Phantom Menace
on December 11, 2013 at 12:01 amChapter: Billie and Danny
Characters: Danny Wilcox, Jennifer Billingsworth
Location: Danny and Joe's dorm room
Oh, right, this one originally ran on May 20, 1999. Â The Phantom Menace was the entire world that week. Â There was nothing else.
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Meh, I was never really into Star Wars
Agreed, Star Trek’s cooler.
I’ve never understood why people feel the need to compare them. They have almost nothing in common. One’s about examining its characters, using a science fiction setting to set up metaphors for the human condition. The others a big good vs evil adventure yarn.
It’s be like if every time someone talks about the TV series where a serial killer helps the police to catch criminals and satisfies his murderous urges by killing those who have escaped justice, someone pops up and mentions that they prefer the show where the ginger-headed child has an amazing laboratory.
wait, you mean they’re not sequels to one another?
Everything I know is a lie o.0
…I’m now thinking up a film pitch for “Astro-Boy vs Terminator”.
“The others a big good vs evil adventure yarn.” Depends on who you ask. Some people will argue the franchise is about the Politics of the universe. You know the part everyone hated about the Prequels? Yeah some people liked that crap.
They are both Star Something (but not Starsomething).
Some of the Star Wars books have some brilliant psychological and philosophical parts that are more Trek-y in style though…
Actually like some of the books better than the movies (never, EVER read “The Crystal Star” though).
I was into Star Wars until the day after this strip originally ran.
I wasn’t into it enough to fight the lines to see Phantom Menace the first day it was out.
What’s a fandom menace? =B
[j/k]
[[tho not really]]
I see what you did there.
It’s not inaccurate :/
It’s the first chapter of Faans!, the author of which likes to comment on these very forums…
Ah yeah, I think we all remember that week. (Is it bad that, back then, Jar Jar Binks was my favorite?)
Also, gotta love how the characters referred to the character development as the boring stuff. XD
I can still remember it. Middle of the summer, but that theater had to be 50 degrees, it was freezing!
aah!! I love this comic! great style, great body language, I just really love it!
I saw it in theatre three times. ^_^
Never saw it once
That’s okay, I saw it enough for us both.
Star Wars release date, the day the internet stopped.
Oh man, I remember sitting in line like 3 hours for tickets (to a show several days later) that week. Crazy.
I actually got to see it before everyone else, because I was a college student and they did a pre-showing in my town.
So yeah, I got to witness the wonders of Jar Jar and Jake Lloyd before all of you! Jealous?
Not in the slightest.
I remember seeing it in theaters and thinking it was utterly amazing. In my defense, I was 6 years old at the time.
I was 10 and I was also totally amazed. Mainly because OOOO CGI. Also I was in love with the Naboo Starfighter. It blew my young mind that people thought X-Wings were cooler.
I was twelve, it was okay XD
A-Wing is the coolest ship in Star Wars, obviously 😀
Eh, Phantom menace was pretty good. it dosen’t fit nto continuity well at all and prolly spoiled lots of things for older fans, but if you’d never seen the others it was pretty rad
my 7 year old self liked it 😀
Actually, my parents showed me the original Star Wars trilogy around that same time. I remember that very clearly because Star Wars (the original) was the first PG movie I ever saw, and I was 6 when I saw it. Come to think of it, my parents may have shown me those movies in preparation for the new one.
Jar Jar was the worst SW character every allowed on screen, and that’s good, because that particular film was the worst of the series. He was irritating, annoying, stupid, and the film reshot several scenes just using diff. angles. All in all, once was more than enough.
As for Danny: I was shocked, he actually said something rather intelligent telling Billie she has been forcibly ejected from her shell…but then following up with the ending comment which brought me back to reality.
The problem with Jar Jar is that they forced him into almost every scene, if they’d used him intelligently he’d have been fine.
The movie had such potential; the wonderful fight scene with Qui-Jon and Obi-Wan against the droidekas, and the fight against Darth Maul (with that FANTASTIC choral music!) but the terrible Gungans and B-movie villain Trade Federation characters (straight out of a Charlie Chan movie!) just ruined that movie. Not to mention stupid Anakin, and the infamous introduction of “midiclorians” (?!?!) :/
I remember the 12 year old me being mostly pissed off at how Anakin just stumbles into a space fighter and winds up blowing up the trade federation ship by pure accident while cutting away from the far cooler Darth Maul duel.
Also half the movie seemed to be that stupid Pod Race. Go 1999 CGI I guess.
I like the Gungans. They were just used too much. Honestly, Chewbacka and R2 probably would have been annoying if we could hear what they were actually saying too. At least GL understands that keeping aliens in the cast of a Science Fiction movie is a good thing.
I watched the movie recently with my nephews, aged 7 and 4. They had never seen any of the films, and their only exposure was playing Lego Star Wars on the PlayStation. I’d got the Blu-ray set last Christmas and not watched it, my wife has never watched the films properly, so the last time we babysat I thought it was a good opportunity. And, being slightly anal, I thought I should start from the beginning, even though Phantom Menace blah blah boring blah. I noticed three things:
1. The kids LOVED Jar Jar. Seriously loved him. The 4 year old spent the next two days saying “How wude”. It was adorable.
2. Everything Anakin’s mother said made me want to punch myself in the face. She is incapable of speaking without making it a platitude.
3. The pod race has been extended from the cinema version. That was not a good idea.
Is it weird that my favourite cuts of the original trilogy are the theatrical cuts? I don’t care if the only DVD releases are shitty LaserDisc transfers, I just prefer the theatrical cuts.
This coming from a guy, 1/4 to 1/3 of whom’s blu-ray collection he owns on DVD as well.
Considering that “Han Shot First” t-shirts exist and that Lucusfilm sold DVDs that were marketed as “Not the Special Editions! The Original Versions!” then no, you’re not the only one.
Given how similar Jar-Jar is to old Minstrel Show stereotypes, I’m not sure he’d have been fine even “used intelligently.”
I remember this as the day Star Wars died…
“13 years from then people were gonna ask themselves: where were you when the phantom menace was running?
and I’d tell them I
was just sitting by, watching it all happen.”
No better time to philosophize I suppose.
My parents took me to the PG premiere of “Star Wars”, I was five.
…I waited until ‘Episode I’ came out on home video.
As others said above, it was a decent movie with some good potential but shoehorned some things in rather awkwardly…
So yeah, other than being two states west of IU (“I was trying to decide if your logo looked like a cactus or a fort…then I thought ‘I don’t care.'” 😉 ) I probably would’ve heard Danny’s big speech. 😛
Since this has inevitably devolved into the classic ‘is Jar Jar the worst thing to ever happen to the franchise’ argument, I feel compelled to throw in my two cents’ worth.
Maybe it’s just because I’m too used to the cartoon, but last time I watched ‘The Phantom Menace’, I enjoyed Jar Jar. I enjoyed how he interacted with the other characters. In ‘The Clone Wars’, other characters were forced to take him seriously, and it almost not jarring because they were almost as cartoony as him. But in the ‘Phantom Menace’, he acted like an idiot, and it was the real world, and nobody took him seriously for a second. Even Qui-Gon, the only person who felt sorry enough to not want to see him die, didn’t put up with his shit. So, yeah, he was annoying, but more than anything it was just to the other characters. Back then, nobody tiptoed around the issue. (And I found that fun.)
And also, people who say the prequels aren’t entertainment, like it’s a fact, are assholes. Just putting it out there.
Originally posted:
May 20, 1999