The Big Picture: Continuity Wars

Vault Citizen

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Desert Punk said:
MovieBob said:
Continuity Wars

MovieBob shows us the consequences of the new Star Wars movie.

Watch Video
Bob, could the next big picture just be your take on the mario continuity? That was entertaining as hell to listen to.
I second that motion. Personally I didn't think there was much of a continuity so it would be interesting to watch Bob look at the issue.
 

Rakor

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Seven Samurai Star Wars, I've got hopes for that.

Hmmm, we've gotten a Zelda Historica. Where's the Mario Historica? o.0
 

Jman1236

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You want to talk about continuity try sentai continuity. Up until Gokaiger the rule was every super sentai was in it's own seperate universe except for the versus(crossover) movies. The only series to admit the exsistance of another team was Timeranger. Now that gokaiger makes them share the same world serveral of them contradict others. For example take the dinosaur themed sentai, Zyuranger said that it was Witch Bandora(Rita) that killed the dinosaurs, but then Abaranger says that the asteroid only killed some of the dinosaurs while it also sent the rest to a another dimension that the impact created, but then the new series kyoryuger says they were killed when a monster-of-the-week caused a global ice age...



Anyone have an advil?
 

Zoe Castillo

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Did bob seriously just say that 50+ years of continuity makes it less intimidating to get into comics?

Because while I do read the damn things the idea of getting into current mainstream comics terrifies me . I can only read relatively new stuff like northlanders or series that have already ended like preacher or scott pilgrim . everything else seems like work . DC?s reboot actually got me to try a few of the new books but even then I was going ? who is this again?? like every 3 seconds .

(New swamp thing is nice though )
 

Ed.

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I'd like it if they filtered books and kept some of the really good stuff mainly stackpole and zhans stuff or at least a few nods, but ditched basicly everything els.

I mean Timothy zhan gave us corosaunt not Lucas, and stackpoles rouge squadron stuff wouldn't interfere with anything.
 

bastardofmelbourne

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Soviet Heavy said:
Obligatory snipe at Star Wars EU being nothing more than fanfiction, followed by spiel about Mario bullshit that consumes half the episode. Yep, I'm still watching Moviebob, and he still has nothing interesting to say without annoying me.
Arqus_Zed said:
Jesus fucking H. Christ, Bob.

Mario continuity? Really?
I know you're a Nintendo fanboy and I know you wear that title with pride, but you really need to keeps tabs on your manchild tendencies.
I don't think you two would know self-deprecating humour if it walked up in front of you and insulted itself.
 

Soviet Heavy

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bastardofmelbourne said:
Soviet Heavy said:
Obligatory snipe at Star Wars EU being nothing more than fanfiction, followed by spiel about Mario bullshit that consumes half the episode. Yep, I'm still watching Moviebob, and he still has nothing interesting to say without annoying me.
Arqus_Zed said:
Jesus fucking H. Christ, Bob.

Mario continuity? Really?
I know you're a Nintendo fanboy and I know you wear that title with pride, but you really need to keeps tabs on your manchild tendencies.
I don't think you two would know self-deprecating humour if it walked up in front of you and insulted itself.
Thing is, I don't give a shit about Mario continuity. I came in with the promise of hearing about Star Wars, and left with nothing useful being said and a two minute tangent on why fucking Shy-Guys are interdimensional beings.
 

Renegade-pizza

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What about the Old Republic? Armies of Sith and Jedi beating the crap out of each other would make nerds cream their C3-PO pants.

Thumbs up if you get the reference
 

Arqus_Zed

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bastardofmelbourne said:
Soviet Heavy said:
Obligatory snipe at Star Wars EU being nothing more than fanfiction, followed by spiel about Mario bullshit that consumes half the episode. Yep, I'm still watching Moviebob, and he still has nothing interesting to say without annoying me.
Arqus_Zed said:
Jesus fucking H. Christ, Bob.

Mario continuity? Really?
I know you're a Nintendo fanboy and I know you wear that title with pride, but you really need to keeps tabs on your manchild tendencies.
I don't think you two would know self-deprecating humour if it walked up in front of you and insulted itself.
Cute.

He spends about one third of the entire episode talking about it. In great detail. With information that seems disturbingly well thought about. Questioning various theories in rapid succession. He probably wanted to let it come of as a joke, but if you're not too dense, it's quite obvious he's really being quite serious.

It's like that Moviebob episode where he pretends to have seen a private screening of a new high budget Super Mario movie. The episode was basically: "If I had half a billion dollars, this is the Mario movie I would make." Yeah, it was disguised as an April fools episode, but he just wanted to get all his "super cool ideas" to the masses.
 

Azuaron

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Continuity is kind of a make or break thing for me because I like settings almost as much as I like stories. Hell, I buy RPG manuals that I know I'm never going to actually play just so I can read about the setting.

So when a corporation (let's face it, it's almost always a corporation) comes in and mucks up the continuity, I start to lose interest real fast. I mean, Star Wars already had an absurd number of levels of canon [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Expanded_Universe#Official_levels_of_canon], then Lucas made the prequels, and now we're going to have a split post-Jedi canon and... the setting is ruined. The stories might be good, the characters good, but the setting, without any sort of internal consistency, is ruined, and I have no further interest in it.

And this isn't the first time I've "broken up" with a series because of continuity problems. I dumped Dragonlance after reading over 100 books because not only did some books directly contradict others, but some books actively made fun of the others. It's like there wasn't any editorial oversight at all, and authors just mucked around as they pleased without respect to those who came before.

This is also why I can't really get into comic books. I mean, sure, Marvel has better continuity than DC to an extent, but they still retcon the Hell out of everything to the point that no one really knows what has and has not happened or what the rules of the setting are at any given point in time. Once you get into the cross-medium stuff (books vs. movies), even a token nod to consistency goes out the window.

In summary, I primarily read single-author (or cohesive team) scifi and fantasy because everything else drives me up the wall.
 

Rad Party God

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It always bothered me how Yoshi's Island in Yoshi's Island is like a 100 times bigger (and funnier) than in Super Mario World.
 

skylog

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Wait, the Mushroom Kingdom's flora affects those two Toads in New Super Mario Bros. Wii and WiiU.
 

TheSchaef

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Gizmo1990 said:
Also will their ever be a Big Picture on the New 52 as I know very little about it and really want to know why Bob seems to hate it.
New 52 is simply the latest (and most blatant) example of how DC reboots its continuity every ten years with a new manufactured "crisis" in order to alter certain "established" traits in favor of wanting to take a character in a new direction.

Their one BIG crisis arguably had the greatest shakeup, knocking off among others Supergirl (whom they wanted to end) and Barry Allen-Flash (whom they wanted to replace with Kid Flash, Wally West). It eventually turned into their continuity crutch, by which they demonized Hal Jordan, replacing him with a character who belongs in a Green Lantern outfit about as much as Raiden belongs in Metal Gear Solid, then rehabilitating his image with yellow brain aliens or something, and a hundred other equally dubious decisions.

TLDR; DC uses stupid reboots to change stupid stories into other stupid stories, and also, Geoff Johns.

I wonder if Bob works Mario-themed games into his continuity, cause it seems like it would be pretty easy to blow his mind, e.g., Birdo is in Mario Tennis.
 

DoctorImpossible

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I'm sure they'll keep bits and bobs from the EU. I wouldn't be surprised if the Solo twins are in the next one, for instance (although they very well may not be). And I'd personally like a KotOR-era film someday. But no Vong plz.

Anyway as a comics nerd I dig continuity but I can accept that the realities of decades of storytelling will mean that not everything is going to line up just right.

I enjoyed the Mario digressions. Mario as John Carter/Superman = pretty slick.

Also kudos on the double use of 'ephemera'.
 

Chadling

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While I can understand the protectiveness that Star Wars fans have towards their Expanded Universe, as I happen to be one of those geeks who really got into the books when I was a kid (I mean, I used to play on a forum post-based Star Wars RPG), there's a real problem with the EU that makes me wonder if it's even worth preserving in the movies.

A lot of it is really bad.

No, seriously. Some of the books are terrible, almost to the point of being unreadable. This normally would be easy to write off, except one of the most important parts of the EU canon, the establishment of Skywalker's rebirthed Jedi Order, is also written by one of the worst writers in the EU. Seriously, this guy is bad. Really bad. He is overly fond of pulling new superweapons out of nowhere that make the Death Star look like a wiffle ball, he writes beloved characters as though they are complete morons, and spins a slew of plotlines that are never resolved elsewhere. He kills at least two characters through means of pure stupidity. It was so bad that another author basically had to write a Fix Fic (obligatory TVTropes link) to tie up all the loose ends and point out what idiots everyone was being in this time period. It's glorious.

Granted, that aforementioned book was from the perspective of a borderline Mary Sue character, but I digress.

Basically, I'm just trying to point out that while there are a lot of people who love the Star Wars EU, it is rife with flame wars over the quality of different authors and plot lines, whether so-and-so should have died in the process of stopping some evil-dark-unholy threat from creating a new age of darkness or survived the ordeal, and various minutiae. There are screaming arguments over the various retcons and "plot twists," in the canon. It gets to the point that I want to read through the tubes of the Internet and grab these flame warriors by the shoulders and shake them while screaming in their faces "Do you guys even LIKE Star Wars?"

....

....

Hold on. Is this how comic book nerds feel about their material?
 

GaltarDude1138

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YES. YES. WE KNOW. They won't adapt any of that EU canon into new Star Wars stuff. (Even though Lucas nodded to some of it, making Coruscant a real place in the prequels is proof he was paying attention to what was being written about it.)

The thing I think most of us EU fans were looking forward to was that Disney might consider adapting the Thrawn Trilogy, since those books SCREAM Star Wars and would be easy to adapt into movies. Then after they won over the fans, they could do whatever spin-offs they wanted.

But no. And that's fine by me. Now I'm hoping that the original cast reunites for at least one more adventure in the SW universe.
 

RandV80

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Falseprophet said:
I thought the Clone Wars cartoon was writing over a lot of EU canon anyway. And it's not like this is the first time this has happened. The prequels undid a lot of EU material that existed up to that point.

If you read through the extensive discussion of canon on Wookiepedia [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Canon], it's clear that through the whole history of the franchise, whatever happened in the live-action films is canon, and any other media is generally accepted as canon until Lucasfilm decides it isn't.

Lucasfilm has the right to mine whatever ideas they like from EU canon, and they probably will use a couple. But adopt that byzantine web wholesale? Not likely.
Yeah that's pretty much what I've been thinking all along, though personally I doubt they will adopt anything from the EU.

I'm okay with that but at the same time I think it would be really cool if they kept Grand Admiral Thrawn around as the bad guy. You can completely re-write the story, but just keep Thrawn as the leader of the imperial remnants.

Out of all the EU universe stuff, the first thing that comes to mind when people talk about it is the Thrawn trilogy. And that's because Timothy Zahn made a legitimately awesome Star Wars villain here. The guy has everything, great name, distinct features, awesome MO. There's a reason why everyone remembers him and those that don't know any of the EU will love him all the same. I'd give it a 99% chance the new writers won't be able to come up with something better, just like how Darth Maul or Count Dooko could never live up to Darth Vader. It would be a great gesture towards the hard core Star Wars fans as well.
 

PunkRex

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I recently found out that Tarantino's films have a continuity... shit's banannas!
 

God of Path

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I hate to say it... but that Mario continuity stuff was terribly engrossing. I would love to see another episode discussing that, if you fancy the idea, Bob.
 

ShadowKatt

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Darth_Payn said:
Gizmo1990 said:
Also will their ever be a Big Picture on the New 52 as I know very little about it and really want to know why Bob seems to hate it.
He already did. It's called Continanity Reloaded, I think.
ShadowKatt said:
I never once expected them to pick up the EU. Lucasarts never did, why would Disney. It's not as if the legwork is already done for them and they would just have to throw their infinite supply of money at it until they worked out a script with only a fraction of the effort. That would just be insane.
OK, time out. LucasArts CONTRIBUTED to the SWEU with lots of great video games (in no particular order: Dark Forces and the Jedi Knight Series, KOTOR, Shadows of the Empire, The Rogue Squadron Trilogy, Republic Commando) and there's no reason to think those will POOF disappear when the new movies arrive.
They were endorsed, yes, but beyond that there is t much that really makes them any ki d of canon. There is very little that ties them Into anything save the jedi knight series, and only then because of a couple familiar faces. Its not the same as if they did a movie that really showed Luke building or at least starti g the new jedi order. Lucasarts contribultio s to the EU have more or less been not suing people who had the same Ideas LA had before they made it into a game.

Though I havent played the rogue squadron games, so maybe im missing something supendously spectacular there that somehow contributed greatly.