Yeah, that's the missing piece - the prequels certainly seem to suggest that everybody knows about Jedi, they've got their own office building downtown in the capital of the Galaxy.

If the prequels had only suggested the Jedi were a secret to the general public, the basic plot could have stayed exactly the same.     QuiGon and ObiWan could have done everything they do, just not openly as Jedi...     

"Hey, there are two guys in the lobby, they're kinda creepy and calm and they're freaking me out."
"Crap, maybe they're Jedi."
"Oh come on, Jedi aren't even real.  Are they?"

If it had been established that the Jedi did their thing in secret, and then were just as secretly exterminated, it would have been perfectly understandable that twenty years later folks like Han and Motti would believe Jedi weren't that big a deal and maybe never existed at all.

Well, whaddaya know.  I was aware of the difference between a trouper and a trooper, but I just always thought that expression was military in origin, and not from the theatah.   Live and learn.

I also realize in retrospect that the video switcher that fires the Death Star's weapon was probably a Grass Valley switcher and not a Chyron.   The Times regrets the error.

It's true - film school will completely ruin your ability to simply watch and enjoy a movie.  And working in the movie industry, doubly so.   

But it does enable you to appreciate them in other ways.   Just as auto mechanics need to know how cars are put together, and that might take away some of the romance of it.  But they probably appreciate automobiles on a different level than those of us who look at a car and just think "ooh, shiny!"

And every once in a while a movie will come along and be so goshdarned good that I'll forget to analyze it and actually just enjoy it like a normal person.   Those movies are rare, but it's great when it happens.

Something I should have mentioned in the anniversary "what did we learn?" discussion - it didn't occurr to me at the time - was that we started with the assumption that fewer people would be interested in a commentary if it was a movie they probably didn't own and therefore couldn't watch while listening.  So for the most part we've stayed with recent blockbusters as our source material.

Now that we know that watching (or even previously SEEING) the video in question doesn't seem to be as much of an issue, we may indeed start doing older and/or more obscure films.   We all can name films that we wish more people would see... or classics that we just can't understand why they're supposedly so great, etc.   I'm hoping we'll do more of that sort of thing in our *ahem* second year.

except that apparently whatever "Arcturians" are, you can't tell the males from the females, and it doesn't matter.   

Even assuming that the characters are teasing each other, it's always seemed to me there's more to that story than just relaxed Arcturian morals.   It's as if they're talking about sheep or something.

In fact there's an old joke that goes sorta like that.  (The punchline is "yeah, but you picked the UGLIEST one!"  You can probably work out the rest of the joke yourself. :-)

My retroactive correction for this movie is:

I referred to a certain actor as Ric Overton, his name is actually Rick Ducommun.   

Ric Overton is another fine character actor, but he ain't in this movie.    I got my Micks rixed up.

Also, I mispronounced the screenwriter's name as "De-SOWza".  For the record, it's "De-SOOza".  Please make a note of it.