Saturday, December 4, 2010

And To Think That I Saw It On Skywalker Street...

A cartoonist imagines some scenes from Star Wars as they might have been illustrated by Dr. Seuss. A couple include dialogue.

Reading the Yoda snippet makes me think that Seuss's rhyming style would not have been at all out of place coming from the little guy -- although I don't know if the switch to a naked Yoda is really something that would work well at all. And hello, second weird-search-engine generator phrase within the past week.

Doing the whole series in a Seussian métier (or meter, for that matter) would have helped many cringe-worthy scenes. The talented Natalie Portman and the other-than-talented Hayden Christensen are stuck with some of the worst dialogue George Lucas has ever written (a singular accomplishment in itself) as they fall in love and try to build a life together. See, if this line from Portman's Padme Amidala: "Hold me, Ani. Hold me, like you did by the lake on Naboo; so long ago when there was nothing but our love. No politics, no plotting, no war" was rhymed, then it would be funny on purpose instead of by accident. And I think that's pretty much the best that can be hoped for about it -- there's next to no possibility that it could actually be rendered meaningful and dramatic.

I can definitely see something like this improving Jar-Jar Binks, although just about anything other than increasing his screen time would improve Jar-Jar. The obstacle there is that if Seuss had been living when Jar-Jar was being dreamed up and had been asked to write for him, I am sure he would have looked at Lucas, smiled sadly and paraphrased one of his own book titles in reply: "George Walton Lucas, will you please stop now!"

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