I keep thinking about how so many of the stories we see between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope do all this work to show Vader as this walking nightmare, the terror of the galaxy, like the hallway scene of Rogue One or the shit your pants nightmare of Jedi: Fallen Order or how unstoppable and extra he is in the Dark Lord of the Sith comics, and now we see more of that Vader here, too, that he drags Obi-Wan through the fire, he rips starships out of the sky, he wipes the floor with Reva, he gets into a knock-down drag-out fight with Obi-Wan.
And contrasting it with the Vader of the originals, where sure a lot of it is the out of universe explanation of them being movies made in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but there’s something so much more subdued about him there. He still has drive and focus, he becomes obsessed with Luke, he’s still terrifying, but it feels lesser.
Like a fire has gone out of him.
There’s a tiredness to him that feels finally ready to give up the fight.
I don’t think Vader could ever have come back for any of those that knew him, not Padme, not Obi-Wan, not Ahsoka. But I also wonder if it was impossible for him to come back while they were still there for him, while they still knew him, while his love for them still twisted in on itself, turning it into a blade that stabbed inside him over and over. While he fueled himself on rejecting their love for him, their willingness to accept him back.
Padme is long dead. Ahsoka is beyond him. And then Obi-Wan dies in front of him, the last of the pillars of Anakin Skywalker’s life, the last person he loved so fiercely that he couldn’t bear their existence because they meant too much to him.
When Obi-Wan dies, when Vader kills him, when Obi-Wan lets Vader kill him and leaves him behind, a fire goes out of Vader.
FUN FACT: I own porn I can't watch.
So this is a copy of Adultery for Fun & Profit, a 1971 X-rated film. It won the Grand Prize at the Amsterdam Adult Film Festival, for the year 1970-1971!
BUT it's on Cartrivision.
Cartrivision was an early home videotape format announced in 1970, released in June 1972, and dead by July 1973.
It has some "fun" features, like not selling VCRs for it: you had to buy it build into a new console TV. Which were huge, because it was the 70s.
There's also issue of Red Tapes (of which this is one!)
See, early on the movie industry hated the idea of home movies. They made all their money on movie tickets, right? People watching movies at home, that's gonna seriously cut into their market. This is why they later sued Sony for the introduction of Beta, arguing that it could be used to pirate movies by recording them off TV. (They lost)
So when Cartridge Television started selling Cartrivision in 1972, none of the movie studios really wanted to start selling their films on home tapes, that idea sounded scary. What if someone had a copy of all their favorite films and could watch them forever at home, and never went to the theaters ever again? The movie studios would go out of business!
So along with releasing a bunch of older B&W movies (the only ones they could license), sporting events, and shows from PBS, Cartridge Television came up with a compromise that worked for the movie studios:
Red Tapes.
So, Cartrivision tapes came in two formats: Black Tapes and Red Tapes. Black tapes you'd buy at the store like any other product, but for Red Tapes (which were relatively recent movies), you instead would go to the store and place an order from a catalog. The store would have it delivered by mail, then you'd come back in and get the tape. You'd take it home, watch it, and then return it back to the store. So... Video rental (like Blockbuster!), except they didn't have any stock on hand, and only got the tapes on-demand by mail? Seems annoying.
BUT OH NO: it's far more annoying than that. See... Red Tapes aren't mechanically like Black Tapes.
You can't rewind them.
You can play them and pause or stop them just like any other tape, but the rewind feature on your Cartrivison TV doesn't work.
So once you start watching a film, you can only go forward from that point. You want to rewatch it? Too bad. Go back to the store and pay for it again.
Here's that tape again. Note that it's red: You can only watch this porn film once. Then you have to return it to the store... the stores that haven't been doing this since JULY OF 1973.
But there's another thing you can see on this picture (barely, because this is a blurry picture, thanks Past!Foone): The visible screws in the corners
So here's the thing: The tape labels for Cartrivision hide the screws. A regular tape will look like this:
BUT when Cartrivision failed in July 1973, a bunch of stores sold off their unsold inventory, including watch-once Red Tapes. And people still had some of the players. But what's the point of having a tape you can't rewind? You've basically destroyed the tape now, since it's stuck at the end and can't be rewound!
So people bought some of those Red Tapes (cheaply, I hope) and then took them home and opened them up with a screwdriver, damaging the labels. They figured out how the no-rewinding mechanism worked, and removed it. So basically every Red Tape you will find for sale on ebay has visible screws, because someone modded it in the past.
Anyway, the format has been dead so long that it's doubly-impossible to watch now. The players were only built into big heavy 1970s TVs, which were long ago thrown out. The tapes have gotten old and brittle. If you somehow DID have a player, and it somehow still worked after half a century, the tape will probably shatter as soon as you try to play it.
And the whole format only lasted 13 months, so there wasn't that much inventory sold in the first place, so there wasn't a huge number of these in existence anyway.
But a final fun fact: Someone HAS managed to get video off one of these tapes. And it was so hard that they made an award-winning documentary about it.
See, this was basically the first home video format for recording TV. The quality was terrible but it was better than nothing, and it turns out some fan with a Cartrivision recorded a copy of Game 5 of the 1973 NBA Finals game. ABC and both teams (LA Lakers & NY Knicks) had video copies of that game... and ALL THREE OF THEM LOST IT. But the fan copy survived, in a format no one could play, on a tape that would shatter if you tried to play it.
So DuArt Media Services got to work trying to rescue the tape. They had to dry it out, bake it, freeze it, soak it in alcohol, and rebuild a broken Cartrivision unit, then do a lot of manual fixups on the digital files they'd captured off the tape, but they finally managed to capture the recording of the game.
This was used for the MSG Network, who were doing a special on the 1973 championship, and had no footage of that pivotal game. With DuArt's work, they had something to show.
DuArt then made a documentary about this, called "Lost and Found: The ’73 Knicks Championship Tape". It won an Emmy.
The punchline? That documentary seems to be lost. I have been looking for years, and have not found a copy, other than a short excerpt on Vimeo.
So yeah. Cartrivision. I'm slightly obsessed with it, even though I've never actually been able to watch a single second of Cartrivison footage. Tapes occasionally show up on ebay, the odd technical manual or spare part, but players are rare, always broken, and probably would just shred the tapes even if they did somehow work. The tapes are just too old. '
Cartrivision is just... dead and gone. Not yet forgotten, but it took media restoration experts a long time and a lot of work to even get a few minutes of footage off one tape. My chances of ever being able to play my Adultery for Fun & Profit tape are basically negative zero.
Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau
in THE MARVELS (2023)
dir. Nia DaCosta | Teaser Trailer
GUYS LOOK AT THIS FUCKING WEDDING CAKE TOPPER I JUST BOUGHT
DID I EVER UPDATE Y'ALL WITH THE OFFICIAL PICS OF THIS ON OUR CAKE?
Bo-Katan haters can kiss my ASS
Anonymous asked:
Was Obi Wan happy being a Jedi, or did he wish he persuade a relationship with Satine? Sometimes I see in those "nothing went wrong" AU's, Obi Wan leaves the Jedi to be with Satine, is that accurate to how he actually felt? Did he wish he left to be with her? Or was he okay with the way things were?
gffa answered:
There’s no smoking gun of an answer on this kind of question, because we have so little information on it and character interpretations are often so, so subjective.
What we do know is:
- Obi-Wan had plenty of chances to leave the Jedi Order if he wanted, he had the chance with Satine, he had the chance every year of his life after that, etc.
- Obi-Wan says he would have left to be with her, if she had asked. This literally all we know of the conversation that’s held when there’s a possibility she might die and she wanted him to be romantic, we don’t see that moment of decision itself, only the tense conversation onboard the Coronet.
- In The Phantom Menace, he says he’ll leave to train Anakin. In Obi-Wan & Anakin, he says if Anakin truly decides to leave, he’ll leave with him to continue his training.
- In Padawan, Obi-Wan very much wants the life of a Jedi, he has a chance to live a more free life with a bunch of other kids, but he loves the Jedi, he feels the call to the Force and the galaxy and the Jedi, he wants this path.
- Obi-Wan encourages Anakin to stay with the Jedi when he’s having issues with Rush Clovis and Padme.
Ultimately, there’s no evidence that Obi-Wan is unsatisfied with being a Jedi and plenty of evidence that he believes in the Jedi path and he lives by the Jedi beliefs and ways, and finds satisfaction in that.
Does he regret that he couldn’t also live a life with Satine? I tend to think so, yes, but that he always knew he could leave and he’s only tempted into doing so when it’s for someone else, not because he doesn’t want to be a Jedi. In both cases with Anakin, he much prefers to remain a Jedi, just that he’s willing to leave, if he must.
Or in Obi-Wan Kenobi, he spends years trying to deny that he’s still a Jedi, that those ways are done and over, the Jedi are gone. But ultimately we see that his heart doesn’t really believe that, he wants to be a Jedi, because as soon as he is one again, as soon as he re-embraces the Jedi ways and his duty as a Jedi, he’s so much more settled and happy.
For me, even if everything went well during the Clone Wars, if the Sith were defeated, if the Separatists stopped invading, if Satine lived, I don’t think Obi-Wan would have left the Jedi Order. Almost no Jedi left after becoming a Knight, it was almost always in the Padawan stages, because a huge part of becoming a Knight was understanding yourself and what you wanted, that you really, truly wanted this life, that you were dedicated to this life.
Obi-Wan would have gone through the self-reflection to understand, regardless of whether he left to be with Satine or not, did he want to remain a Jedi, he had to genuinely make a choice. You can’t half-ass being a Jedi, it doesn’t work. Obi-Wan had to commit. And we see that he chose being a Jedi.
He wanted to be a Jedi, just by dint of how the worldbuilding works, in my opinion. Even if everything went perfectly, he was an adult now, not a young Padawan still figuring himself out. He knew who he was, he was Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.
