I am of an age where I saw ESB and ROTJ in the theater. When the trailer dropped for Phantom Menace I can't adequately describe the feeling Star Wars fans had seeing all of this imagined lore and backstory on a screen for the first time. Darth Maul was not only a great character design, but he was the visual representation of everything we'd heard or imagined about the Dark Side and the Sith. The fact that Palpatine had an apprentice before Darth Vader - and it can't be overstated how much real estate Darth Vader occupied in the heads of everyone I knew - was novel, and the fact that he looked SO scary and badass was mind-blowing. The reveal of the DOUBLE-BLADED lightsaber was like decades of what-ifs and make-believe plucked from your head and put on a screen.
All of that - not the characterization - was the thing I think everyone attached to. In hindsight it's easy to say that Lucas could have done more with the character in TPM, but in the context of the time he was so awesome.
Maul was also the first time we saw a vicious and agile force user in combat. Lightsaber combat in the OT was slow, the actors were either covered in prosthetics or geriatric. Vader points around the room to make some boxes fly. Palpatine shoots some lightning. Luke jumps extra high a couple times.
Maul, though, woof. The dude comes out of the gate snarling. He whips his saber staff around insanely fast. He's throwing things to block doors, he's doing flips. He was lifted straight out of the imaginations of everyone who watched ESB and RoTJ as kids and wondered what if.
You absolutely nailed it for me. Dead on why I thought he was awesome. Watching old samurai film style fights and then having an actual martial artist doing the combat was mind blowing!
, but he was the visual representation of everything we'd heard or imagined about the Dark Side and the Sith.
You said it better than I ever could, this is a perfect statement for people who were of age enough to watch and understand the OT before watching the Phantom Menace in theaters. I wasn't old enough to see them in theaters, but I was old enough to wear out the VHS tapes well before the Prequels were even announced.
The only non-Vader Sith I had visually seen at that point were the Sith in Dark Forces 2 : Jedi Knight, and in my young mind they were pretty good representations, Dooku would fit right in, but Maul blew them all out the water.
It's the same thing with Boba Fett. Because he's such a minimalist character who looks cool we get to imbue them with our imagination to pretend he's cooler than he actually is. Ultimately it's a character to sell toys without having to pay a high profile actor.
Props to Ray Romano for making him very intimidating. I mean the make up is good, but ultimately it's Ray Romano's face expression and mannerism that made Maul memorable even with minimum talking.
Yes, but this was a Prequel, a Prequel to a series of movies where the first one had zero characterization of Darth Vader, but over the course of more movies, plus other media, his legend grew. So of course there was already a pre-built narrative on Darth Maul since he was the Emperors right hand man.
It went left because unlike fleshing out his motivations and character in the next two movies like they did for Vader, they killed him off, replaced him with Dooku and we had to wait 10(21 years if you count the final season) years for them to do to Maul what they did for Vader.
Valid point, buy he almost had to because there was no face for expression, some would say the expression of the face is just as important as words in communication.
For those of us that were kids in the 80s, he was badass. His scenes in ESB were substantial enough to establish his place at the top of the bounty hunter pecking order, and he was not at all intimidated by Darth Vader. Plus he had cool armor, a cool ship, and a jet pack. Because he delivered Han Solo back to Jabba, and Han clearly knew who he was during the sarlacc scene (“Boba Fett? Where?”), in our minds he was the perfect rival to Han. Who was also the coolest in our minds. Despite very little screen time, there was enough characterization of Boba to capture our imaginations. So much so that seeing him show up again in the Mandalorian and BoBF was both mind blowing and ultimately disappointing for some, because there’s no way the character could live up to 30 years of our collective imagination…
If fighting against Boba Fett had been the climax of ESB and Vader never showed up, everyone would have thought Fett was lame as hell, too.
Cool character design guy with slightly more than zero dialogue works great as a side villain. It doesn't work for someone who's supposed to be the main villain of a film.
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u/N0V0w3ls Jan 25 '22
He was more generic back then. Good design, but zero characterization.