We all know about Mace Windu NOW, and how awful Anakin was for lopping off his arm and allowing Chancellor Palpatine to kill him and become "The Emperor" we knew from the original trilogy. It's been over a decade since Revenge of the Sith, and now we're in the middle of a new "trilogy," plus Disney's standalone "Star Wars Stories" like Rogue One and the upcoming Han Solo movie.
But let's flash back to 1999, before we knew who Mace was. Shortly after Samuel L. Jackson starred in the Shaft update (which hadn't been released yet, if my memory's correct), he announced he would be playing a Jedi in Star Wars Episode I, and that he would get to say that iconic line, "May the Force be with you."
Until May of 1999, when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (aka "the shittiest Star Wars prequel") came out, all we had were rumors and the clues granted us by the newest Star Wars toys, because while George Lucas believed in secrecy, he was a marketing WHORE when it came to toys. So, thanks to the merchandise, we knew that Sam's character was called Mace Windu and that the villains were Darth Sidious and his "Sith" (whatever that is) apprentice, Darth Maul. Minor nuggets from which we could not decipher a plot. But I was making jokes left and right, and it was some of my all-time best material...
For one thing, the Shaft update and the news that it was keeping Isaac Hayes's iconic theme song allowed me to rewrite the lyrics. "Who's the black Jedi Master that's a sex machine to all the Sith? (MACE!) You daaamn right!"
But the biggest one was my rendition of a Pulp Fiction/Star Wars mash-up, in which Mace wasn't a Jedi at all, but rather a hired gun working for Darth Sidious. That was an inference one could draw from the joke anyway, but since NOBODY knew of a plot, and this was a time before internet spoilers were unavoidable, it was a safe enough assumption for the sake of a joke. Let's face it, back then a guy could make a geeky pop culture-related joke and not be put to the rack for it by purists. So yeah, the joke went as follows:
"What does Darth Sidious LOOK like?"
"He wears a hooded cape."
"Go on?"
"He carries a red light saber..."
"Does he look like a bitch?"
"What? (WHUN-light-saber noise) AGH!"
"DOES. HE. LOOK. LIKE A BITCH!?"
"No!"
"Then why'd you try to fuck him like a bitch, Obi-Wan?"
"I didn't!"
"Yes, you did, Obi-Wan. You tried to fuck him. And Darth Sidious doesn't like to be fucked by anybody except Mrs. Sidious."
Laughs all around, then my nerdy friends and I would move on to talk about how cool Darth Maul looked, and how we just couldn't WAIT to see what George Lucas would do with his Legacy... which he would go on to sell to Disney for $4 billion thirteen short years later. Boy, was Dave Mustaine right: "Hindsight is always 20/20."
Reminds me of the last line of Fanboys, though: "Guys! What if the movie sucks?" That was a great place to end it, with the last-moment hesitation foreshadowing what what all die-hard fans of the original Trilogy have come to accept. As Yoda might have said, "Sucked, it did."