People love Star Wars and Indiana Jones so much that George Lucas never has to have another original thought for the rest of his life.
And it's an offer he's been keen to exploit. This year George Lucas has a new Indiana Jones movie coming out and a new Star Wars movie coming out, plus he's got a 100-episode Star Wars TV show in the pipeline. And the time has come for George Lucas to spout off about all of this at once.
In a nutshell, then – George Lucas expects everyone to hate Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, doesn't really seem too fussed with the new Star Wars movie and has compared the TV show to The Wire. Yay! Possibly.
We get the impression that George Lucas has never heard the terms 'leave them wanting more' and 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. Or perhaps he has, but he misheard them as 'leave them feeling uncomfortably bloated' and 'if it ain't broke, stick a bunch of sodding CGI aliens in it or something anyway'.
It's this ethos that's made George Lucas make a new Indiana Jones film after almost 20 years, while constantly adding enough peripheral crap to Star Wars that people start forgetting what they liked about it in the first place. Prequels, cartoon spin-offs, holiday specials. more cartoon spin-offs, books, videogames – George Lucas isn't going to stop until you've spent so much money on Star Wars that you have to live in a bivouac made out of damp Special Edition DVDs.
Coming up this summer is Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a cartoon all about that stuff that happened in the other Clone Wars cartoon done in a different way that George Lucas is determined not to call a movie even though it's the same length as a movie and will be released in movie theatres to movie audiences.
And following that is the long-awaited Star Wars TV show, where none of the characters you know or love will do a bunch of stuff you don't care about on the cheap for 100 hours. Exciting, huh? George Lucas seems to think so.
To big-up Star Wars: The Clone Wars, George Lucas appeared at the ShoWest convention and spoke to Entertainment Weekly all about these upcoming projects. Check the full interview for his detailed thoughts, but for now here's a taster.
George Lucas on Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
I sat down and said, ''Okay, the Luke Skywalker story'' — or the Anakin Skywalker story, actually — ''is done.'' But whenever you create a universe, there's just vast areas you've never touched, and part of that was this. Which is to say, ''Well, gee, I did the movies about everything but the Clone Wars, so wouldn't it be fun to do a TV series that is nothing but the Clone Wars, and we could just have all the adventures?''
George Lucas on the Star Wars TV show:
Some of the characters from the features find their way in there, so it's not completely divorced. It's as if we just went down the street and told a different story. You know, we were doing, I don't know, 24, and now we're going to move down the street here and do The Wire. Same thing, it's just different people doing the same thing in the same city.
George Lucas on Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull:
We know that for the fans it won't be the movie that they have been making in their minds for the last 19 years, so they all get bent out of shape. A lot of the critics forget that they didn't like the first three, and so they get off on this one, too — or it's not the Second Coming.
Happily, though, once Indiana Jones is done and Star Wars: The Clone Wars is done and the Star Wars TV show has got to the 100 episode mark and all the Star Wars movies have been made 3D, George Lucas wants to turn his back on those and start making his own movies again.
First on the list is George Lucas' much-anticipated WWII movie Red Tails. And then once he's made that, made a few sequels, done some cartoon spin-offs, brought out computer-enhanced versions of all of these things, made a bunch of prequels, a cartoon movie about the stuff that happened between the sequels and the prequels and then done a Red Tails TV show that hasn't got much to do with anything else, he might even go and make another one.
Read more: