Samuel L. Jackson would like to know where his Star Wars franchise is
As Disney walks through the shadow of death, they should probably fear the wrath of Mace Windu
Aux News Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson is out here, holding down Disney’s two most lucrative franchises. He made the Star Wars prequels exciting for those who dismissed them. He gave the Marvel Cinematic Universe its first big pop. Would there even be an Avengers if Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury didn’t invite Stark to the initiative?
Which leads us to ask: Where the hell is the Mace Windu show? You’ve got one of America’s finest actors, a purple lightsaber with the initialism “B.M.F.” engraved on the hilt, and a cinematic universe that’s become a welcoming place for prequel veterans. What gives?
Do you know who else would like an answer to this question? Samuel L. Jackson. In a recent interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Jackson said that he would “definitely” love to attach a robot hand and slip back into his Jedi robes.
“There’s a huge history of people with one hand returning in the Star Wars franchise,” he continued. “The only person I’ve ever said that to about coming back was Bryce Dallas Howard, ’cause I just did a movie with her. And she directs episodes of The Mandalorian.”
Apparently, he pleaded with Howard to hook him up with a role. Man, what’s going on with Jackson’s team? Get this man a meeting!
“You think you might be able to hook a brother up? I mean you like me, right? I’ll learn to lightsaber left-handed. Come on, hook me up,” Jackson said.
We all know that Disney is busy these days, keeping shareholders and politicians in Florida happy as they make the “Happiest place on Earth” as unwelcoming to the LGBTQIA+ community as possible. If Disney doesn’t keep Ron DeSantis happy, who will host the $5,000 a night Star Wars hotel that no one is going to? But c’mon, y’all. It shouldn’t be this hard to get Samuel L. Jackson back in a Star War.
And no, his character isn’t dead. Rumors of his death in Revenge Of The Sith have been greatly exaggerated. As per the law of universes, cinematic, comic book, or otherwise, if you don’t see the body, they’re still alive.
107 Comments
Me: “I wish Star Wars would explore new characters and locations and expand its universe more”Also me: “Man I’d watch the fuck out of a Mace Windu show”
Me: “I don’t care if Star Wars explores new characters/locations or just keeps using the same ones, as long as they can handle basic narrative storytelling, which they have completely failed to do in every live-action project for the last five years.”
The Mandalorian: A failure of basic narrative storytelling.
The first season was okay: Most of the episodes were fairly self-contained, little episodes that didn’t try to do too much. Grogu sure was adorable but wasn’t really much more than a plot device. Din doesn’t have much of a personality and his nearly invincible armor means that he never really seems in much peril. The fact that it was so few episodes means there wasn’t really much time to explore his character.
The last couple of episodes went off the rails a bit in that they tried to expand to a more serialized bit of storytelling with Moff Gideon without really properly setting up what was supposed to be at stake or why. By the end of the season, it was a collection of fun, potentially interesting, but half-baked ideas and plot threads.
The second season was substantially worse, in that every character seemed to be on a steady diet of stupid pills. The show repeatedly failed to set up stakes or pay off setups properly, or undercut its own lore elements (e.g. Din taking his helmet off for the infiltration mission would have had a lot more impact if he hadn’t already taken it off in the first season). A lot of the episodes seemed like excuses for extended setpieces without taking the time to get us to care about the outcome. In the final episode, the show abruptly ignores the plotlines it had set up so that it could inject probably the most groanworthy bit of fanservice in the history of storytelling (Luke’s arrival).
All that aside, it was still better than TBOBF, which was catastrophically bad.
Calling either season a complete failure of narrative storytelling is pretty extreme though: I understood the plot and characterizations and was in no way confused about what was going on or why. It could have been better but in no way was it a failure.BoBF could have been better with it but, again, I pretty much understood what was going on, so calling it a complete failure is a bit extreme. I didn’t think it was catastrophically bad either; it wasn’t what a lot of people were expecting but I generally understood what was going on in the narrative.TLJ and RoS were a lot closer to what you’re talking about, both of those movies were fairly nonsensical.
Yes, I was being a bit extreme; it was hyperbolic. My non-hyperbolic issue with the shows is that they routinely (not always, but frequently) fail to properly set up characterization, stakes, narrative momentum, the reasons why the characters are doing what they’re doing, or giving me any reason to care about what happens to the characters. Sure, I can tell what they’re trying to get at, but they’re doing it so ineptly that I’m constantly exasperated by what I’m seeing.Like, I understood that BoBF wanted to tell us a story about how Boba was becoming the daimyo of Tatooine (or just Mos Espa, or the whole sector? this is one of those things the show contradicts itself about), but they kept leaving out important connective tissue that would get us from point A to point B.
“Sure, I can tell what they’re trying to get at, but they’re doing it so
ineptly that I’m constantly exasperated by what I’m seeing.”If I found myself at that point I would have stopped watching after the first Mando season.
Yeah, but I have kids. 😉
Then another generation gets to learn that ‘That’s Star Wars, baby!’
The New Adventures Of Mace Windu On Tattooine
They are gonna pull a reverse Book of Boba Fett and we are gonna find out Mace is just a huge asshole
He’ll just go around telling people to take a seat
I want to see a Star Wars except instead of taking place in a galaxy far far away a long time ago it’s set in present day San Fernando Valley.
Reminds me of the old Battlestar Gaklactica series in the 70s/80s, where they found Earth and ended up in Los Angeles.
Mace Windu goes back through Star Wars time in a Time Chasers fashion. Yep, I’d see that. Though I can’t see Mace as a Castleton snob.
A.V. Club: I wish Star Wars would stop retreading familiar ground and do something that’s not set on Tatooine! The galaxy is so big!Also A.V. Club: Let’s do a Mace Windu show.
I am okay with them exploring characters that had very little screen time like Mace Windu. Some characters are great because they are a mystery so making a series about them just ruins the magic(Cough Boba Fett cough) but Mace Windu was just a cool ass Jedi we didn’t get to see a lot of. I bet he goes on all sorts of sexy adventure with hot alien ladies and scary bad dudes
I want the former. How ineffective is Palpatine going to look at the end of all this? 😂 Took over the galaxy – twice. Failed both times in stupid ways. Couldn’t kill the corrupt Mace Windu when he had it coming all along etc. It’s annoying as hell. There are no creators at Disney anymore. The corps are too scared of building actual franchises.
why? what was it about the mace windu “character” that appealed to you? He had some lines that were pure exposition and then died
SO I guess you could say… this party… ISN’T over…* walks into the ocean *
If they can bring back Darth Maul after he was literally cut in half, then anything’s possible, but was there that much to Mace Windu as a character? He’s kind of a dick for 3 movies and then he dies in a pretty messed up way by getting his hand cut off, electrocuted, and thrown out of a high story window.
Everyone was so pumped that SLJ was going to be in Star Wars. Like there was no way it could suck if he were bringing his natural level of badassery into it.But then his character turns out to be thuddingly boring — literally SLJ’s mellowest character ever. He doesn’t even make facial expressions until the third one where he just widens his eyes a bit
He’s great in Tarkovski’s Clone Wars though!
There was OBVIOUSLY a space balcony below that window.
A cart of space hay!
In the prequel novelizations he’s kind of fascinating. All the other Jedis are about pushing away any feelings of anger. Windu gets his power from stoking his anger, but letting it flow through him without attachment like back at his opponents. Kind of overkill just to explain why he has a purple lightsaber but these are the joys of Star Wars fandom. It’sIt’s an interesting third way between the Sith and the Jedi that could be fertile ground if Disney had the inclination to really interrogate the basic duality of Jedi/Sith. The major course correction after Last Jedi implies they do not. That said, I’m still not up for a Mace Windu series. While Samuel L. Jackson is extremely well preserved, he’s still 73. A whole story about his younger self would be too uncanny valley. And at a certain point it’s just implausible that so many Jedis survived the rise of the Empire, so I’d rather he didn’t play closer to his actual age either, plus an action series centered around a septuagenarian is kind of pushing it.
Not actively pushing for such a show to exist, but I could see them doing a Mace “prequel” series. One major benefit of bit characters is that you can pretty much treat them as blank slates minus a few little notes or history nods here and there. Hire an actor with a vague resemblance, let mannerisms and such carry the rest.I mean, why not Mace as a hit man travelling with a weirdly coiffed partner arguing about intergalactic cheeseburgers?I mean, other than it would suck. Other than that though?
He’d make a great mentor to Ahsoka, though.
Luke survived practically the same thing; Windu is a Jedi master, and he could have landed in a skycar, same as Anakin did on Coruscant when he did a bit of impromptu base jumping. And I think that he may have some use as a character, per delete999999‘s comment, if they ditch the whole light/dark Force, Jedi/Sith dichotomy.
It’s not that I think it’s improbable that he survived what happened to him, it’s that it’s improbable that everyone in the galaxy thinks of Jedi as a distant myth when there are survivor Jedi and their students around every corner. We’ve already got Obi-Wan, Yoda, Ahsoka (kind of), Kanan, Ezra . . . at a certain point it undercuts pretty much everything that happens in the original movies and the sequels if there’s a friendly former Jedi survivor on every other planet.
But it’s a really big galaxy, though. In fact, wasn’t it the relative scarcity of Jedi (even worse after the massacre at Geonosis) that justified the clone army in the first place? I don’t know if there’s ever been an official number of inhabited/habitable planets in SW canon, but I think that space operas in general (and Star Trek in particular) tend to underestimate that sort of thing; about the only one who got it right was the late Iain M. Banks in his Culture series. Even with the Inquisitorious looking for them, they had to resort to stunts like using a dead Jedi to bait a trap to try and catch them. I think that we can have a few more that plausibly survived.
You’re not wrong about the number of planets, but it still falls apart if you carry it on to the sequel trilogy. It’s mathematically possible, but for storytelling reasons impossible. Like how James Cameron says the size of the door in Titanic is immaterial, Jack always dies. If they survived that long, why wouldn’t there be more Jedi after the fall of the Empire than just Luke?
Because of the Inquisitorious driving them underground; I also think that without other Jedi around to reinforce their code, some of them probably weren’t that interested in getting together any more or really doing the Jedi thing in general. I mean, if someone becomes a Jedi, does that mean that Yoda or whoever can find them anywhere in the galaxy for the rest of their lives?
No kidding. And aside from the time he was reacting in front of a greenscreen, he was pretty wooden and expressionless. Windu was supposed to be cool because he was Samuel L Jackson, but he seems so neutered.
Hell of a lot more to him them Maul, and that guy keeps getting tossed into shit
Mace Windu, Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now. He’s gone batty and become a one-handed crime lord in the lower levels of Courscant and either Vader or Boba Fett (or both) have to go take him out.
I think i saw his show falling outside my window
Man, those filmed performances are so lifeless compared to the TV tapings. What a weird sketch film that is.
Seriously, if Boba Fett can survive that pit, anything’s possible.After all, no-one’s ever really gone.
“That’s right, Doodle. No one ever really dies!”
Mace Windu just went off to fight in The Great Spice Wars!
love sam jackson. very cool guy. incredibly reliable. i do not want to see his 73 year old ass twirling a lightsabre around.
You put up with it from Alec Guinness.
He was a decade younger than that in Star Wars.
We didn’t see Alec Guinness as the main action hero in a 6-8 hour piece either. SLJ can still pull off a supporting action role, but you can see in the MCU he’s not doing the heavy lifting centerpiece action scenes anymore.
This is true.
If you want your brain to break, just remind yourself that Mark Hamill in the sequel trilogy was older than Alec Guinness in the original trilogy.
Wow, really?
Obligatory Ralph Machio is older now In Cobra Kai than Pat Morita was in Karate Kid
And Sir Christopher Lee, as a Sith Lord with a very unfortunate name!
His fight with Palpatine in RotS looks like two 90 year old holding broomstick.
I want to know how he is supposed to be the primary character in a series when he is filming 27 motherfuckin’ movies each year. Dude seems to believe he has to be in every movie made this century.
But having an unathletic grandpa play Boba worked so well…
Good news, we can make a computer generated man with digitally de-aged face of Mace Windu do all the twirling!!!
“He made the Star Wars exciting…”No, he didn’t. I don’t think it was his fault, though. Lucas just wrote a boring character and had Jackson act in a boring manner. It was the same thing with Portman.
His character was literally a monk. Lucas’ dumb ass directed him not to emote
Maybe we’ll get to hear Master Windu’s feelings about sand.
Ugh, Portman’s lines couldn’t have been more flat.
We never say the body so Mace lives!But seriously, I want Mace to live a long life so he can start his trilogy played by Samuel L. Jackson and end his trilogy played by Morgan Freeman. Hell, Freeman can narrate the whole thing.
Morgan Freeman is only 11 years older than Samuel L. Jackson
Everything lines up perfectly.
The character is dead. Even if he wasn’t, Sam Jackson is 73 and would be 74+ by the time filming started. Even if he wasn’t, there really wasn’t anything to the character. The only things interesting about the character was his lightsaber color.I typed “things” plural above but couldn’t come up with a second interesting thing.
He chopped off Django’s head in front of his clone son.
A Mace Windu show? Stop. I can’t get any harder.
I would like a show where Windu goes into hiding and mentors a new character to become a Jedi.
I’d watch the fuck out of a Mace Windu show.
Mace Windu was boring.The performance needed more “Jules Winnfield”I blame Lucas
Or June Whitfield.
Niche, but I like it.
Or Wilford Brimley.
Yes, there would have been an Avengers without Samuel L. Jackson.
Samuel L. Jackson would like to know where his muthafuckin’ Star Wars franchise isFixed the title for you!
This is a great idea. I would also watch the shit out of a series about Michaela Coel’s Resistance monitor character in Last Jedi, written and directed by Coel!
This sounds sarcastic but a series with Michaela Cowl’s unadulterated voice set in the MCU sounds great. Like a filthier, more incisive Lower Decks.
*Coel! Damn you autocorrect!
Um, Sam. I hate to break it to you, but your character died in the last movie.
Who’s gonna break the news to Ray, Ian, and Temuera?
Man AV Clubs is really going out of their way to mention the Gay Bill in every Disney adjacent post.
He made the Star Wars exciting for those who dismissed them.
No. He made Mace Windu almost exciting. Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars micro-series made Mace exciting. And the prequels are many things, exciting not being one of them.
Yeh, I missed the parts where he made anything about the prequels “exciting.” Maybe it was the way he sat in a chair in Ep 1 and said “No, we’re not going to train the kid.” Maybe it was the way he totally missed that he had been working practically alongside The Ultimate Evil for years. Maybe it was the way he got his hand cut off and got thrown out a window.
My favorite part was when he delivered his handful of lines in a lifeless monotone. He really managed to bring the full stilted vision of Lucas to life with that bored performance.
I liked the scene where he acted like he was bored with the whole thing and being in Star Wars was a massive inconvenience! The man shows more acting range in Capital One commercials FFS.
The man shows more acting range in Capital One commercials which are arguably better written than the Star Wars movies he was in.
Better directed, as well.
It was exciting for the kids who grew up watching the prequels. What Ewan said in the Kenobi coverage really put some much needed perspective.
It may have been exciting for some kids, certainly not all kids. I know of a few that had watched the original trilogy and found the prequels boring in comparison.But the point is that nothing made those films exciting for those who dismissed them. That’s why they dismissed them.
Mace Windu was the most useless part of the Prequel Trilogy just like Nick Fury was the most useless part of the MCU. I’ve never understood how he got his Ultimate Badass rep playing such boring characters.
I’m pretty sure it’s actually from that shark he ate and wrestling a bunch of snakes.
how he got his Ultimate Badass rep Oh, maybe Jules in Pulp Fiction, Ordell in Jackie Brown, Darius in those silly Hitman’s Bodyguard movies. Lazarus in Black Snake Moan*, even Frozone in The Incredibles. All pretty badass I would say. And hey, he even played John Shaft, who was a bad mother- well. I’d better shut my mouth.(* in that movie he chained Christina Ricci to a radiator, and that’s something I would not have the guts to do. Hence – badass.)
Yah I don’t need a new Windu story his story was told well. Is this a new A.V. Club writer?
Okay, here’s how it opens: we see the battle between Windu and Palpatine from Revenge of the Sith, but when he gets thrown out the window it freeze frames with a record scratch and Jackson’s narration kicks in, “You’re probably wondering how I got here…”
I’m a LOT more interested in where LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s “ Star Wars” movie is. You know, the woman he made hold everything together while he was perfecting his first career, as a crack addict. She’s an excellent actress, how ‘bout you hook a sista up, Sammy boy.
Maybe he can blow up a really big space ship thing.You know, like the Death Star but not the Death Star.
It’s been said before: they gave Samuel L. Jackson a light sabre and still managed to make it boring.
Low key the novel Shatterpoint, a solo Mace Windu story, is the single best Star Wars novel.
Low key the novel Shatterpoint, a solo Mace Windu story, is the single best Star Wars novel.
it’s like pointing out your favorite pint of diarrhea. Anybody who isn’t scat fetishist is just going to look at you weird.
I hope they Mace Win-don’t
😁
Mace Windu episode One:Mace is flung out a tower window.He falls and falls.He busts through a plate glass window.He slides across a kitchen table, out a door, and down a flight of stairs.He busts through another window and falls through a nearby building’s skylight. He breaks through the branches of an indoor tree, drops through a glass floor, and is hit by an urban speeder in a parking garage.He tumbles over a ledge and bonks off another speeder. He then falls into Coruscant’s lower, below surface neighborhoods. He lands on top of a cavern dwelling dragon-bat, cracking its skull. Mace and the dragon-bat tumble into a subway tunnel and get hit by a subterranean passenger train. This propels Mace to smash through a dark and mysterious tavern, through a neon lit wall, down another flight of stairs, through the door to an alien Turkish-style bathhouse, into a vat of scalding water, and down a drain. roll creditsEpisode Two: He wakes up in the desert on Tatooine
A Mace Windu show is a really good idea. No wonder they didn’t think about it.
Even if he did die, they can do a prequel series about him. Sure they will deep fake him into the uncanny valley but they can do it
I always think about all those streams of flying cars out the Coruscant windows…all those dozens of people who just happened to be cruising past Palpatine’s office at that particular moment must have been like “Wait — Jesus Christ, did you guys SEE that?”
It should have been the Samuel L Jackson & Liam Neeson franchise. Think about it. Two of the biggest badasses, 20 some years ago, sigh.
Would be fine as like a Young Indiana Jones thing where an elderly one-armed Sam Jackson sits in like Dexter’s Diner and tells stories of his crazy Jedi youth to bar patrons (varying degrees of interest/belief is assumed). Just need to cast someone as young Sam Jackson and you’re set. Plus that way you could have one or two episodes where old Windu has to kick ass too. Very Batman Beyond. I see no problem with that.