original films that was released in theaters, in the Extra-Special Super Chocolate Fudgy Edition that has now been released on DVD, and most notably in the films of the current trilogy.

As he’s added more detail, fans of the original series have been complaining, and loudly.

There are some circumstances in which adding detail hurts a work of art, situations in which less is more.

That’s the message fans of the original Star Wars movies have been sending to Lucas, but he doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.

HERE’S ONE OF THE MOST INSIGHTFUL ANALYSES OF THE PROBLEM THAT I’VE READ.

Your DVDs Are Obsolete!

. . . or they will be . . . sooner than you imagine.

Here’s the deal:

You know how George Lucas announced at first that he wouldn’t release the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD until after Episode 3 comes out in 2005–then he released it suddenly last month?

You know how they are currently releasing Star Trek: Voyager season-by-season on DVD and then decided to release the original Star Trek series on DVD at the same time–instead of maximizing their profits by getting one series completely out and then releasing the next so that it doesn’t overtax the Trekkies’ pocketbooks?

You know how they are currently talking about releasing Star Trek: Enterprise on DVD next year even though the series isn’t even complete yet (contrary to the normal way Star Trek series are released)?

You didn’t know that? Well, now you do.

There’s a reason for all this sudden releasing of DVDs.

The reason is called Blu-Ray.

Blu-Ray is widely viewed as the REPLACEMENT for DVDs. It is expected to make DVDs obsolete.

The Blu-Ray format uses disks the size of CDs/DVDs but packs 25-50 gigs of data onto them (that’s 13-26 hours of programming, compared to 2-4 hours of programming in the DVD format). One Blu-Ray disk could hold a whole season of a TV program.

And if you want video quality rather than quantity, Blu-Ray beats DVD by similar margins. It can pack far more HDTV onto a disk than something in DVD format could.

As a result, Blu-Ray is expected to be the hot new format that will make DVD obsolete. It has the major industry players behind it, who are currently developing commercial versions of their Blu-Ray players/recorders.

These are expected to hit the market in 2005-2006.

That’s why we’re getting all these sooner-than-expected DVD releases right now.

The companies are afraid that Blu-Ray will roll right over DVD and quickly make it obsolete, depriving the companies of their chance to make money off the DVD format. So they’re rushing DVD releases of their programs out in anticipation of Blu-Ray bursting onto the market.

Is this a sound marketing strategy?

Well . . . I’m glad to be able to get DVDs of favored stuff sooner-than-expected. But I doubt the release of Blu-Ray will change things too much. I’ve already got Bablyon 5 on DVD, so I’m not inclined to buy it on Blu-Ray just so I can reduce the number of disks I have to put into the player in order to watch the whole thing in one run.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want to buy DVDs now or wait for Blu-Ray versions of your favorite programs to start to be released (probably several years from now).

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BLU-RAY.