Farewell My Jedi

Hey guys.
Remember when Jedi used to be cool? Remember back in the day when we only knew of a handful of these wonderful, mystical, inexplicable beings. They broke into are world with their zen like understanding and their samurai like super skills. We all wanted to be one...shut up you know you did! We all wanted to go out in the swamps and start flipping around like some sort of magic rock-piling freak! What a life it would be! And back in the day we all respected and admired that dying religion...those sorcerers ways.
So what the hell happened? What went wrong? One simple word...Demystification.
All of a sudden its all about midi-chlorian counts, and there are thousands and thousands of jedi who all suck apparently. I mean seriously folks, Order 66 comes down and out of all of these people deeply connected to the force no one says "Hey you guys do you have a feeling we are all about to be slaughtered?" There is just no magic in it anymore. And I am obviously not the first to have made this observation or taken issue with any of this, I was just thinking about it and it all made me really sad. It feels that now the jedi are really gone now. Turned into some throw-away character. I mean how many jedi died on Geonosis alone? And against droids? Really? So jedi are the ass-kickin'est folk in the galaxy but can be defeated pretty easily by droids. Or is that only red-shirt jedi? But again if they are this elite order, which was always sort of implied in the originals, then why are there so freaking many of them? I mean there were swarms and swarms of them to be used as battle fodder in the prequels. Even Yoda and Obi-Wan seemed to be really dropping the ball when it came to anything and everything you would think a jedi would be able to sense.
I remember when I was little, going over my friends house to play Star Wars in her basement, with our little light up extend-o lightsabers, we just thought we were the coolest ever. We wanted to have the power to go against a remote with the blast shields down, and pull an entire x-wing out of a swamp.
Jedi used to be the ultimate in awesome in that galaxy far far away... now
not so much.
And don't even let me get started on Boba Fett.

But demystification seems to be the new trend in Hollywood. Anything mysterious or inexplicable has now been explained within an inch of its life. Take The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for instance. The original is dark, gritty, uncomfortably realistic, and flat out scary. There just wasn't much to it, basic 70's horror movie formula, but what I always loved about it was the supreme lack of explanation. We understand Jason Voorhees's story and why his mother had to punish all of those sex-maniac kids. We even generally understand Micheal Meyer's blood lust and his unfinished business with his long lost sister. Leatherface and his whole disgusting family are different though. No complicated motives, no obvious reasons for targeting one person over another, just a family of cannibals going about their daily lives, and that was enough. They didn't need any more explanation than that. Or so Tobe Hooper thought. But when the time rolled around for Hollywood to say "Hey lets do a remake" Scott Kosar decided that random inexplicable horror was just not enough. So he tacked on this really lame ass, in my opinion, back story/explanation as to why Leatherface is the way he is, when I was always under the impression that it is sometimes scarier not having a motive and that was part of the point of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the first place. You can also see this same technique of over explanation in the remake of The Hills Have Eyes.

And I am obviously not categorizing the Star Wars prequels as remakes. I am just making a comparison of the bastardization of beloved characters in order to make a quick buck.