{"id":1334,"date":"2008-03-17T10:03:42","date_gmt":"2008-03-17T10:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1334"},"modified":"2008-03-17T10:03:42","modified_gmt":"2008-03-17T10:03:42","slug":"dont_talk_back_to_darth_vader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2008\/03\/17\/dont_talk_back_to_darth_vader\/","title":{"rendered":"Don&#8217;t Talk Back to Darth Vader, He&#8217;ll Get Ya"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Several people have sent me links to the following video, including most recently our Simple Tricks East Coast correspondent, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.familygreenberg.com\/blog.htm\">Brian Greenberg<\/a>, so I suppose I&#8217;d better stop procrastinating and get it posted up, as it appears to be the current happening thing here on the InterWebs. It&#8217;s somebody&#8217;s three-year-old daughter recounting the plot of <i>Star Wars<\/i> and doing a pretty fine job of it, too. I&#8217;m not somebody who finds the antics of three-year-olds particularly cute, so trust me when I say it&#8217;s worth your click.<\/p>\n<p><object width=\"425\" height=\"355\" classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/EBM854BTGL0\" \/><embed width=\"425\" height=\"355\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/EBM854BTGL0\" wmode=\"transparent\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;m especially amused by her comment that &#8220;the &#8216;siney&#8217; one always worries,&#8221; which is as concise a summary of Threepio&#8217;s character as I&#8217;ve ever encountered). Amazingly, she&#8217;s seen the movie only once, spread out over several days. Smart kid.<\/p>\n<p>(On a side note &#8212; 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 &#8212; isn&#8217;t three a little young for a movie like <i>Star Wars<\/i>? I was <i>seven<\/i> 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&#8217;t too sure about that beastie in the garbage masher, either. Maybe I was just a wussy kid.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, as long as I&#8217;m talking about <i>Star Wars<\/i>, here are a couple other items of interest:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First up, another tip from Brian that you may have already heard about (considering how long I procrastinated putting this up): there&#8217;s going to be an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2008\/SHOWBIZ\/Movies\/02\/14\/lucasfilm.starwars.ap\/index.html\">animated <i>Star Wars<\/i> movie<\/a> in theaters this summer. <i>Star Wars: The Clone Wars<\/i>, set in the time period between <i>Attack of the Clones<\/i> and <i>Revenge of the Sith<\/i>, is essentially the first episode for a TV series of the same name, which will debut on cable this fall. There&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.starwars.com\/video\/view\/000478.html\">trailer<\/a> for the movie\/series over at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.starwars.com\/\">official <i>Star Wars<\/i> website<\/a>, if you&#8217;re curious. I&#8217;m not wild about the look of the piece, personally &#8212; it&#8217;s a little too video-gamey for my tastes &#8212; but I&#8217;m willing to give it a try. One of my frustrations with the prequels was that they completely glossed over the actual war part of the Clone Wars, when Anakin and Obi-Wan supposedly became such great heroes and friends, so maybe this series will help fill in that gap.<br \/>\nOf course, my cynical little inner voice, upon first reading this article, immediately quipped that G. Lucas has finally gotten what he&#8217;s obviously wanted for so long: even his actors have now been replaced by CGI.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of G. Lucas, there&#8217;s a pretty good interview with him <a href=\"http:\/\/www.comingsoon.net\/news\/showestnews.php?id=42983\">here<\/a>, done within the past couple of days following his appearance at last week&#8217;s ShoWest industry convention in Vegas. He talks mostly about the <i>Clone Wars<\/i> animated project &#8212; interestingly, he says it&#8217;s &#8220;an old-fashioned episodic show&#8221;, i.e., each episode is a self-contained story unlike the current trend toward serialization in most television drama; I like the sound of that, as I find the serial format frustrating at times &#8212; but he also mentions his long-promised film about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tuskegeeairmen.org\/\">Tuskegee Airmen<\/a>, <i>Red Tails<\/i>, which he says may start shooting this year. (Of course, my cynical inner voice reminds me, he&#8217;s been saying that he&#8217;s about to begin shooting that flick for <i>years<\/i>, just like he&#8217;s always saying he&#8217;s finally going to return to those experimental art films that he <i>really<\/i> wants to make instead of all this mainstream commercial stuff. At least he doesn&#8217;t say anything offensive to my fellow old-school fanboys in this particular interview&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li>And finally, check out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.actionfigureinsider.com\/ottertorials\/2008\/02\/10\/rejected-a-long-long-time-ago\/\">this blog entry<\/a> and the accompanying illustrations of ideas for <i>Star Wars<\/i> tie-in merchandise that never got made. These items were all actual concepts that were created and pitched to PepsiCo and Lucasfilm during the run-up to the release of <i>The Phantom Menace<\/i>. Some of them are pretty lame &#8212; a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.actionfigureinsider.com\/ottertorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/jediring.jpg\">Jedi mood ring<\/a>? &#8212; but many seem like sound, marketable products that I&#8217;m frankly amazed were rejected. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.actionfigureinsider.com\/ottertorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/sunshield.jpg\">cockpit sunshields<\/a>, for example, look like naturals to me, and I personally would buy a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.actionfigureinsider.com\/ottertorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/cclamp.jpg\">Cloud City desk lamp<\/a> &#8212; assuming that it was made of actual metal and had some nice detailing on the skyline, and wasn&#8217;t just a misshapen lump of molded crap &#8212; in a heartbeat. I&#8217;m also amused by the thought of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.actionfigureinsider.com\/ottertorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/bantha_slippers.jpg\">Bantha slippers<\/a> and, perversely I know, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.actionfigureinsider.com\/ottertorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/gametrophies.jpg\">galactic game trophies<\/a>. Honestly, who <i>wouldn&#8217;t<\/i> want a mounted tauntaun head over their mantelpiece?<br \/>\nAh, well&#8230; it&#8217;s not like I haven&#8217;t found plenty of officially licensed and branded crap on which to spend my hard-earned Imperial currency over the years&#8230; (For the record, I saw this particular item some time ago but never got around to posting it &#8212; I seem to have a theme going today &#8212; until <a href=\"http:\/\/byzantiumshores.blogspot.com\/2008\/03\/sunday-burst-of-weirdness_16.html\">Jaquandor<\/a> reminded me of it over the weekend.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And now back to your regularly scheduled surfing&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;d better stop procrastinating and get it posted up, as it appears to be the current happening thing here on the InterWebs. It&#8217;s somebody&#8217;s three-year-old daughter recounting the plot of Star [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-star-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}