Triple Post – “Why? Just… why?”

While strolling through the fields of nerdom aka the internet, I stumbled upon three seperate articles that made me think “Wtf? Why?” And here they are:

1. Star Wars live action TV Series.

This has been threatened for a while, but now it officially has a working title: Star Wars: Underworld. Skating right over the weirdness of that in itself, I found myself wondering why. It’s well known that they’ll squeeze every penny they can out of the Star Wars franchise, so it’s not really a shock, and as long as there is one second of the timeline undocumented, they’ll keep on filling in the story.

Producer Rick McCallum said:

“They take place between Episode III and Episode IV, that 20-year period when Luke is growing up. It’s not about Luke, but it’s about that period when the Empire is trying to take things [over].”

That’s a handy place to put it, because you don’t need any of the original cast. Whether or not any of our favourite characters will make an appearance is yet to be seen. The interview with Rick is a bit rambly, but take a look:

 

2. Police Academy Remake

There’s been rumours about this for a while, but it seems to be going ahead as they’ve assigned a director. Scott Zabielski, who I personally have never heard of (He is the producer on Tosh.0, if you know what that means)

This remake definitely brings to mind the term ‘flogging a dead horse’ in more ways than one. Firstly, there were too many Police Academy films as it was, and second there doesn’t seem to be anything Hollywood won’t remake.

 

3. Goodfellas the series

It’s been 22 years since The Goodfellas became, arguably, everyone’s favourite gangster film. I liked it and I don’t usually enjoy the genre. Now AMC is working with the original writer of both the film and the book it was based on, Nicholas Pileggi, to create the series. Naturally it will be a prequel; everyone in the film died and it was never going to be a ghost-gangster series. A while ago, Nicholas said of the series:

“Of course, you can’t pick up from Goodfellas, since we murdered everybody, or rather, everybody was murdered! There’s nobody left. But I think we’re going to figure out a way to do the early years – sort of a prequel. The part of the movie people often like best is the opening third, where all the funny stuff is happening, and there’s so much we could fit in.”

Feel free to start making Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire allusions now. One thing is for sure, the gangster genre has changed since 1990 and there’s no guarantee -especially since the original cast will presumably not be involved- that Goodfellas will live up to its competitors.