This really pissed me off, sorry!
Obi-Wan's Big Dis
by Julie Keller
September 7, 1999, 2 p.m. PT
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas made a movie that royally pissed off one of his main characters.
And even the Force can't keep him quiet.
In the forthcoming Talk magazine, Star Wars' beloved Obi-Wan Kenobi, Sir Alec Guinness, takes the opportunity to ream the director, the film and the fans of the multibillion-dollar franchise.
"I shrivel up every time someone mentions Star Wars to me," says the 85-year-old actor.
The actor says he's mystified by the movie's "obsessive" fans, and he throws all fan letters into the trash.
Guinness also regales the magazine with a very un-mentor-like story about his treatment of a 12-year-old fan. The actor harshly reprimanded the child, who approached Guinness and told him he'd seen the original 100 times, bringing the boy to tears.
"There was something obsessive there that really frightened me," Guinness recounts.
He also takes credit for plotting the death of his character in the first installment of the trilogy, convincing Lucas that Obi-Wan would be more poignant as a ghost.
"What I didn't tell him was that I just couldn't go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines," he tells the magazine. "I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo."
Guinness isn't the only Star Wars alum whose feelings about the film belong on the Dark Side. After his stint with Lucas, Liam Neeson, who played Jedi Knight Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, announced (and quickly retracted) his retirement from acting. He said he "felt like a puppet."
David Prowse, the body--but not the voice--behind Darth Vader in the trilogy, also recently blasted the sci-fi franchise. He accused Lucas and company of kowtowing to the P.C. police by stripping Prowse's voice from the original film's soundtrack and replacing it with the booming voice of James Earl Jones.
The franchise doesn't seem too affected by its unhappy troopers, however. The estimated gross of Star Wars merchandise is more than $4 billion, and plans for the next two prequels are well underway.
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