I’ll never stop finding it very funny that the only hugely popular mainstream mass entertainment product that I would possibly call “leftist” without making caveats for copious amounts of lib shit is a massive budget Star Wars show produced by fucking Disney
what a time to be alive
Just goes to show that people like leftist stuff when they’re given a chance to observe it
I feel like Disney is such an enormous content mill of a machine that it might actually sometimes be easier to get the broader leftist messaging through, so long as you don’t say that your project is explicitly about actual politics.
That movie The Creator springs to mind. That might be the most most intensely anti-American-war-machine agitprop movie since Verhoven was killing it in the 80s and the whole thing is basically a Maoist global revolution fantasy.
Eh, I’d argue it’s the same as most media about opposing “evil empires”. It’s not explicitly ideological, just vaguely anti-empire, and allows people to project whatever ideology they want onto it. I would guarantee many liberals will watch it and think “wow the emperor is Trump, Mon Mothma is just like Kamala Harris!”
People were comparing the Gorman massacre to the nasty tankies crushing the Hungarian freedom fighters, saying the empire “did a Tiananmen Square,” big evil empire is pretty easy to apply to the Soviets or China given the average level of historical literacy among the audience
That maintains its plausible deniability. In context, the massacre hits harder because 1.5 seasons have already shown the everyday reality of living within empire in a way that can’t be mistaken as vaguely anti-authoritarian. The realities of imperial maintenance are hard not to correlate with specific empires in history (it evokes alternately the British, Nazi-German, and American empires) and the logic of the anti-imperial struggle is hard not to correlate with real-world counterparts like the Bolsheviks, the Haitian revolution, the Chinese communists, and others.
It doesn’t matter if viewers are ignorant of the specific historical references, as long as they understand and agree with the logic of anti-imperialism.
The total production budget of the original Star Wars trilogy, adjusted for inflation (2024 dollars), is approximately $227 million.
If they start with good writing they don’t necessarily need a 650 million dollar budget
But they never do
Bit idea: bankrupting Disney by producing revolutionary agitprop
I wonder how bady Andor has hit their Empire merch sales
Well 3 things:
- Americans are media illiterate,
- Americans revel in being the bad guys as long as they can look/feel cool. Reminds me of that British navy ship that played the imperial march on loudspeakers transiting a port or canal or something,
- They sell the rebellion toys and such as well so they could always try to push more of those. (Truth be told the empire’s stuff for most part looks cooler (not counting pre-Empire galactic Republic stuff some of which looks pretty neat but none of which has any current relevance given the whole new empire thing past the original trilogy Disney is pushing)). But see 1-2 for why they could make an ISB play-set with Doctor Gorst and Star Wars nerds would rush to buy it.
Lego sets of the Corsucant locales in the show would sell like hotcakes.
I was having the same thought. My girlfriend was like, “Why would anyone ever dress up as a stormtrooper? They’re awful”
Base colors, inexpressive, military influence… it’s classic men’s fashion.
If anything it probably caused a bump in sales as people remembered storm troopers etc. There’ll probably be a lego TIE prototype for like $600 soon.
I chuckled at how much some of the blasters were shaped like real guns: double barell shotgun on Ghor, Kleya’s revolver style blaster.
Original blasters were made from prop guns of real firearms. Pretty sure Han Solo’s blaster is a Mauser with some attachments.
I also remember seeing rebel troopers on Hoth with some kind of kitbashed STG44
E)
This pretty much. Even in episode One Naboo blasters were just sporting air pistols.
The Aldhani crew just had straight-up AKs
That’s just all star wars movie guns since day one
So you’re telling me they could have had 30 minute long episodes and twice as many of them?
Needs CW and nsfw tag, article mentions SV without warning
Back to the regularly scheduled Baby Yoda merch ads
$650million was worth it for Star Wars. Consider that they’re already seeing the effects of its success elsewhere in the franchise. Battlefront 2 for example went from being a dead game to having 18k concurrent players, which for an old game is insane.
That’s the Andor effect. It happened at the end of Season 2, people wanted more Star Wars. This same effect will have occurred across other parts of the franchise as well.
It’s extremely valuable. It will become recommended to new Star Wars fans, potentially as a starting point, or at least after watching the original trilogy. It is as valuable to the franchise as the original trilogy was. Getting a win like this will keep Star Wars alive for them for another 2 decades of sales.
Frankly tired of people praising yet another garbage show that uses SV to make itself seem “serious” and “gritty”.
I really don’t think that’s the take you’d come away with after actually watching the show.
It’s not doing the Game of Thrones thing at all.
I won’t be watching it, these sorts of plotlines always cordon off actual SV victims from the media. It doesn’t matter how “tasteful” it is, it’s slop that ultimately trivializes SV for the profit motive
Obviously I cannot speak for other SV victims, but for what it’s worth I did not personally find the attempted SV scene to be triggering at all.
“I won’t be watching it because of a thing they show one time in the second season which i have a very strong opinion of despite having no knowledge of howit is portrayed in the context ofthe show, which, i won’t be watching”
The fuck is wrong with you? What are you arguing for? Do you want me to watch it? It doesn’t fucking matter how it’s portrayed. The setting, genre, and the company who made it itself trivializes the portrayal of SV. I say the same shit about Tasha Yar in Star Trek.
To back you up, the SV scene did lead nowhere, since the character gets magically “fixed” by killing (one) of her torturers.
It’s a common and awful trope, like oh yeah PTSD is just this thing that dissipiates with vibes.
I stopped watching after about 3 episodes, it didn’t hook me. I was hoping for Star Wars meets The Wire, I wanted to see how the cities worked how they’re run and how local government and policy affect day to day life for people in this universe.
I think it’s a bit more Mr. Robot than it is The Wire, but you absolutely should give it a bit more time. Aldhani and Narkina 5 will absolutely give you the payoff you want.
I didn’t even realize what scene you were talking about until I googled it. I disagree that it’s used to make it more serious and gritty.
The way SA is tackled and portrayed in Andor is good.
But also wholly unnecessary.
What does that even mean? Its a tv show, none of it is “necessary”. It was an important event in Bix’s arc throughout the season, and a connection to the reality of precarious workers.
Its not explored at all. Bix
spoiler
gets a short scene where she kills a dude then is perfectly fine and then returns with her special hope babe as a vessel for cassian’s patriarchal lineage to the occupied ICE metaphor farm planet where she only has suffered traumatic experiences instead of her mechanic worshop on ferrix.
She was already violated once. Didn’t need to do it again.
that’s not what andor is so thanks for playing
how many homeless people could have been housed for a year for that much money?
still didn’t watch it
I’m stickin with my old movies and Praveen Mohan videos
$650,000,000. Where?
I would argue that the set construction is movie level and probably eats up a huge amount of that. How many locations are in Andor and how many of them are fully constructed sets with painstaking amounts of detail put into making them feel real and lived in rather than styrofoam backgrounds like most television series? Every single one has a completely unique culture and architecture too.
They even designed an entire fashion style for Gorman.
The production values in this were insane, so the insane costs aren’t surprising.
They built entire city block sized sets. For example the wedding arc was 3 episodes showing off an entire realized set. Thats why you had so many walking montages.
I absolutely love the long walking shot at the start of that arc, it’s completely uninterrupted and has 7 or 8 different scene interactions with different characters.
Yeah it was sets
