Okay, accepting a major entertainment-industry award in a Colonial Warrior outfit is one thing, but this is just... kinky. And also kind of... well, no, I can't let myself go there.
Sometimes it's hard to admit that I'm part of this community...
Via.
Enough of the political unpleasantness for now... let us consider something far more soothing to the mind... like this delightful piece of 'net crap:
Oh, if only this video really existed... I'd know what I'd be doing this weekend for sure!
(Incidentally, there's an entire thread of similar stuff over at Fark. The idea was to photoshop Star Wars characters into other movies. Most are pretty lame, but a few generate a chuckle; this one is downright creepy...)
It's been a while since I last addressed the matter of Star Wars on DVD -- specifically, George Lucas' stubborn and frustrating determination that the general public will never again see the pre-1997, unrevised (which, by the way, is quite a different animal from unrestored) editions of the classic original trilogy in any kind of high-quality video format.
For those of you who may have only recently joined us, let me state for the record that I am not one of these "George Lucas raped my childhood" types. I didn't think the prequels were all that bad, Jar-Jar Binks is not the end of western civilization, and I don't even begrudge George becoming very, very wealthy by exploiting the devotion of his fans. After all, nobody held a blaster to our heads and forced us to buy yet another box set of the same damn movies we already own five copies of, and it's not like Lucasfilm is the only company guilty of practicing the "double-dip" marketing strategy. Hell, I don't even particularly mind that he chose to use our beloved franchise as a test platform for his ideas about digital filmmaking -- which I suspect was his true (and probably only) interest in revisiting Star Wars all along -- and I also forgive him the sin of not being the man he was 35 years ago. People age, and their thinking about a lot of things changes along the way, and sometimes their skills decline, too. That's life.
But the one thing I can't forgive is The Great Flanneled One's zeal to suppress the earlier, more significant editions of three of the most important movies of the last 50 years.* It wasn't the Special Editions that changed everything for Hollywood, and I don't understand George's lack of respect for film history, if not for his own fans (I'm the first to admit that hard-core fans can sometimes be pretty damn annoying). Even so, his position on Star Wars is downright hypocritical given his support for film preservation in general; he's been quoted as saying that he's concerned about saving the films he watched when he was young. Just not the films people of my generation watched when we were young, apparently.
But don't take my rant for it. Consider this lengthy but well-reasoned op-ed that outlines the history of the situation and makes a passionate argument on behalf of both old-school fanboys and general cinephiles (I count myself as both, incidentally). The following point, in particular, is the thing I wish we could somehow get through George's thick skull:
Okay, since it's becoming obvious I'm not going to manage to do any actual entries today...
Yeah, it's a commercial, and it kinda sucks that the dread gargoyle that haunted our collective childhood has become both a spokes-Sith and a punchline... but this still made me laugh. So there.
Sunday afternoon driving around, weather pleasantly warm. A sign in front of Arctic Circle, a local burger chain, advertises "SW Salad with Jalapeno Dressing."
Says I: "Look, hon, Star Wars Salad."
Says The Girlfriend: "What do you suppose would come on a Star Wars Salad?"
I: "Ewoks."
She: "You didn't even miss a beat with that."
Continues I, again without missing a beat: "Charcoal-grilled Ewoks. They're quite tasty with that Jalapeno Dressing."
She: "You scare me..."
Continuing on with the fun and games, it's not often that a silly Internet quiz generates exactly the answer you were hoping for:
how jedi are you? :: by lawrie malen
But then, the questions on this quiz are pretty leading...
Via the SamuraiFrog.
I don't watch Grey's Anatomy and I have no idea what's really going on in this scene -- how the hell does a guy get encased in concrete anyhow? -- but I thought this speech was awesome, for reasons that will become obvious:
That would definitely boost my ego if I'd somehow done such a lame-o thing as getting myself encased in concrete. Nice shout-out to the Expanded Universe, too, with the mention of the Solo twins. There's either a major fan in the writer's room of Grey's or they've got some good research assistants...
Via.
Cranky Robert sent me this earlier tonight:
Brilliant... and weirdly catchy. Go on, try not to sing along...
I just learned from the blog of Irene Gallo, the art director for Tor Books, that the illustrative artist John Berkey has died. Irene mentions something about him being in poor health in recent years, but so far, I haven't been able to find any further details about his age or cause of death.
Berkey is probably best known for painting some of the very earliest pieces of promotional art associated with Star Wars -- the image above was a poster concept for the movie, which ended up instead becoming the iconic cover of the film's novelization -- but his work was pretty commonly seen on all kinds of books and posters in the late '70s and early '80s, and it was a big influence on my developing sense of aesthetics. Several of his paintings still live in my memory; when I read of his death, I instantly recalled an image of his that appeared on Navy recruitment posters throughout my high school and early college years, and also this painting,which was the cover of a National Geographic coffee-table book called Our Universe. A friend of mine owned a copy of that book; as I recall, I borrowed it several times, but about all I remember about it now was that awesome cover painting.
Berkey's work was more impressionistic than realistic, but one of the things it always conveyed was a true sense of mass. His starships and ocean-going craft and floating cities always felt huge and immensely powerful. It was a perfect style for the time of its greatest popularity, when Star Wars, with its mile-long Star Destroyers and moon-sized Death Star, set the tone for so much science fiction.
I don't recall seeing any new work from Berkey in years, and I don't know if that's because he's been ill or otherwise not working, or if his stuff just fell out of fashion. I rediscovered him a few years ago when I ran across a used art book at Sammy's, and I spent several days marveling at how many of his paintings were familiar, and how much I still like them. That Star Wars piece above, for the record, is one of my favorites out of the hundreds of Original Trilogy-related paintings produced over the years; this companion piece is, too, even if it inaccurately depicts several Corellian YT-1300 light freighters at the Battle of Yavin, rather than just the one we all know actually was there...
Oh, boy... what a conundrum...
You see, I loathe the "competitive reality show" phenomenon that has overtaken primetime television in recent years. Survivor and its highly contrived ilk long ago wore out their welcome for me and the American Idol-style talent shows alternately bore and irritate me. However, I reserve a particularly strong flame of hatred for the mind-numbingly stupid modern-day variants of the traditional quiz-show format. I think it's the way they all try to generate artificial suspense by having the contestants deliberate for ridiculously long periods of time (usually not very believably -- I mean, come on, how hard is it to answer the lowest difficulty level of these softball questions? Is the sky is blue or green? You honestly don't know that one? Well, then just pick one!) while ominous "the clock is ticking and which wire is Jack Bauer going to clip" music plays in the background. This technique was developed for Regis Philbin's thankfully deceased Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but it endures in the even-more-annoying Deal or No Deal, in which contestants essentially play three-card monte by choosing from a range of metal attache cases in hopes that one of them will contain a cool million bucks. (The difference, of course, is that the contestants aren't betting their own money and so have nothing, really, to lose by just picking one, a scenario that makes the delayed-response thing even more obnoxious. It's not like Howie Mandel is pulling cash out of their wallets for every wrong choice they make!)
Needless to say, I don't watch Deal if I can possibly avoid it -- which is sometimes tricky, because my parents love the damn thing, so I have to be careful about when I choose to visit them -- but now an item on the Official Star Wars blog has piqued my curiosity... not to mention my prurient interests.
If you've never seen the show, part of Deal's schtick is that the attache cases that may or may not contain the million-dollar winnings (well, the cases actually contain cards with a dollar amount written on them) are held by 26 lovely female models, all wearing identical dresses (I believe they're usually red). But according to the Star Wars blog, an upcoming episode will have the Deal models dressed in the classic Princess Leia slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi, a.k.a., the "metal bikini." Can any loyal fanboy whose puberty was haunted by sail-barge fantasies resist that diabolical kind of lure? Especially when Vader, Chewie, R2-D2, and Carrie Fisher herself are also supposed to be on hand? I guess we'll find out...
(As an aside, I will admit that the idea of a Star Wars-themed episode did make me smile, even if I dislike the show, because it brings back a lot of fond memories of How Things Used to Be. Back in the late '70s, every variety show on the air, from The Muppet Show to Donny and Marie did an SW episode. It seems like strange timing to do one now, though; I've been thinking lately that SW in general, and the original trilogy in particular, is fading from the pop-cultural radar now that the prequels are complete. Perhaps Deal or No Deal skews heavily among people in my demographic?)
Several people have sent me links to the following video, including most recently our Simple Tricks East Coast correspondent, Brian Greenberg, so I suppose I'd better stop procrastinating and get it posted up, as it appears to be the current happening thing here on the InterWebs. It's somebody's three-year-old daughter recounting the plot of Star Wars and doing a pretty fine job of it, too. I'm not somebody who finds the antics of three-year-olds particularly cute, so trust me when I say it's worth your click.
I'm amazed by how articulate she is, even if the video has been obviously edited to condense some of the standard little-kid rambling. She also seems to have a surprisingly cogent grasp of the movie, which her dad (who shot the video) swears in comments over on YouTube is entirely real and uncoached. (I'm especially amused by her comment that "the 'siney' one always worries," which is as concise a summary of Threepio's character as I've ever encountered). Amazingly, she's seen the movie only once, spread out over several days. Smart kid.
(On a side note -- and admitting up front that, as a non-parent, I have no authority to be saying a damn thing about how other people raise their kids -- isn't three a little young for a movie like Star Wars? I was seven when I first saw it, and, as enthralled as I was, I was pretty badly traumatized by the smoking skeletons of Owen and Beru. I wasn't too sure about that beastie in the garbage masher, either. Maybe I was just a wussy kid.)
Anyway, as long as I'm talking about Star Wars, here are a couple other items of interest:
Continue reading "Don't Talk Back to Darth Vader, He'll Get Ya" »
Okay, sure, my birthday is still six months or so away, but that just gives one of my terribly generous friends out there time to save up the money to get me something really, really cool. Like, oh, I don't know... maybe a Han-Solo-in-carbonite desk! (Although for my purposes, a coffee table would probably be better... I already have a nice roll-top desk.)
Seriously, though, this thing is really cool. It was custom-made by a company called Tom Spina Designs; if you like movie stuff at all, I recommend you go over there and have a look around. They've done a lot of other custom display pieces (some Star Wars-related, much that is not), and there's a fascinating page showcasing some the restoration work they've done on original movie props and masks. Latex is not the most durable material and most movie companies make little effort to preserve costumes and props after shooting wraps, so the actual physical artifacts behind our favorite cinematic fantasies tend to degrade pretty quickly. This company has done some very impressive work on, among other things, puppets from The Dark Crystal and Gremlins, and a whole slew of Ughnaught masks from The Empire Strikes Back. Nice to know that somebody cares about saving this stuff... it's all precious in my book. As Indy would say, "it belongs in a museum!"
Oh, and for the professional courtesy bit, this item was via Boing Boing. Of course.
A couple weeks ago, The Girlfriend and I, along with several of our friends from the subgroup I like to think of as "The Usual Suspects,"* attended something rather unusual: a one-time-only theatrical screening of "The Menagerie," an episode of the original Star Trek television series. The screening was essentially a promotional gimmick for the release of the series on the HD-DVD format, so naturally what we were seeing was the "remastered" version of the episode -- that is, the one with all the new digital "enhancements." Not that anyone except me seemed to mind. We shared a sold-out house with several hundred enthusiastic members of the uniform-wearing faithful (there was even a guy there in full-blown Andorian make-up, complete with antennae!), and there was much ooh-ing and aah-ing over the digital recreations of scenes we've all seen a thousand times. Even I have to grudgingly admit that whoever is behind the CG tinkering is doing a very nice job of it. The new footage is very faithful to the look of the original series -- the Enterprise isn't suddenly an unnaturally manuverable cartoon -- and there has been no "Greedo shoots first" revisionism to any of the stories that I have seen. I will even concede that some of what's been done is an improvement. (Click here for a gallery of screencaps and judge for yourselves; my thanks to Mike G for sending me the link.) Nevertheless, as my Three Loyal Readers can probably predict, I remain opposed to the updates on basic principle.
My stubbornness on this point led to a pretty interesting conversation following the screening, which in turn led me to a whole new understanding of my own thoughts on this matter of updating old movies and TV properties, and which types of changes bother me and which types don't.
Continue reading ""The Mangerie," and My Manifesto on Digital Tinkering" »
Courtesy of Cranky Robert, here's a clip I can't begin to do justice with mere words. Just watch it:
That's some brilliant editing, IMHO. Perfect casting, too...
Elvis has long held the monopoly on tacky, plushy living room art, but I'm thinking this just might give The King a run for his money:
Groovy, baby, yeah!
(Via.)
How many Star Wars t-shirts can a grown man own before it starts to become sad and lame? I've been doing a little online window shopping this afternoon and, well, I'm just asking...
My first day back at work went pretty much exactly as I anticipated: right back into the grind. No time to write a proper entry about the vacation, or even to catch up on all my blog-reading from last week. (I won't tell you how many unread posts I had waiting in my aggregator. It's too frightening. If I was wise, I'd just mark them all as read and start fresh in the morning. I never made any claims to wisdom, though.)
I did, however, stumble across this, which I will share with you now:
It's our old friend Danny Choo, the Tokyo stormtrooper I've blogged about before, showing us some of his slick moves. I don't know why I'm so amused by the sight of Imperial stormtroopers in everyday, terrestrial settings, unless it's because the costumes -- the good ones, anyway -- look so real, literally like these guys just walked off a movie screen into our world. Star Trek-themed costumes, by contrast, very rarely look like the real thing -- homemade Starfleet uniforms are usually just a little too obviously amateur jobs, latex Klingon foreheads don't match the wearer's skin tone, etc. But a guy (or gal) in one of these armor suits, well, they look the way they're supposed to look. And it's all the better when they're dancing...
(Incidentally, I love the guy on the subway who is trying his darnedest not to look at the two-stepping lunatic in the white polystyrene Halloween outfit...)
So, it seems that X-Wing wasn't the only craft from a galaxy far, far away clawing its way toward the sky over the weekend. A model Y-Wing also went up at the same model-rocketry event, with much the same results. Hey, nobody ever said those ships could really fly, only that they're cool-looking. There's a video clip of the flight -- including some footage from an onboard camera -- at Gizmodo. (I couldn't figure out how to embed the clip, and none of the clips I found on YouTube were as good as the Gizmodo one.) Go check it out! And have a look at the construction gallery, too!
Following up on that item from last week about the half-size X-Wing built by some model-rocket enthusiasts, here's some video of its spectacular (if short) flight:
Looks a lot like what happened to poor old Porkins...
(Porkins: "I've got a problem here."
Biggs: "Eject!"
Porkins: "I can hold it."
Biggs: "Pull up!"
Porkins: "No, I'm alrigh---yeaaaaaargggg!")
Update: Here's another clip from a different angle. Looks like it launched with the S-foils in attack position (i.e., the wings open in the X-shape), something I wasn't clear on from earlier information. Wonder if that made any difference with the tumble?
My dad isn't a particularly well-educated man, but I think he is, in his own way, something of a genius. Over the years, I've seen him modify ordinary tools to fit difficult jobs, rather than spending the money on a specialized gadget; improvise repairs to things that everyone else would say are impossible to fix; and, most impressively, build wild flights of fancy for no other reason than he thinks they will be cool and make people smile. There was, for example, the year he transformed my '63 Galaxie into a reasonably good replica of the RMS Titanic, complete with Ken-and-Barbie versions of Jack and Rose out on the bow, for a Halloween party.
Then there are the ideas he's had but for one reason or another never brought to fruition. He was always going to cobble together a Headless Horseman outfit and ride Thunder, our old gray nag, through the subdivisions just to see what the trick-or-treaters would do. And when I was a young fanboy, he often thought about making a float with a life-size X-Wing on it for our small-town Fourth-of-July parade. (The idea was that I'd be dressed as Luke Skywalker, riding the float alongside my "ship.")
I was reminded of Dad's unfulfilled X-Wing scheme this afternoon when I ran across this:
That's a 21-foot-long (half-scale?) X-Wing built by a group of model-rocket enthusiasts; they intend to launch it next week, with four solid-fuel rocket motors mounted right where the engine pods would go on a "real" Incom T-65. And here's the wild thing: the wings are motorized. If all goes well, the ship will "lock its S-foils in attack position" as it ascends. Or maybe the ship will start off with the wings in X-configuration and fold them closed during the flight -- the two websites I've seen contradict each other on that. Either way, there's a good chance the whole thing will come apart, but I hope it doesn't. And I also hope the video of its flight makes it to the web; my three loyal readers know I'll be posting it if it does!
Read an overview and see lots more pictures here, or go here for an obsessively detailed construction log.
Spotted this morning on the train ride to work, a college kid in a black T that read:
Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies.
--V
Understated geekery. Nice...
Courtesy of Eric D. Snider, a former Utahn who now snarks at movies for a living in Portland, Oregon, comes a manifesto written by this guy, a radio DJ from the Pacific Northwest. With only a few minor tweaks, it could've just as easily been written by myself:
What a geek believes
According to Rick EmersonI believe that Han shot first. I believe that Ally Sheedy was hotter before Molly Ringwald cleaned her up. I believe in miniatures, models, claymation, and not revealing the shark until you absolutely have to. I believe that George Lucas, for better or for worse, change[d] the way we see the world, each other, and ourselves. And I believe that we will someday reach those stars that he himself made visible. I believe that George Lucas is also a narrow-minded, money-grubbing, pig-headed slave to the now, who ought to be locked away from his own creations, lest he do them further harm. I believe that Jean-Luc Picard is the better Starship Captain, but I also believe that James Tiberius Kirk is infinitely cooler. I believe that a child standing in line to buy a book at midnight is fantastic; I believe that reading makes you smart — it’s schools that make you dumb. I believe that any episode of Futurama is better than any program featuring a precocious teenager who’s wise beyond their years. I also believe Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be the sole exception that proves this rule. I believe that comic books are an art form, and will someday be recognized as such. I believe that good shows die too young; and crap shows last too long. I believe that Eddie Izzard is the funniest man alive, and I don’t care whether you’ve ever heard of him or not — it’s still true. I believe that a girl who likes movies about zombies is hotter than whoever is on the cover of Maxim this month. I believe that Belloch ate that fly, I swear to God that I heard Luke call Leia “Carrie,” and I believe that Samwise Gamgee never quite got the credit he really deserved. I believe in magic, I believe in dreams, I believe in the power of music, movies, and the untold worlds inside an everyday library card. And I do not believe that geeks will inherit the earth; I believe that we already have.
So, did you catch all the references? If you're wondering about those tweaks I mentioned, they're after the fold:
Proving that tourism boosters will find a way to appeal to just about any niche or hobby group, here's a poster promoting Tunisia, the North African desert country that, as any good fanboy or 'girl should know, was the real-world stand-in for the planet Tatooine in the Star Wars films (not to mention several key scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark):
According to this, these posters were being distributed at the Star Wars Celebration Europe convention last week. I'd love to have one for the Archives, and I wouldn't mind watching a sunset from the Hotel Sidi Driss, either. Guess those boosters know what they're doing after all...
[Update: Actually, a little bit of googling has turned up some trivia I didn't know, as shocking as that seems. The "double-sunset scene" in which Luke stands on the rim of the pit he and the Larses called home was actually shot at a place called Chott el Jerid, some distance away from the hotel that served as the interior locations of the Lars homestead.]
So, all my blather a month ago about the early days of the Star Wars phenomenon put me in the mood to revisit a novel I've not read in probably, oh, 25 years or so: Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster.
Continue reading "Book Review: Splinter of the Mind's Eye" »
Remember that photo of the International Space Station looking like a TIE fighter? Somebody's been playing...
The crew of the space shuttle Atlantis had better angle the deflector shields and charge up the main guns! Oh, wait... that's just the International Space Station, looking rather TIE fighter-ish with its newly symmetical shape following Atlantis's successful construction mission. Just another one of those photos that amuse me...
(For a comparison of how the ISS has changed during this mission, click here for a 2006 photo, then here for a current one.)
The blog Indexed features curious little cartoons and musings sketched on index cards. Usually they illustrate the convergence of several apparently unrelated concepts that add up to some kind of common knowledge or meme. I have to admit that I find many of them utterly indecipherable -- or at least not terribly funny -- but today's entry (titled "Fantasy vs. Frustration") struck a chord:
Oh, and if you can stand one more item on the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, I liked Javier's remarks:
at this point "star wars" is a living thing - a highly complex and still-developing universe that goes well beyond a series of films. it's also the guiding light for a great number of media professionals of my generation: while studying at usc film school, george lucas's alma mater, i used to say that there were two kinds of film school students in my age category, those who freely admitted that they were there because of george lucas's example, and damned liars.
...
if you're like me, and your feelings about uncle george are deeply mixed because of the quality of the prequels, or because of how many damned times you have had to buy the movies in multiple formats, or because of lucasfilm's extremely poor management of the original movies in their original forms, or the excessive merchandising, or because the "dark nest" trilogy of post NJO novels was kinda weak, or what have you...
...well, get over it and raise a glass [of] corellian noale - wherever you are.
some of the prequel trilogy haters have been heard to say "george lucas raped my childhood" but, i'll tell you what, george lucas gave me my childhood. my life changed the day i saw "star wars" and for that - for the moment when i saw what was possible on the screen and said "i want to do that" - i can only be eternally grateful.
happy star wars day!
Just in case there's anyone out there who still has any sort of appetite for Star Wars-related crap, a couple of quickie links:
According to the digital clock-sign at the train station this morning, it was 4.21 AM, January 1, 1999. Oh, goodie, now I can relive all the madness that led up to the premiere of The Phantom Menace...
(Seriously, that would be fun, don't you think? The final few moments of unadulterated excitement before Star Wars fandom broke down into testy pro and con factions...)
All right, all right, the people have spoken (well, three of you have, anyway), so here you go: more Star Wars crap!
In honor of the 30th anniversary of my all-time favorite film -- and if you don't know what that is by now, then you haven't been paying attention -- allow me to present a whole mess of related links. You folks out there in InternetLand enjoy looking at this stuff tonight; me, I'll be off watching the movie itself. My bootlegged copy of the original, unrevised version, of course...
Continue reading "Drive-By Blogging 3: Revenge of the Blog" »
The blogosphere is, not surprisingly, sagging under the weight of personal 30th anniversary remembrances today, so I thought I'd offer a few links to some "official" coverage:
So, it occurs to me that the Big Anniversary Entry I posted earlier this morning is somewhat vague about my own personal experiences with Star Wars in the late '70s and early '80s, and some folks who are just joining us may wonder why. Well, it's because I've written about that subject before, of course:
I was seven years old in the summer of 1977, the prime age of susceptibility to a story featuring young, swashbuckling heroes, strange-looking creatures, and scary -- but not too scary -- villains. (See also Potter, Harry, Modern kids and.) I'm sure I must've seen a few movies on the big screen before then -- I vaguely recall a couple of early-70s live-action Disney films about people in really bad polyester knits -- but the first truly memorable film I saw in a theater...
Wait. Stop.
I'm not going to continue with that thought. My experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time couldn't have been much different than a lot of other people's. We were all kids, we'd never seen anything like it, we stood in lines that went around the block (literally, in my case -- I saw the film at the long-lost Centre Theatre in Salt Lake; there was no lobby to speak of, and the only place to queue up was outside, on the street), big spectacle, big excitement, tiny little brains melting, lifelong obsessions forming, blah blah blah.
We were all there, weren't we? And those of you who weren't have probably heard about it from someone who was. It was the defining communal experience of our generation, at least until the towers fell.
But here's the thing that was unique about my personal experience: I didn't actually want to see Star Wars. I had no interest in it whatsoever, and, in fact, I remember being frightened of it. I don't recall why, but something in the TV ads gave me a major case of the willies.
Read the rest here.
Didn't believe me when I said that the suits at Fox had no idea how to market the original Star Wars? Then check out this vintage trailer:
I dig the ominous music. Sounds like it came from some disaster flick like The Poseidon Adventure or something. Not to mention the random alarm wail that's never actually heard in the film. The art of the movie trailer has come a long way in 30 years...
Thirty years ago today, a modestly budgeted little space adventure movie opened on a grand total of 32 screens nationwide.
That number seems hard to believe now, considering what that movie ultimately became; by contrast, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End debuted last night on some 4,000 screens (according to this). There are technical reasons why the initial release was so small, but the simplest explanation is that things were done differently in 1977, and also that expectations for this particular film weren't very high. Science fiction had historically not done very well at the box office -- Planet of the Apes and its sequels being one notable exception -- and even when the opening weekend started looking like a record-breaker for the handful of theaters that were running it, the film's writer and director remained pessimistic about it succeeding over the long run. The studio heads he was working for largely agreed; they didn't even know how to market this oddball project, which was essentially a mash-up of Westerns, old Flash Gordon serials, and samurai pictures.
They needn't have worried, though. The public embraced the movie like nothing before or since. Word of mouth did their marketing work for them, and by the time the film "opened wide," audiences were clamoring to see it. It became a global phenomenon that would infiltrate every aspect of our culture and, for those who were lucky enough to be children in the late '70s and early '80s, it rose to the level of our shared mythology, a lingua franca that even non-geeks easily understand. I've met many people from other states, even other countries, and so long as they're roughly about my age, it seems like it doesn't matter whether we truly have anything in common. We always have this movie to discuss.
The movie in question, in case you haven't guessed way before now, is Star Wars. And yes, kids, that is what it was originally called back in '77 -- not "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope." Just Star Wars.
It is not just fanboy enthusiasm on my part that makes this day worth noting, because this one movie, whose creator, George Lucas, has reportedly never been satisfied with it, changed everything about movies. The way they're made, the way they're marketed, and the way they're received.
And I thought the multiple cover "collector's edition" TV Guide tributes to Star Trek a few years ago were a bit much: A British film magazine called (appropriately enough) Empire is issuing no less than 30 different covers this month to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. They're unveiling one a day here.
Makes me glad I no longer feel the frenzied collecting urge as strongly as I once did; ten years ago, I would've needed each and every one of these as a tulip needs the sun. Nowadays... well, they'd be nice to have, but I'll live if I don't get around to picking them up. At least, I think I'll live... I suddenly seem to have spots in front of my eyes...
I'm not a big fan of Conan O'Brien -- as I believe I've mentioned before, I much prefer his cross-channel rival Craig Ferguson -- but I did enjoy his little tour of George Lucas' special-effects shop last night:
Continue reading "Conan O'Brien Visits ILM and Uncle George" »
Over the past ten years or so, George Lucas has seemed to go out of his way to alienate his own fan base. There were, of course, the Special Edition re-edits of the classic Star Wars trilogy, the myriad disappointments that accompanied the prequel trilogy, and the milking of our wallets with multiple home-video releases of the original films that still, somehow, never quite deliver what we actually want. But he's also said a lot of offensive things, like his recent comment that he considers The Empire Strikes Back -- generally seen by the fans as the best of the six Star Wars movies -- to be the worst of the series. (I personally think this was probably not worth the uproar it provoked. I suspect it was a failed attempt at a joke, or something taken way out of context. Or maybe he just wanted to screw with our heads and he knew exactly which button to push.) The impression he often gives is that he'd be a lot happier if the whole Star Wars thing had never happened and he didn't have any fans.
That's why it was so surprising to read that he has offered official Lucasfilm support for the upcoming indie movie Fanboys, which follows the adventures of a group of Star Wars fans driving cross-country to steal a print of The Phantom Menace from Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. George has also lent his approval and Lucasfilm's assistance to a 30-minute Star Wars spoof for the animated cable series Robot Chicken (don't feel bad, I've never heard of it either), going so far as to lend his voice to his own stop-motion likeness.
Could it be that Uncle George is finally gaining a sense of humor about this whole crazy thing? And that maybe, just maybe, now that the pressure of making the prequels is off, he's even learning to appreciate his fans again? Anything's possible... although I'll be more inclined to believe it when I'm holding a DVD of the unrevised Star Wars in my clammy little fanboy hands...
(Incidentally, the trailer for Fanboys is online here. It looks pretty damn funny... and, in a show of cross-franchise solidarity, it even includes The Shat!)
Cranky Robert just sent me this:
Oh, if only I'd kept up on my Sith lessons. I could totally use that Force-choke thing just about everytime I'm out in public...
Boy, does this ever sound like a recipe for total fanboy embarassment: take an ex-boy-bander who's gone a bit beefy with ma
