MovieChat Forums > Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Discussion > Name problems make no sense

Name problems make no sense

posted 2 years ago by avortac4 (3770)
3 replies | jump to latest

I have talked about movie names before, every big 'franchise' seems to have nonsensical names.

First Blood SOMEHOW became 'Rambo III', don't ask me, how. Star Wars II was changed to 'Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back' (although it's written slightly differently here for some reason). The less said about 'Alien turned Aliens turned Alien 3', the better.

Heck, even 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' didn't get a sequel named 'Raiders of the Lost Temple' or 'Raiders of the Holy Grail', but SOMEHOW it changed to 'Indiana Jones and blah', just replacing 'blah' with something else. It makes no logical sense from the 'artistic' viewpoint, only from the 'SHOW ME THE MONEY!!'-perspective.

Now, as english is a mess when it comes to pronunciation, you'd think they would at least use a more logical language in some galaxy that's far, far away, but nope. Same language, same problems. Sigh.

It's just remarkable, how everyone can pronounce 'Luke' correctly every time, no matter how 'alien' the tongue, but other names are a problem. Obviously this harkens back to 'real names that everyone knows how to pronounce vs. fictional names that even George doesn't seem to give a crap about when it comes to pronunciation' (The 'Gungas' or whatever they are in the so-called 'prequels' are a good example).

However, in a movie series, with a director with a clear vision, would it have been so hard to just give everyone some kind of pronunciation guide? "No, it's not 'Lee-aah', it's 'Ley-ah, you dumb #$@%*&!

Somehow 'Chewbacca' or 'Chewie' is also always pronounced correctly, even though it's a fictional name, but when it comes to 'Han', it's a crap shoot. Sometimes it's with some scandinavian ää (as in 'ban'), other times it's the same 'a'-sound as in the word 'barn'. WHICH IS THE CORRECT ONE?!

The movie never tells, the director didn't seem to care at all. How do you make a good movie, and then let stupid, immersion and worldbuilding-breaking mistakes like this creep in? Just TELL EVERYONE how the names are supposed to be pronounced, for crying out loud!

As a sad sidenote, it always bugs me when movies do this; in the Dr. Strange movie about multiverse - as in 'multiple universes', someone still mentions something about 'destruction of AMERICA'. WHAT?!

How flag-waving, nationalistic fanatic, jingoist and 'patriotic' (groan) are moviemakers, when literally multiple UNIVERSES are at stake, and the 'destruction of America' is the only thing anyone thinks about in that situation. Do people equate 'the Universe' with 'America' (not to mention multiple ones)?! It's always 'America' this and that (or worse: 'THIS country' - the only reason we always know which country it is, is because no other country has such egotistical nationalistic 'world'view) although the same thing happens everywhere in the west at least.

So of course all 'alien languages' EASILY and perfectly conform to 'american tongue'.

What I mean is, no matter how 'fictional' a name seems to be, it's easily pronouncable by americans, so it's not very 'alien' at all. Why can't some 'alien language' EVER sound like japanese, polish, or icelandic? That's hard for americans to pronounce correctly - I hope I didn't just answer my own question.

In any case, 'Star Wars' universe names seem to always conform to this as well, only 'american pronunciation' everywhere in the galaxy, no 'actually different' pronunciation allowed. Perhaps this is the root cause of the problem, but at least it would be understandable if the name was some Xianghuzywerd that has to be pronounced, like most chinese words, with the exact, correct intonation, or its meaning changes completely.

I bet most americans wouldn't be able to correctly pronounce even the chinese word 'ma' in all four different intonations, to express the four different meanings of the word (I think they are 'mother', 'horse', 'flour' and a fourth meaning I forgot).

If they can't pronounce 'ma' correctly, it would be so interesting to see this kind of 'WHAT DID YOU SAY?!'-kind of conflict arise because Han Solo can't pronounce some otherplanetarian's ACTUALLY difficult name correctly. Chinese language also has very interesting sounds you don't usually hear in english, like how you pronounce the word 'Hanzi'. Looks simple, but TRY to pronounce it correctly without any practice to a native chinese speaker, and I 99.9999% guarantee you won't get it right.

('Without any practice' here of course means you have not practiced chinese language, but especially this word - I will let you off the hook if you have learned 'Ni Hao' and 'Xiexie', but if you are 'almost fluent' but just haven't practiced this particular word, you can't play)

My point is, if you are going to give us a presentation of your wild and crazy imagination about otherplanetary worlds with weird-looking, very 'alien' people and interesting cultures, could you AT LEAST do the bare minimum when it comes to names and pronunciations?

[–] sati_84 (467) 2 years ago

I agree in general - a bit more creativity could have gone into linguistics, pronounciation, cultural background of non-human sentient beings in the vast universe George has created.

But in the case of Star Wars and in the case of the OT in particular - why did he create that universe? To serve as a backdrop to tell the story about the main characters. And from that point on, it's about what the focus of the story is. George could have thrown in some scenes about cultural differences, alien languages, misunderstandings, communication, etc. He decided not to. He decided to invent the "Galactic Basic" language that most people (and non human beings) use in the movie. He even decided to include a protocol droid with translation skills to address the concerns of the viewer and provide a plausible way to our heroes to avoid communication issues.

And there's your answer. Galactic Basis is - incidentally - depicted as English in the movie. So anything that is said in GB will conform to speakers of English. That might be a poor decision in your eyes - and I can sort of understand how you expected more creativity in this department - but it is a clear decision by Lucas.

Well, Lucas did not focus on linguistic, sociological and cultural issues in Star Wars. He focused on a handful of characters getting into trouble in the story, and he focused on the groundbreaking visuals, the armor, weapon, spaceship, droid, etc. designs. You might take issue with that, but the explanation is clear - Lucas did not want to lose focus of the story he wanted to tell. And part of what makes the Star Wars OT great is how focused it is, how conscious it is about what it wants to be. Muddling that focus with socio-cultural or linguistic issues would not have been a good idea. It could have been done, but it was not the path Lucas had chosen.

[–] Martoto (5190) 2 years ago

Rambo III never became First Blood.

The first movie featuring Rambo was titled First Blood. Its sequel was titled Rambo : First Blood Part II. And the threequel was called Rambo III .

You failed at the first hurdle.

[–] Karl Aksel (1498) 2 years ago

Empire Strikes Back was never Episode II. When it hit the theatres in 1980, the opening crawl read: "Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back. The only Star Wars movie to go through a name change was A New Hope, and that was from "Star Wars" to "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope". That happened in 1981.