Armus wrote: ↑Wed May 05, 2021 11:22 am
I legit wonder what this conversation would look like if George Lucas read the thought i had in my head in 1998 and made the Thrawn trilogy as Eps VII-IX.
The thought
you had?
I read the novels when they came out from 1991 onwards, and
everybody was talking about that.
All of my local fellow Wars fans, and all the buzz that was created about them, too.
But from the get-go, it was clear (to me) that Zahn's narratives were much too complex -- and would demand way too much exposition -- to be adapted into a silver screen trilogy. Each novel would require either 2 films,
or a 3.5h film,
or be cut down to size as a very superficial installment each.
We saw
exactly that last MO be employed with Dark Horse's
comic series that adapted the trilogy. Those comics -- however awesome -- left out a great many details. Come to think of it, it mostly did a
great job at that -- except for the Delta Source storyline. That particular sub-plot was resolved (IIRC) in a single panel
without the "correct" (i.e., the novel's) explanation; I believe it implied that robots were the source of the data leak...? (I cannot at the moment access my library of Wars TPBs, or I'd look it up.
) They weren't, and the actual culprit was much more satisfying.
(But the panel does also support the "actual" theory -- if you know the novels' explanation, you can read
that into that same panel. That was well done! But it was an example of how much of the rich backgrounds the comics writers had to forego.)
Anyway, that was just
one element that was dropped to cram the whole intricate story into 18 comics or 3x 160 pages (TPBs). I remember vividly thinking how they would not be great films, because they'd be too complex, too elaborate, for Wars films.
The Jedi Academy trilogy, OTOH,
might make better Wars films. They are simpler, much more visually oriented (instead of plot-oriented). However, they are far inferior novels, from a literary
and quality POV. But that's what you get -- a thin, simple novel will make a good film. Anything more in the way of density and elaboration, needs more films. (Or, like TLOTR -- which officially is 1 novel -- needs three 3.5 h films that still omit many smaller plotlines.)
So. I never thought (or opined) seriously that the last 3 films of Lucas' epic would be based on Zahn's books. They were simply too well-crafted for that film genre.