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Inside Star Wars (Ad-free)

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Inside Star Wars (Ad-free)

By: Wondery
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From the creators of Inside Psycho, Inside the Exorcist, and Inside Jaws, comes a new immersive audio biopic about the making of the original 1977 Star Wars. It was a movie made on a shoestring and dumped into a handful of movie theaters. And then it changed the world. This is the story of George Lucas and his dream. We take you inside the stories of the people who struggled to make the original classic and the people who did their very best to stop it dead. Now playing in all galaxies.©2019 Wondery (P)2019 Wondery Art Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Introducing Inside Star Wars (Ad-free)

    Introducing Inside Star Wars (Ad-free)
    May 2 2019
    Premiering in all galaxies on Wednesday, May 29, 2019.
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    1 min
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  • Two Suns Setting | 1 (Ad-free)

    Two Suns Setting | 1 (Ad-free)
    May 29 2019
    A torturous first day of shooting Star Wars in the Tunisian desert. Including a one-time “carpenter to the stars,” an actor named Harrison Ford. Cut to: A young George Lucas captivated and thrilled by a new gadget called “television” and the thrilling, swashbuckling serials of Flash Gordon. Later, Lucas falls for fast cars. More speeding tickets than baseball cards. Fights at home with his father over work and school and career. “I’m gonna be a millionaire before I’m 30,” he shouts at his dad. But he’s failing classes and his best hopes are for a life as an auto mechanic. Then, one fateful day he’s in his tiny Fiat turning left across traffic. That’s when a car smashes into him - an accident that nearly kills him. And an experience that will change his life forever. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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    24 mins
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  • Two Suns Setting | 1 (Ad-free)

    Two Suns Setting | 1 (Ad-free)
    May 29 2019
    A torturous first day of shooting Star Wars in the Tunisian desert. Including a one-time “carpenter to the stars,” an actor named Harrison Ford. Cut to: A young George Lucas captivated and thrilled by a new gadget called “television” and the thrilling, swashbuckling serials of Flash Gordon. Later, Lucas falls for fast cars. More speeding tickets than baseball cards. Fights at home with his father over work and school and career. “I’m gonna be a millionaire before I’m 30,” he shouts at his dad. But he’s failing classes and his best hopes are for a life as an auto mechanic. Then, one fateful day he’s in his tiny Fiat turning left across traffic. That’s when a car smashes into him - an accident that nearly kills him. And an experience that will change his life forever. Support us by supporting our sponsors!
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    24 mins
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Featured Article: Tap into Your Inner Jedi (or Sith) with the 66 Best Star Wars Audiobooks in the Galaxy


In the 45 years since George Lucas's interstellar fantasy epic Star Wars first hit theaters, the saga has grown to include 12 canonical feature-length films (and counting), a growing number of shows (both animated and live-action), and hundreds of novels and comics inspired by that galaxy far, far away. But there's nothing quite like the magic of a Star Wars audiobook. The stories featured in this collection are as vast and varied as the universe in which they're set.

Featured Article Tap into Your Inner Jedi or Sith with the 66 Best Star Wars Audiobooks in the Galaxy
Experience Star Wars Like Never Before

Experience Star Wars Like Never Before

Our stellar collection of intergalactic listens offers an expansive
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not just your typical documentary! there's a lot of drama worked into the historical facts. highly recommend for anyone who's even a mild Star wars fan.

Amazing

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I love the Inside films series from Wondery. The Exorcist, Jaws and Psycho were all fantastic. Star Wars is just as great. It covers a bit of George Lucas' bio and how he came up with the concept as well as meeting his fellow filmmaker friends and studio rejections. The improvised dialogs are fun and based on extensive research and books. It is framed around the difficult production of the film. As a lifelong fan who know the story and remembers this well, it was more fun to listen to the denials that this film would bomb. How wrong they all were. Also includes a wonderful interview with Lucas biographer Brian Jay Jones. Brings back memories. Happy listening and May the Force be With You!

A Fun Look Back at Original Film

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A bit more surface-level than I was expecting, but I suppose I should have seen that coming. Most of the story I already knew from sources like Carrie Fisher's books, and other things I must have read here and there. I was really expecting more of a deep dive into the making of the first Star Wars, but Ramsey paints with pretty broad strokes—there wasn't much detail in the depiction of day-to-day filmmaking, mostly just non-specific sketches of robots breaking down and budgets running over. I don't think the word "Tunisia" is mentioned more than once, and The Hidden Fortress and Joseph Campbell aren't mentioned at all.

What also didn't help the level of detail is that three-and-a-half of the episodes aren't actually about Star Wars, leaving under half of the total runtime to cover the production itself: two-and-a-half episodes are run-up, which isn't such a bad thing, covering Lucas' biography and then his first two films, but the final episode covers the film's legacy, and the subsequent 40+ years of franchise history, and, to be honest, that's not really what I was here for. Like everyone else in the galaxy, I am well aware that Star Wars' original trilogy was followed up by some not-so-well-beloved prequels and a corporate buyout which led to more films yadda yadda yadda. It's difficult to divorce this one film from its subsequent half-century of cultural baggage, which was perhaps why I was hoping the podcast would strip that all back to take a closer look at where it all started.

The production decision to have the show structured largely as reenactments narrated solely by Ramsey was questionable, though I'm sure the lack of a voice cast helped keep the budget low for Wondery. He kind of does half-impressions some of the time, occasionally sounding a little like Carrie Fisher, for instance, but he makes no effort to do any accents for British personalities, like Alec Guinness. What really made the sole-narrator format unhelpful, though, was the fact that the podcast featured an "interview" with George Lucas, but because Ramsey was reading both roles, it's difficult to know whether this was an actual interview that really took place, or whether it was a fictional device that conjectured Lucas' responses based on recent interviews he really has given. And if it was a real interview, were these Lucas' verbatim words, or has the dialogue been edited for the show? Why wasn't it recorded for the podcast, an audio medium? Really a confusing choice.

A retrospective that mostly skims the surface

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absolutely pathetic. If you want to know why George Lucas does do interviews. listen to this.
upset that many have nondisclosure agreements this is why.

TERRIBLE

pathetic. just dirt

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