This place is due for an overhaul. I'm working on a lot of new stuff - template, graphics, etc. - that I'll be doing some trial-and-error with this weekend and the next few days. Hopefully a better/more fun and engaging blog will emerge from the wreckage. In the meantime if something goes way off-kilter on this page, it's prolly just me monkeying behind the scenes and I'll try to have it fixed in a jiffy :-)
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Friday, February 10, 2006
Look at what they've gone and done to Juggernaut!
The more I've heard about X-Men III: The Last Stand over this past year, the more I've come to dread it. The X-Men movies had two solid installments (X2 was in some ways much better than the original even, which is pretty rare) but if even half the stuff I'm hearing about this next chapter is true, well this is going to be a pretty sucky movie. Which is sad 'cuz it does have some potential, like the pics I've seen of Kelsey Grammer as Dr. Henry "Beast" McCoy.
And then there is stuff like what I'm about to show you that goes and deflates my hopes for this all the more...
One of my all-time favorite X-Men characters is Juggernaut: Professor Xavier's half-brother with a lot of attitude and way too strong for anybody's good. Juggy's power is that once he starts moving in any direction, nothing on Earth can stop him. He's not a mutant though, his power is all magical, but I can understand it if they make him to be a mutant for the movie series.
What I can't understand is this: Here's Juggernaut from the Marvel Comics...
Now here's Juggernaut (as portrayed by Vinnie Jones) in X-Men III:
What a letdown. I've been looking for a good pic of the movie's Juggernaut, and this is what I find. There'd better be some darned good word-of-mouth on this movie, if they expect me to plunk down five bucks to see it.
Phil Brown passes
It's being reported at this hour that Phil Brown, who had a storied and colorful career but is probably best known for playing Uncle Owen in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, has died today at the age of 89.One thing I always found interesting about Brown was that he was one of the American actors who got "blacklisted" during the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s. Brown never had anything to do with the Communists though, not so far as anyone's been able to find anyway. He moved his family to England and continued work as an actor there. It was some years later that he got picked to play the part of a simple farmer in a science-fiction epic that practically nobody felt sure about. The rest, as they say, is history.
I met him very briefly in the spring of 2002, at Star Wars Celebration II. There's a story about that, and it would be really neat to share that because there was a certain kind of irony to it, but I'm gonna hold off on it right now. Just wanted to take that opportunity though to pass along that I got the impression that he was a very nice guy and it was an honor to have met him.
EDIT 6:47 PM EST: Okay, here's the story...
As part of TheForce.net contingent I shared a hotel room with the site's creator Scott Chitwood during Star Wars Celebration II in 2002. The day before it officially kicked off, it was him, editor Joshua Griffin and me up in our room when the phone rang. Someone asked if we could go pick up a wheelchair for Phil Brown. So we hopped in Josh's minivan and off we went. It was on the return trip back that Scott noticed something: we were helping to get a wheelchair for the man who played Uncle Owen, while in Star Wars Episode II Owen's father Cliegg Lars is confined to a "wheelchair" following a Tusken Raider attack.
It was later that night at this fancy dinner-thingy that I got to meet Brown. Like I said before, he was a really neat fella. Wish now I'd gotten his autograph.
If the Internet was around in 1944...
...would Yahoo! have betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis?
The web portal giant is helping the Communist government in China track down political dissidents. At least two of them are now sitting in prison because Yahoo! handed over records that led to their arrest... for the simple crime of sending an e-mail.
Why the hell is a U.S. company like Yahoo! dealing with a government that would rather see this nation destroyed? Why is any American company dealing with China, for that matter.
I mean, will somebody please explain to me why it is that China enjoys Most Favored Nation status with us?
This deal with Yahoo! tells me something: that too many parties, from the elected politicians on to corporate interests, are willing to sell out this country's principles for sake of a fast buck. There is no possible way that this can be defended, no matter who it is that's dealing with for all intents and purposes the sole superpower threat that exists to the United States today.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Found a Spudtrooper!
Last week I went driving around for no particular reason and wound up at the new Wal-Mart Supercenter in Mayodan (I'll refrain from once again ranting about how it makes no sense whatsoever for Rockingham County, North Carolina to have three Wal-Mart Supercenters). Anyway it had just been open for a day so I figured they might have some of the newer Star Wars loot. Including this one thing in particular that I'd been looking for some time now.
And on the Star Wars toy aisle, there it was. I bought it immediately and brought it home. Behold the Spudtrooper...
"Crazy Dave" Hoover is the new Meat Loaf
Three guys stick out in my mind from last night's American Idol, the first covering the "Hollywood week" part of the contest: Garet Johnson, Taylor Hicks, and "Crazy" Dave Hoover. Johnson is the cowboy who broke down in tears after seeing the ocean for the first time in his life (and he sings pretty good too): Lisa especially wants him to go far. Hicks is the gray-haired guy from Alabama who really seems to be a standout individual in terms of his style and personality, and he's a darned good performer too: I really like this guy. And then there was Hoover: the guy who showed up barefoot at the Chicago auditions and claims to be able to talk to the animals. This guy's theatrics totally destroyed whatever chances he had of moving forward in the competition, because the thing of it is Crazy Dave can sing on the level of the other contestants. Jumping from the stage to the judges's table probably didn't help his chances though, given how he almost scared Paula Abdul to death. But I think Hoover is yet going to wind up with a good career. He reminds me too much of Meat Loaf, and the style and theatrics that he's been known for. There's a real niche for that kind of personality and Crazy Dave fits it well.
(Yeah, I know: I said before I wasn't going to watch this, but I'm now a little interested to at least see how the people from the Greensboro auditions do in this competition. North Carolina has produced Clay and Fantasia, and we've a good shot at putting a few more notches on our belt with Idol this season :-)
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Song Tapper: Search for music by tapping your spacebar
Lisa found this really cool website through a music educators mailing list she's on: The Song Tapper. Tap out a tune with your spacebar and the site returns you a list of songs that it probably matches. I tried this with the Dukes of Hazzard theme and the Imperial March from the Star Wars movies, and the site figured both of them out. May be good to bear this one in mind if you ever know what the song sounds like but don't know its title.
"HEY YOU GUUUUYYYYSSS!!!" The Electric Company lights up on DVD
Hitting DVD as of yesterday is The Best Of The Electric Company! At last, the breakout PBS hit of the 1970s from the creators of Sesame Street comes home in a four-disc set. They're all here: J. Arthur Crank, Easy Reader, Jennifer of the Jungle, Fargo North: Decoder, Letterman, Paul the Gorilla, Spider-Man, the Cranky Director, DJ Mel Mounds, Road Runner, Lorelai the Chicken, the Short Circus players, those send-ups of 2001: A Space Odyssey... All brought to life by one of the most bizarre ensembles in television history: Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman, Luis Avalos, Jimmy Boyd, Rita Moreno, Gene Wilder, Joan Rivers, and plenty more.Definitly worthy of consideration of buying. I mean, where-ever else are you going to find Morgan Freeman looking like this:
Duke beat UNC tonight
87-83 at the Dean Dome (that's Carolina's home turf for anybody not from around here). One of the best played games I've seen in awhile. Have never been much of a Tarheel fan but I gotta say, they were in pretty fine form tonight even though they lost.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Idol contestant sings Jigglypuff lullaby
This must be said: Donnell Bolton is a pretty bold guy. The 20-year old showed up at the American Idol audition in Austin, Texas. And how did he try to impress Simon, Randy and Paula? Donnell did the Jigglypuff song from Pokémon! This one must be seen and heard to be believed, folks. I mean... just daaaaarrn...Greatest Star Wars action figure ever
Why am I posting so much about Star Wars lately? We were in a lull for a good while there, but in the past few days I've made three posts about it. And there's at least one more coming up in the next day or so. But in the meantime Scott Johnson has this picture on his ExtraLife blog of what may be the best Star Wars figure of all time. Thanks to AfterShock for sending the heads-up on this...
Episodes 7-9: Star Wars Virtual Sequels laid out at last
Finding that stuff about Star Wars Legacy – the new series from Dark Horse Comics that takes place almost a century and a half after the Star Wars movies – I couldn't help but think back to something from several years ago, back when I was on staff at TheForce.net. It was gonna be a pretty ambitious and unique project, and unfortunately it didn't really take off the way I'd thought it would. I never shared much of the details about this with the general public. But with the new direction that the Star Wars saga is taking and with the movies now all behind us, and in case anyone was ever interested in this, now might be a good time to finally talk about what was planned out for the Virtual Sequels Project.
A little over five years ago I came up with what I thought was a pretty neat idea. Remember that TV show Millennium? It only lasted three seasons and the third one was pretty lackluster. Well, a dedicated group of fans took it upon themselves to create the Millennium Virtual Fourth Season. It was an entire season's worth of episode scripts that not only brought the story to a satisfying conclusion, but it also fixed a lot of plot problems that had cropped up along the way.
It was the Millennium Virtual Fourth Season that led me to think about doing the same thing for the Star Wars saga, since there would be no more movies in the series after the third prequel. You know: all that about how George Lucas "originally" planned for it to be twelve, and then nine movies? What if someone tried to "figure out" what the last three movies would have been like? But this being Star Wars, it deserved to be a far more bold effort that simply putting out a script or three.
Here was the idea: extrapolate what a third Star Wars trilogy might have been like, had George Lucas chosen to make his film saga a nine-part story. It wasn’t going to be a "film" series per se (I doubt even the most tenacious Star Wars fans could have pulled this off as a fan film). But it was going to be more than three scripts either. There would have been the scripts, plus a lot of accompanying multimedia: pictures, animations, poster art, heck maybe even a soundtrack to download as MP3 files if someone wanted to give scoring it a try. It was going to be something akin to what Lucasfilm did with their "Shadows of the Empire" thing ten years ago (wow, ten years ago this month, I think!): market it as if it were a movie, but without a real movie to speak of. Part of me wonders if anyone would have tried to make custom action figures out of this, which I would have loved to have seen (particularly of this one character I had in mind, a really squat-looking Jedi, sort of like Gimli the Dwarf with a lightsaber). Have the entire thing put online for everyone to download and enjoy, and use their own talents to add to it for others to enjoy too.
I spent about a year working out the general story. It got announced on TheForce.net early in 2002... and then went nowhere. Part of it was my fault: so much started happening in my personal life that I didn’t get to dedicate as much time as I wanted to it. If I'd announced it a year earlier, a lot more headway could have been made with it. It’s weird 'cuz other than kick off the whole thing and take an "executive producer" role in guiding the general story along, I really wanted to take a "hands-off" approach to it.
This wasn't going to be one fan's interpretation of what happened after Return of the Jedi, where his take on characters and situations might vary considerably from whatever George Lucas might have envisioned. With a lot of people working on it, and holding ourselves accountable to the spirit of the saga, there would be far more assurance that the Virtual Sequels would have all the ingredients of vintage Star Wars storytelling: action, thrills, outrageousness, and of course humor. In a lot of ways this was going to be like the ultimate work of fan fiction. There's no way any one person could do a Star Wars pastiche and do it right according to whatever George Lucas may have had in mind. This was something that belonged to ANYBODY who wanted to contribute. And if someone had an idea that went wildly off-tangent from what I'd envisioned but was better than the original plan, well I was going to be all gung-ho for it. Guess you could say I was more interested in just starting the Virtual Sequels Project off, and then for the most part sitting back and seeing what my fellow fans could do with all their imagination and talent. Not that I wanted to take a lot of credit just for that, mind ya... I was just gonna be happy to see something like this going somewhere.
But that never really happened, not to the best of my knowledge anyway. There were some ongoing attempts to really make it take off, but so far as I know there hasn't been anything to date that's come of it.
Well, in case anyone ever wanted to know where I'd originally planned for this to be headed, here is the lowdown on the Star Wars Virtual Sequels Project...
In approaching what the Virtual Sequels would have been about, I took the approach that the Star Wars movies are a massive morality tale about power. The prequels are about discovering power. The classic trilogy is about struggling with how to use that power. The Virtual Sequels in my mind were to be the next stage in that: they were going to deal with learning when – and how – to relinquish that power, despite the desire to cling to it at all costs. I had that in mind, and something else that I thought would make the perfect ending for this multi-generational saga: I wanted to bring the Skywalker family back home.
Virtual Episode VII was to have taken place thirty years after the Battle of Endor. I figured that would be plenty enough time for Luke Skywalker to at least have a good start on recreating the Jedi order, both from new recruits and whoever may have survived the Jedi Purge (which we didn’t know was called "Order 66" at the time). It also would have allowed time for Luke to marry and have children who would be old enough to play central roles in the story. As for whom Luke would have married to, that was a no-brainer: Mara Jade. Some of the characters from the Expanded Universe were going to be used, but their backstories were going to be radically different than how they’ve played out in the established literature. I absolutely had to use Mara Jade. Her origin as a student of the Emperor would have been somewhat retained, and she and Luke would be married far earlier than where they were in the EU timeline. I wanted to use Mara and I wanted to use her and Luke's children as some of the main characters. In fact, I think it's safe to say that in my plan for the Virtual Sequels, it was in this third trilogy that the female characters of the Star Wars saga would really get their time to shine. Mara, her daughter, Leia… the ladies had a lot more "camera time" in this trilogy. Thrawn was going to come into play in Episode VIII, but other than his basic appearance he was going to be completely different from his EU incarnation. I envisioned him being this Attila-like warlord who would lead his armies out of the Unknown Regions, one more threat as if things weren't bad enough. He would have been a lot like the kind of threat that Count Dooku was in Episode II. Maybe a few other characters, like Leia and Han's children, would have made the transition. Han Solo himself died in tragic circumstances years earlier, alongside good buddy Lando Calrissian. Chewbacca was still alive though, and was honored for his bravery in the civil war by being bestowed the title of chieftain of all Kashyyyk... but I envisioned him being very much like the sullen king that Conan is at the end of Conan the Barbarian. Artoo and Threepio were naturally in the story: Artoo was going to accompany Luke's daughter throughout most of her adventures.
The Sith figured nowhere in my plan. As far as I'm concerned, Anakin Skywalker ended the Sith once and for all when he sacrificed himself to save his son by destroying Darth Sidious. Nor was there any more Empire, not even the most cohesive remnant of it. Palpatine's rule was something like Marshal Tito's in Yugoslavia: he may have been a very bad man, but he did keep the galaxy from tearing itself apart by ruling it with an iron fist. It was only after Tito died that his country began coming unglued and split into warring factions. That would have been the state of the galaxy for a few decades after the fall of the Empire: there would not have been an overnight acknowledgement throughout the galaxy of a new Republic's authority. And without that the galaxy would be rife with power struggle. Imagine a really bad Reconstruction era on a galaxy-wide scale, and that would pretty much describe the situation thirty years after the Battle of Endor. But look at how much wonderful literature – like Gone With The Wind - is based on the Reconstruction. Even without a central villain, there would have been plenty of storytelling possibilities.
But this is Star Wars, and a main baddie is needed. I had a character in mind, and I never really settled on what to name him but for the longest time I referred to him as "the Liege Golem". He was going to be this very shadowy figure, I guess you could say he operated a lot like Darth Sidious did in The Phantom Menace, but over the course of the story he would become a far more overtly-active persona than Sidious ever was. Golem would have really established himself as a worthy opponent in Episode VII, when he killed off a major good guy in a lightsaber duel. Golem – or whatever his name would have ended up being - wasn't going to be Sith at all. He was going to be one more example of what happens after a war, when there's all these unresolved problems and weapons laying around for anyone to pick them up.
Of all the problems that would come with the fall of the Empire, the most glaring in my mind was "what exactly do we do with millions... if not billions... of Stormtroopers?" It's not like they can all file for unemployment, is it? Well, I came up with a solution for what to do with all those Stormtroopers... but it was a pretty nasty one. I would even say that it would have been downright controversial. And it was going to have some very haunting repercussions for one major character, in a downright shocking way... but it was also going to allow for a personal redemption to take place too.
Okay, let's talk about how the episodes in the Virtual Sequels would have gone story-wise.
In the opening scene of Episode VII, two Jedi were arriving on a mission to the planet Naboo (sound familiar?). They were going to be the son and daughter of Luke Skywalker, who wasn't going to figure quite as prominently as one might think he would in the first part of a sequel trilogy. For more than twenty years there had been no trade or communication with Naboo. Luke was sending his children as envoys to re-establish contact with the planet... and also find out why exactly it had been cut off from the nascent New Republic. The reason for that would be discovered fairly early on, when the two Jedi find that Naboo has long been held captive by Stormtroopers from the old Empire. Without the Emperor or even a real government to serve, what Stormtroopers survived the Republic’s "solution" began organizing themselves into nomadic clans. For almost thirty years they'd been driven by a desire to survive and somehow continue a fight that was already lost a long time ago. They were using whatever old Imperial weaponry they could scavenge from the fallen Empire. Their numbers would have been dwindling down significantly, not only because of violent death but being clones they were aging faster than baseline humans. Well, these tattered remnants of the once-vast Stormtrooper legions had found a way to propagate: aided by a mysterious benefactor, they were using Naboo's vast natural resources to set up a massive cloning operation. And their sinister sponsor had provided them with a prime substance from which to replenish their ranks: the genetic material of the very first clone template... a man named Jango Fett.
That was one of the things I wanted to incorporate into the Virtual Sequels: tying them not only to the classic trilogy, but to the prequels also... just as George Lucas connected the prequels to the classics. And one of the things I was really looking forward to doing was to introduce the leader of the Gungans at this point in time, since Boss Nass would have been long gone. So we were going to meet an old, wrinkled and bitter Gungan who was once called something else, but now was known as Boss Jarrius. I thought it would be cool to have one of Jar Jar’s eyes sliced off too, and make him really decrepit-looking.
Well, long story short, Luke's daughter and son were going to make it to Naboo, find out what was going on, and run afoul of the clone clanners. They soon thereafter hook up with some of the natives. Realizing they needed to contact the Republic about this, Luke's daughter steals a ship while her brother stays behind (and would come to grow infatuated with one of the local girls) to try and rally both Naboo and Gungans to stand up and fight these guys. En route to Coruscant Luke's daughter had to land the ship on Kessel for repairs (after taking damage while escaping). Kessel was going to be Roughneck City. And it was in its spice mines that I'd planned for the "movie"'s "faster more intense" thrill ride sequence to take place. It was here that Luke's daughter was going to meet a young miner – no he wasn't going to be five years younger than her – who was going to wind up her ally on this planet. Partly because he conned her into it, but also because she kind of liked the guy, he wound up finally leaving Kessel and going with her to Coruscant. Luke and the Council – definitely more hands-on than it was in the days of Mace Windu and Yoda – decide to lead a task force to liberate the planet. What follows is a battle that takes place on the surface of Naboo, in orbit above it and beneath its oceans, where the cloning facilities were being put into operation. And it would be during this battle that we would really see Liege Golem revealed for the villain he is for the first time... before he KILLED Mara Jade in a lightsaber duel!
Yeah, I said that in my plan for the Virtual Sequels that the women would play a bigger role in this trilogy. Well, in this first act it was going to be a girl's turn to be the one who takes the tragic fall. Mara dies, but the cloning facilities are destroyed and the clone clans are finally repulsed from Naboo. Liege Golem is nowhere to be found... for the moment. For the first time in a half-century, Naboo is finally and truly a free world. And in the "film"'s biggest irony, Luke's son, who wound up leading the peoples of Naboo in fighting off their oppressors, despite not even being from the planet is elected to be sovereign leader of the Naboo... just as his grandmother has been sixty years earlier. So like Episodes I and IV, Episode VII was going to end on a happy, upbeat note.
Episode VIII was to pick up about five years later. The clone clans would still be a major nuisance, but the REAL problem was going to be a vast army that was coming out of the Unknown Regions, led by a strategic genius named Thrawn. I wanted very little to be known about these guys, other than they were really good at decimating whatever planets were in their way (one idea was that Thrawn was going to "carve" his name in kilometers-wide script into the surfaces of any worlds he conquered, as his way of claiming them). The Jedi and Republic were scrambling to figure out how to deal with this threat, but I also had in mind an interlude where Luke was going to return to the Lars homestead, where he grew up, for the first time since he buried the smoldering remains of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. It was here that he was going to reunite with childhood friends Tank and Cammie (filmed but not used in A New Hope). This was going to establish the Lars farm for when it was needed later on in Episode IX.
I came up with the biggest disaster of Episode VIII almost a year before 9/11, and to this day it creeps me out how similar my idea was to what happened in real life. Toward the end of the "movie" it had Coruscant being virtually destroyed: the last remnants of the clone army, believing they've been left with no possible way to win, lash out a final spiteful blow to the Republic. The clones were going to commandeer hundreds of Star Destroyers left over from the Galactic Empire, and send them all on a suicide course, smashing into Coruscant's planet-wide city.
The big revelation of Episode VIII was going to be when Golem removed his mask, and his face looked exactly like Luke's! It was to be a scene that brought to mind the Dark Side cave in The Empire Strikes Back. That was when Luke confronted his own Dark Side potential in a vision. There’s an old legend about the wizard Merlin having a "twin" brother, an opposite number to Merlin who was actually Merlin's afterbirth. That's what Golem was going to be to Luke. Remember in the Timothy Zahn novels how it turned out that Vader found Luke's hand after their fight on Bespin, and it was later used by Joruus C'baoth to create the Luuke Skywalker clone? Well, Golem wasn't going to be a clone per se of Luke... he was going to be Luke's severed hand itself! It was going to be revealed that Vader brought Luke's hand to Darth Sidious. Using advanced technology plus his skill in the Dark Side, Sidious was going to "grow" a whole new Luke out of that hand, to be an apprentice if Luke refused to yield to the Dark Side. So imagine Luke's original severed hand, with evil Luke growing out of it.
And it would have gone back to a lot of stuff from the Grail legends, about losing part of yourself and being changed into something more than what you were. Symbolically, Luke was cut off from his own Dark Side when he lost his hand – something that would subtly recollect the moment he looks at his artificial hand during the lightsaber duel in Return of the Jedi – and he grew to become wiser and more powerful because of it. But his own Dark Side potential had now taken form in Liege Golem, and Luke was going to have to confront that. Golem was what Luke would have become had he turned to the Sith, just as Anakin became Darth Vader, although Golem would definitely not be a true Sith at all.
Well, it was going to be revealed that the reason Thrawn's fleet came pouring out of the Unknown Regions was because he was being directed to do so by Liege Golem. This, and Golem's dealings with the clone clans, all figured into Golem's real master plan. He was orchestrating events in a way that the Jedi... and Luke and the Skywalker family in particular... would increasingly be tempted to use their power to intervene and take control of the situation. Until ultimately the Jedi would to rule the galaxy, with the Skywalkers at the top of the heap. Golem wasn't out to destroy the Jedi: he intended for them to take over everything. And this was important to consider about Liege Golem: to him, there was no distinction between Jedi and Sith. There was only power and the will to use it. To him the semantics or philosophical differences didn't matter at all. This was going to be revealed for the most part during the duel between Golem and Luke's daughter: who was going to be given the choice of surrendering now and letting all this carnage cease, or fight on and let the galaxy continue to burn. No limbs got chopped off this time... unless you count Luke's original hand getting severed (again) from Golem's arm. But don't worry he was still gonna be evil as they come.
The final scene of Episode VIII was going to be Luke's daughter and her boyfriend (the guy she met on Kessel... and he was gonna play a heckuva bigger role than I've let on here so far) looking down from the viewport of a Jedi cruiser onto the ruined landscape of Coruscant far below, with smaller vessels carrying survivors straggling into orbit. They decided that they can't put off their love any longer, not with how there are no guarantees. He asks her to marry him and Luke's daughter says yes. It was going to come across a lot like that final shot of The Empire Strikes Back.
Episode IX would take place two years later, and in my mind was going to be as sullen and apocalyptic as it could possibly be. And it was going to finally, once and for all, answer the problem of power and the Force. Luke was going to do something that would forevermore make it impossible for the Force to go out of balance. On the eve of the last battle (of the entire Star Wars saga, so it had to be pretty darned honking big), he was going to give his final command to the Jedi Order: whether the battle was won or lost, they were ordered to disband and disperse. The Jedi were to be scattered to the four winds across the galaxy. There would be no more Jedi Council, no more centralized structure for the Jedi. Never again would the Force be something reserved for an elite few: the Jedi were to flee, and wherever they were led they were to teach others what they knew about the Force. Luke was going to make it so that no one sect – or no one person – would ever use the Force to control the galaxy again. In this way Luke Skywalker was going to become very much a Christ figure: sending "missionaries" unto all nations to "preach" a message.
It was during the final battle that Luke's daughter (who at this point is pregnant, which I had no idea would be analogous to where Padme would be at this point in Revenge of the Sith), her husband and Luke would have their final confrontation with Liege Golem, with it coming down to a lightsaber battle between Luke and his own dark potential. Golem was going to be killed, and Luke would be mortally wounded. Liege Golem's forces (made up of Thrawn's army and a few others, including some former Jedi who left the Order) are beaten in the main battle and we see them defeated in skirmishes around the galaxy. The Jedi obey Luke's decree and scatter. The Republic is in ruins – maybe in even worse shape than it was at the end of Episode III – but with the Jedi now working abroad and throughout it, there is finally the hope of a real and lasting peace to come about.
As for Luke Skywalker, grievously wounded and near death, he commands his ship to be flown to Tatooine. His daughter begins to go into labor. With the suns setting they land on the outskirts of the Lars homestead, which Luke had given to Cammie and her husband. Luke's daughter is taken inside, and Luke tells his son-in-law to take him and Artoo in a landspeeder out into the Dune Sea. They come to a place far in the desert where Luke leaves the speeder, and in his final order to Artoo he entrusts the faithful droid with his lightsaber. Luke tells his son-in-law to leave him, but he refuses. Luke tells him to at least take the speeder a distance away. This his son-in-law reluctantly does, and when he stops he turns to see a ship has landed, with three beings of Yoda's race using the Force to lift an unconscious Luke into their vessel. The ship takes off into the night, leaving only Artoo behind on the desert floor. Luke's son-in-law retrieves the droid and returns to the Lars homestead, arriving just in time to see the birth of his newborn son. The Skywalker bloodline, which left Tatooine almost seventy years earlier, has finally come home.
The End. Roll credits.
Now, all of that is leaving out a lot of other stuff, like one thing about why Luke Skywalker realizes he must take his own family out of the bigger picture of the galaxy, and have it return to more humble roots. It's also leaving out something of a political scandal involving Leia. What I've just laid out is really a pretty rough synopsis of what was going to happen, per the original plan... which like I said could have changed radically according to the input from everyone involved in the Virtual Sequels Project.
A lot of different worlds were going to be featured in this: familiar ones like Coruscant and Tatooine and Naboo, but also newer locales like the barren landscape of Kessel. I've always like the idea of Tarkin's homeworld of Eriadu, a factory planet, and that was going to be used. By far the most disturbing was going to be a "cemetery world", where the entire planet was one massive graveyard... and where a terrible secret would be revealed about one of the main characters. And there was going to be a return to Dagobah and the Dark Side Cave... which at the time I was hoping would be investigated further in the prequels, but that never happened.
The Virtual Sequels were going to introduce a lot of new characters, but also bring back a lot of familiar faces from across the six movies that were really made. I already mentioned how Jar Jar Binks was going to be used. Well, I had a plan in mind to bring a Fett into the story... after a fashion. How it was going to be done is something I'm gonna keep to myself for now, but suffice it to say that if you know anything about Jango Fett's tragic childhood, you might be pleased to know that there was going to be a happy destiny for his progeny after all.
And right now I'm trying to think if I left out anything really important. Even if I did this monster of a post just hit nine pages of length in Microsoft Word, so I'd better stop while I'm ahead.
Anyway, there it is: the Virtual Sequels Project. Even if nothing ever really came of this like I'd imagined it would, I'm glad to finally have this out in the open, for benefit of anyone who might still remember this and wonder what in the world was this trying to accomplish. And who knows, maybe someday someone will take what I've just written here and try to do something with it. Nothing would please me more than to see that happen (well some things in this life would please me more, but you know what I mean).
Any questions? :-)
Monday, February 06, 2006
The "Addicted to Lost" Super Bowl ad
In case you missed it, ABC ran an awesome one-minute promo for its show Lost during last night's Super Bowl. From the comments I've read this morning, it was one of the better ads that ran during the game. It's a well-edited series of clips from the show set to Robert Palmer's hit 80s song "Addicted to Love", but with audio fixed so he's now singing "Addicted to Lost". I think how they put this together and the elements they chose to use is going to really be a "what is this/wanna see" thing for anyone who watched the game and wasn't already a fan of the show.
Wanna see it for the first time (or as Locke says at the end of the promo, "We're going to need to watch that again")? Hit here to watch the extended 3-minute version of the promo, which is followed by the one-minute spot that aired last night.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
I've got a very bad feeling about this...
You're not gonna buh-leeeeeve what this picture is from:
And so will begin the Star Wars Legacy era: a period set more than one hundred years after the events of the Star Wars movies.
Here's the ad they're about to start running...
Look, the Sith are dead. Bringing them back means that Anakin's self-sacrifice meant nothing. He died so that the Sith could be wiped out once and for all. And to restore balance to the Force by taking them out of the equation. It took millennia for the Force to get that off-kilter to begin with... and now a mere century later it's all back out of whack? You mean there's another Empire that asserts itself? Geez louise, a new Republic that can't hold itself together THAT long deserves to be toppled, if you ask me.
But wait, it gets worse...
I'm going to buy this issue. I'm going to probably buy the next few issues, just out of curiosity about where this is going. But I got a real bad feeling about this one. Re-hashing the Sith and the Empire seems too much like sheer desperation on Dark Horse's part. They should have projected this series five hundred, or even a thousand years after Return of the Jedi, and played around with that, just like they're doing with Knights of the Old Republic set four millennia before the movies. If I were running the show, I would make it five hundred years post-Jedi, give it enough time for a whole fresh threat to arise, and make one of the characters be Artoo-Detoo. Why him? He'd be the link to the classic era of the movies. As a droid he's virtually immortal anyway, barring accidents. It would be kinda through his "eyes" that we'd see how all of the history had unfolded. Artoo needs to be a part of Star Wars Legacy, if this is going to hold any legitimacy in my book. And Dark Horse needs to do something really, really clever to justify bringing the Sith and Empire back. I hope they can make this work... but seeing that picture of Cade Skywalker makes me almost cringe to wonder what's going to happen with my favorite saga.
Steelers win!
Pretty good game. Don't really follow football too much but for some reason I've always liked the Steelers (and Denver, Atlanta and 'course Carolina :-)
The V for Vendetta Super Bowl commercial just hit online
They ran it about fifteen minutes ago and DARN this movie is looking better and better. I almost screamed when they had the very quick shot of Natalie Portman in the little girl/ballerina outfit... and do you know why? 'Cuz that means the Bishop Lilliman death scene made it to the movie!! Truly an awesome commercial. Heck I haven't seen a "dud" commercial yet during this Super Bowl (loved the FedEx one) which is good 'cuz hey why spend $3 million for 30 seconds of a sucky ad? So far, am very impressed with this year's batch. Anyway about that V for Vendetta commercial: Watch it in Quicktime here if you missed it.
LEGO Slave I: The 2006 Edition
Two things defined my childhood: Star Wars and LEGO. And when the two finally came together in the spring of 1999, I was one of the first in line. I've bought or received dozens of Star Wars LEGO sets over the past seven years. No doubt my favorites have been the Millennium Falcon (the 2004 version), the AT-AT Walker, and the Imperial Shuttle (the original one, not the re-release). All of those were gifts from Lisa. I've got both versions of the X-Wing that have come out, Jabba's Palace, the Mos Eisley Cantina (also from Lisa, for my 30th birthday), bunches more. And as of this past week I also now have all three Slave I models.
Slave I is a weird ship to try replicating in LEGO. First of all there's the strange curves and angles of Boba Fett's ship. Then there's it's flight orientation: the ship rotates forward on its lateral axis upon takeoff, so that what is the "top" of the ship on the landing pad becomes the front of the vessel. And then there's all the detail - particularly the weaponry - that's boasted by the ship of the galaxy's most notorious bounty hunter.
To date LEGO has made three attempts to create a faithful rendition of Slave I in the building bricks medium. The first one was released just before Christmas 1999:
Well, apparently a lot of folks weren't all that crazy about this first Slave I set. So a little over two years later LEGO took advantage of the build-up to Star Wars Episode II and released their second Slave I model...
So a few months ago it was announced that LEGO would be releasing another Slave I model, as part of its 2006 line. Which if you know LEGO means that it would probably come out just before Christmas 2005. That it did, and I had this box in my grubby little paws for about a minute a week before Christmas but decided to hold off on getting it at the time. Lisa gave me a gift card for Toys R Us, and every week or so since Christmas I've been going to Toys R Us to see if they had gotten anymore in. A little over a week ago on Thursday night, I found it and brought it home...
537 LEGO pieces, in several bags fresh out of the box:
30 minutes into construction: the 2002 Slave I had its body in two or so separate "pieces" that you had to build separately, and then put those together. The 2006 edition is all one solid unit from the base up:
EDIT 3:04 PM EST: In regards to the Dengar minifig, FBTB.net (which stands for "From Bricks To Bothans") just posted a great cartoon about him...
