I'm feeling somewhat vindicated now that Dave Filoni is generally considered to be a bad writer. I was only a little ahead of everyone else. Before Disney bought Star Wars, I thought Filoni was a genius like everyone else watching Clone Wars. But his first Disney era project, Rebels, rapidly diminished my esteem for him and I was compelled to realise he probably wasn't the reason Clone Wars was so great--and there was a reason he's almost never credited as a writer on that series.
After Filoni's work on the live action Ahsoka series, the Tales of the Jedi series, and The Bad Batch, everyone has been forced to acknowledge his mediocrity. Now I'm noticing different parts of the fandom are handling it differently. This morning I watched a YouTube video by a guy accusing Filoni of ripping off Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film Notorious for the 2009 episode "Senate Spy". The YouTuber seems to have deleted the video, or YouTube is hiding it from me for some reason, since this morning.
As grounds for called Filoni a "Hack" (as the YouTuber summed up his analysis) it's not a very potent example considering it was written by Melinda Hsu, not Filoni. But what about this idea that basing the episode on Notorious is theft? No-one said that about the episode based on Seven Samurai--or about any of the other movies and shows based on Seven Samurai. Or about the stupid Zilla monster episode based on Godzilla. I suppose it's because Notorious isn't as well-known. Cinephiles know it but usually when I mention Notorious to anyone else they think at first I'm talking about the Notorious B.I.G. biopic. Still, it's different enough I think it's fair to call the episode an homage rather than a rip-off--though some special thanks in the credits would've been nice. That's not to say the connexion went totally unacknowledged: there was this blog post on the official Star Wars web site. Padme's motives for going on the mission are much different to Alicia's in the Hitchcock movie. That, and the context of Star Wars itself makes it different enough, in my opinion.
The YouTuber, whose name I can't remember, presented Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as an homage done properly. He argues Temple of Doom takes its plot from Gunga Din but that it's okay because the movie acknowledges it, two claims that make me wonder if he's even seen Gunga Din or Temple of Doom. Unless there's a cut of Gunga Din that involves a singer at a Chinese nightclub, a village with kidnapped children, a set of magical stones, brainwashing, and a mine car chase. Temple of Doom was certainly influenced by Gunga Din and both films feature the Thuggee as villains. But to say that Temple of Doom copies Gunga Din's plot wholesale would be like saying Hellboy is a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Temple of Doom isn't even as close to Gunga Din as Raiders is to Secret of the Incas.
It's like the guy knew that Temple of Doom was an homage to Gunga Din based on other analyses or commentaries but had no grasp of how homages actually work. How the hell does Temple of Doom directly acknowledge Gunga Din? I bet the guy doesn't know the Thuggee were a real cult in India.
Speaking of Indiana Jones, a YouTuber I usually enjoy, Ryan George, has been uploading odd, nitpicky episodes of his popular Pitch Meeting series about the Indiana Jones movies. One of his jokes is about the fact that Indy and Elsa slept with each other on brief acquaintance for little reason beyond the fact that they were attracted to each other. Are we really at a point where modestly depicted consensual sex between pretty people occurring off-screen is too perverted? It's weird to see that kind of morality alongside the Selena Carpenter videos YouTube's algorithm has been offering to me lately.
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