A recent Reuters story on Guatemala, their Mayan temples, and Star Wars contains this paragraph:
Yavin 4 and the rebel base return to the Star Wars plot in the forthcoming Episode VII, announced in October by the Walt Disney Co, in which Skywalker comes back to the planet to build a Jedi Knight academy. However, fans said that Disney will likely film those scenes in a studio rather than return to Tikal.
First of all, as Big Shiny Robot’s Bryan Young points out, there’s absolutely no source for this. Yes, Yavin 4 does reappear as the site of the Jedi Academy in the Expanded Universe – but that certainly doesn’t mean it’ll show up in the movies.
But unlike Bryan, I don’t think I would call this anything as as sinister as “rumour-mongering.” Yes, I’m cynical about the EU and doubtful that it will play a large role in the new movies, but if I had to bet, I would say this is probably just the result of basic fan enthusiasm (“I know some EU!”) paired with ignorance. After all, we can’t expect everyone is going to be up on the half-dozen different levels of “canon” and all that jazz.
The EU’s first Jedi Academy is eventually destroyed in the New Jedi Order series, and at the end of the most recent series, Legacy of the Force, the Academy is moving to it’s third – third! – location. So even if they do follow the books, Yavin 4? Probably not.
Could they bring it back anyway? Of course. But I wouldn’t count on it. And I certainly wouldn’t give this report much weight.
UPDATE: Eric at TFN reached out to the article’s writer, Michael McDonald, who confirmed that he did not receive any inside information from Lucasfilm.
I wouldn’t mind Yavin, but compared to other possibilities – Ossus, Coruscant or my personal favorite Jabba’s palace :-) – the Massassi temple is a pretty lame place to put a Jedi Academy. :-)
Plus: Wouldn’t they rather call it “Jedi Temple” to match the prequels?
Don’t they still call the one on Coruscant a Temple? The one that magically materialized after the PT?
I was never a fan of the Yavin location for a Jedi whatever (and lord, do I hate the term ‘praxeum’) but visually, there’s certainly much more they could do.
Also, as a moon, that should be rendered Yavin 4. Not VI.
Well, that does make my life easier.
At Celebration II I was at one of the umpteen Rick McCallum panels and some dude got up and told him he’s from the Guatemalan government and handed Rick all these filming permits so they could film in the temple for EIII. smh
A rumor is a rumor, but as it’s likely we’ll have a Jedi Temple of Academy SOMEWHERE, Yavin IV is a pretty good option. It would link the ST to the OT, even for people who’ve seen the OT only once. And as for EU or not – Yavin IV would naturally work in a complate reboot – but also in a partial reboot (like efter VOTF). Also, it could work post FOTJ inside EU – AND post Legacy – as the Ossus Academy is abandomend twice in the EU. Lots of possibilities there ;-P And we’re as much in darkness as ever.
My free advice to Disney: You’re spending $4.05 billionto buy Lucasfilm; filming anything related to the Jedi Academy trilogy should *not* be at the top of your list of priorities (or even on the list at all).
Could cinema really do an Umgullian blob race justice, though, given how much our imaginations have built it up after all these years?
“Now *this* is Umgullian blob racing!”
I just hope whoever they cast as Winter can really deliver the unspoken yet obvious sexual tension required for scenes with Tim Rose as the big fish puppet.
For you, Pablo:
Regardless of whether they do a Jedi Academy story or not, and regardless of where they choose to locate it, this does bring up something that’s been a bit on my mind about these sequels: I’m very curious to find out what kind of Jedi presence we’re going to see in the films. I mean, the Jedi Order is a fairly large and ornate organization, and admittance more or less requires a lifetime of training. It’s not the kind of thing that reappears over night, or even in thirty years…at least not on the scale the the current generation of young Star Wars fans are really familiar with. I wonder if the writers will just trust that people will accept a new set of stories that aren’t all about Jedi, as the OT is, or if they’ll work overtime to give people the large-scale Jedi combat that the later prequel films and The Clone Wars have made something of a standard.
@Dunc:
To quote the radio drama: “Make it stop. Please, make it stop.”
;-)
@Doyle: To be honest, that’s just one of the many questions I have. There’s so much speculation floating around that it’s easy to forget that we know absolutely nothing about the plot of Episode VII.