Episode I: The Phantom Menace - 20th Anniversary

[Whill]

This is a poster still on the Star Wars wall of my basement.


When I started playing the Star Wars RPG game, Star Wars movies beyond the original trilogy were not a certainty. I can't express the excitement I felt when they announced Episode I in the mid-90s. The screenplay for the first Star Wars film had originally been much more inspired by Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, so it seems appropriate that Episode I's final story went back to Kurosawa. It is neat that Lucas officially introduced things stated in a 1977 interview, such as Midi-chlorians and Threepio being built by a boy working for an outer rim junk dealer. And we see the initial factor in Darth Vader's decent to the Dark Side, the separation from his mother.

There is a lot to love about The Phantom Menace. John Williams delivered a totally up to par score with my favorite Star Wars theme, Duel of the Fates. Ewan McGregor is an excellent young Obi-Wan Kenobi. Liam Neeson is an absolutely fantastic lead as Obi-Wan's Jedi Master (the Old Ben of this film). We get to see a brief lightsaber duel long before the final battle. Maul is a perfect mysterious dark warrior introducing the mystery of the Sith and his master Darth Sidious, the titular "phantom menace". The delightful Ian McDiarmid returns as Palpatine, now in his pre-Empire days. Jabba the Hutt appears. The pod race was so wizard. There was a minor amount of humor in the film.

It is quite fitting that Episode I serves as the quintessential Star Wars films in some ways, especially with respect to the film's four-arena final battle. The lightsaber duel of the climax is an epic melee. TPM's space battle with young Anakin is a meaningful contrast to his son's final battle in ANH. (Luke was a young adult with a fully developed ego so had to be told to let go of his conscious self to act on instinct and make the shot, but Anakin on the other hand was a kid and still more fully immersed in his unconscious self so "Oops".)

[griff]

I too was very excited when the new movies were announced. What I really liked about The Phantom Menace was seeing Coruscant on screen. I liked the set pieces a lot. My favorite is still the pod racer repair facility and the arena. And after having kids and showing them Episode 1 and having them love Jar Jar, I don't mind his goofiness as much as I did when the movie first came out. In October of 2001 I had a bad motorcycle accident and was recovering for two months, The Phantom Menace came out on DVD and I watched it several times during that time (sometimes twice aday), it got me through that recovery without have to focus solely on everything going on in the real world at that time. To this day I still don't know where all the hate for the prequels comes from, especially The Phantom Menace.
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"EXECUTE ORDER 67. Wait a minute, that doesn't sound like order 67..... No, wait. Yes, yes it does. EXECUTE ORDER 68" Palpatine's last moments - robot chicken.

[garhkal]

Same here. When Ep 1 was announced, i think most EVERY Sw fan was stoked...
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Dredwulf60]

I remember setting up my computer to download the trailer.
It was ready to view the next morning!

And I watched and watched that trailer!

This one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJZ846YkK78

I think that might have been responsible for some of my disappointment with it.
The original trailer hints at so much that it could NEVER deliver on what my imagination had conjured as I watched that trailer and indulged in unintentional mental conjecture!

"Wipe them out. ALL of them."
How could I NOT think it was the Emperor starting the purge of the Jedi?

The best part, for me, was the Ben-Hur style pod race.

I got a lot of use out of that concept and imagery in my game.

[MrNexx]

I didn't get to see it in theaters. I was working 1800-600 shifts in a warehouse, and my family went to see it without me, and I was too wiped to see it myself.

The only prequel I saw in theaters was The Revenge of the Sith. I didn't see AotC until after that, even.
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"I've Seen Your Daily Routine. You Are Not Busy!"
“We're going to win this war, not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.”
http://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/

[RyanDarkstar]

Exploring new worlds, especially Coruscant, was great. It gave a better look at a galaxy actually populated by citizens, rather than out-of-the-way locations that were largely devoid of human forms.

Also, seeing the Jedi in their prime was neat, but the council was somewhat disappointing. They were so detached from reality that they really had no one but themselves to blame for their eventual destruction, which was the point.

While I enjoyed the original treatment for The Phantom Menace more, the movie created a decent foundation for the prequels.
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Currently playing D&D 5E and painting an unholy amount of miniatures.

[TauntaunScout]

I was a senior in high school in 1999. My mom orchestrated us all cutting school to go see it in the "good" movie theater an hour away as opposed to the lesser one which was 30 minutes away.

We had to drive 60 minutes each way the week before too, to buy the tickets in advance. My friend who'd graduated ahead of me, and my older brother, came back to town to go to it with us along with a handful of my HS friends. I wanted to take my then-girlfriend but it wasn't a certainty that her strict grandparents were going to let her ditch school to go.

Ultimately the best thing about TPM was my girlfriend's gramma saying "When I was your age we all skipped school to go see Gone With the Wind, I think you should go!". That was an early and important lesson about the constancy of human nature throughout and across generations.

Her gramma died just a couple weekends ago, had to think of that and pour one out for her.

[Solo4114]

When it first came out I pretty much loathed everything about it. There's still a great deal that I don't like about it, but one thing that I do appreciate is the very different looking design aesthetic of Naboo and its culture.

You still see, for example, the more "typical" looking starship design from the Jedi consular corvette (or whatever the ship is), and you see certain common themes in things like blaster design, but the design aesthetic of Naboo is all about beauty and sleekness and it just ends up being very distinct.

I've been thinking about the sequel trilogy and what comes after it, and about how -- once you're past that point -- you presumably can no longer rely on the visual tropes established in the OT -- or variations on those themes -- to get you through and convey that "This is Star Wars." You won't have white-armored troopers and wedge-shaped giant spaceships and variations on the X-wing theme. So...how do you make Star Wars that doesn't exactly look like Star Wars? I think TPM manages to do that pretty well.

It's still hampered by some other poor design choices (why are Jedi all apparently dressed like Tatooinian farmers?), but on the whole, it's pretty clear it's a Star Wars film, just one that doesn't rely on a ton of visual familiarity as a shortcut to "Yup, that's Star Wars." I definitely didn't give it enough credit in its time for that.


I'll reserve comment on the rest of it, though, in the spirit of this thread.

[Whill]

[Dredwulf60]

I remember this one guy brought his girlfriend, who wasn't a Star Wars fan.

After TPM she turned to him on the way out and asked,

"So...when does Anakin change his name to Luke?"

[Whill]

[RyanDarkstar]

[Whill]

[Sutehp]

[TauntaunScout]

Obi-Wan et al dress like samurai, from the samurai movies being copied at the time. Owen et al dress like Japanese peasants, from the same movies.

I never thought of it as "moisture farmer" clothes, just "Star Wars" clothes.

I suppose one could think of it as both Jedi and farmers as being subsets of the population that dress very old fashioned though. As opposed to city fellers like Han and Lando.