It Doesn't Suck Too Bad, Star Wars Ed.

Once upon a time, someone in or associated with The Muse's family asked me how I liked a movie or something and I responded, "Well, it didn't suck too bad." I have yet to live that comment down. I now have decided to love my problem to death by starting a new feature here on The Webbed Toe called, surprisingly enough, It Doesn't Suck Too Bad. When you see the header It Doesn't Suck Too Bad, you will know that The Webbed Toe is rising to defend some unfairly maligned piece of our culture, political figure, sports team or other random thing about which I have decided to write. This will be a periodic feature, although it will only show up when it's interesting to me.

As you can tell from the header here, the first edition of It Doesn't Suck Too Bad concerns, as do many of the posts here, Star Wars. Today, The Webbed Toe rises in defense of The Return Of the Jedi.

As all sentinent beings know, The Return of the Jedi was the third movie of the original trilogy and is now also known as "Ep. VI," or, to some, "the worst one of the good movies," "the one with the freakin' Ewoks" or "the one that wasn't very good, but at least didn't have Jar Jar Binks." It is the red-headed stepchild of the first trilogy and stood in its accepted place as the only Star Wars movie that sucked for a very long 16 years until Phantom Menace came along and demonstrated what a Star Wars movie that truly sucks actually is.

But let us revisit The Return of the Jedi. At Enthusio's urging, we sat down and watched the whole thing a few weeks ago. Then, the movie has been on HBO this month, so the HBO Effect kicked in and I have been watching five-minute snippets of it periodically. So I'm primed for this one, baby.

Now just about everyone who has seen The Return of the Jedi admits that the first hour of the movie rocks. (Well, except for my grandma, who went with us to see the movie when it first came out because my mom decided to surprise me by taking us to see the movie on a trip to our big city in association with a more regular shopping trip. Grandma would always go on a shopping trip to the big city because, you know, that's where the closest Standard Brands was. Anyway, Grandma must not have liked the Return of the Jedi because she fell asleep. I don't know what got her, although it could have the damn Ewoks.) I mean, what's not to like?

Right off the bat, this was the first time we ever saw Jabba the Hutt. Wow, there was a creation. A giant, nasty slug who was keeping poor Han Solo frozen in carbonite on the wall. Cool! And then the good guys all show up in disguise to try to save Han. Cool! C3PO wigs out when Luke's hologram says that Luke is giving the droids to Jabba. Funny! One of Jabba's henchmen starts crying when Luke kills the giant monster thing that Jabba keeps around to eat people for entertainment. Also funny! (I know the name of that thing, but it's not coming to me right now. It's 7:20 in the morning.) "They're going to throw you in the Sarlaac, where you will be digested for a thousand years." No way! The whole shootout at the Sarlaac. Awesome! Oh yeah, and Princess Leia in the gold bikini. Young men's minds everywhere were opened to new, previously unimaginable possibilities.

So it's the second hour of the movie that's the problem. Now let's dissect that. What does the second hour of the movie have? It has the speeder chase through the forest of Marin, excuse me, Endor. Pretty cool. It has the Emperor being all evil. Again, pretty cool. It has the drama that the new Death Star actually is operational. An Imperial trap! God, are they evil! Ultimately, it has the destruction of the new Death Star (and, as noted in Clerks, all those independent contractors who were still working on it because it wasn't done).

Most importantly, the second hour of the Return of the Jedi has the moment when Darth Vader saves Luke because Luke is his son and, hey you know, that's way more potent than the "power of the Dark Side." (When you read that last sentence, say "the power of the Dark Side" out loud in your best James Earl Jones impression. It will really add to the experience.) That's the climax of the whole trilogy, man. Vader picking up the Emperor as he's death-raying Luke and throwing that old SOB down into the Death Star's reactor core (or something, I can't imagine the Imperial General Services Department would be so sloppy as to design a Death Star that left the Emperor's lair open to direct access to the nuclear core -- that seems like a very good way to get fired or choked to death by the Force). That was it. The end. The thing. The moment. Good triumphing over evil. Yeah, Lando got to blow up the Death Star, but that was an anticlimax at that point. (I mean, really, Lando? What did he do to deserve the honor? Serve up Han like a pork chop? Try to use some awesome Billy Dee moves on Leia?)

So why is the Return of the Jedi considered to suck so universally? Well, I think it comes down to the Ewoks. Yes, they certainly did suck. In retrospect, they were really the first sign that George Lucas, if left entirely to his own devices, will do stupid things. (Letting your kids name the characters? That's how you end up with Sith lords being named Count Dookoo. Oooooh, real scary.) As The Muse once brilliantly asked, why couldn't Endor have been the Wookie planet? Imagine how awesome that would have been. OK, and there was unnecessary mushiness with the whole Leia-is-Luke's-sister thing. But, jeez, that wasn't that bad. It's really just the Ewoks that are the problem.

So, when we look back at the Return of the Jedi, with the perspective that comes with having suffered through Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones and some of Revenge of the Sith (because some of that movie was pretty good), I think we should all agree that we should forgive the Return of the Jedi for the Ewoks. In fact, with DVD technology, we probably can just skip their scenes now. If you do that, I submit to you that the Return of the Jedi well deserves its place in the original Star Wars triolgy. Cut it some slack. It Doesn't Suck Too Bad.