star wars

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Check this cryptic page out for some amazing Star Wars artwork. We already knew that Lucasfilm was producing a Clone Wars animated series and that there was supposed to be a second animated project: is this it? The page says “Stop by this Friday to find out more”. Since Star Wars Celebration IV is just getting started in Los Angeles and that Friday is the 30th anniversary of the first film, there’s no doubt that all kinds of saga wackiness could be erupting over the next few days.

Anyhoo, judging by this and the other pics on that site, me like!...

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There’s a great article at NorthJersey.com about Star Wars fans and the many varieties that they come in. I think it’s safe to say that I’m strongly Charismatic:

These are the folks for whom it’s not enough to watch “Star Wars” — they need to live it. So they make costumes, dress up as Lucas characters and join worldwide groups like the 501st Legion (they impersonate most “Star Wars” bad guys) and the Rebel Legion (the good guys).

Let’s see: I’ve made a Star Wars fan film, based my first political ad on Star Wars, have a movie-quality Jedi costume and I’m a member of the Rebel Legion… yup, when it comes to the religion of Star Wars I’m definitely of the speaking-in-tongues variety 🙂...

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Y’know, the school board election was in November and it’s now been more than 7 months since my first campaign commercial – the “lightsaber” one – first aired. And I only ran that one for about a week and a half before replacing it with the next in the series. But months later, and I’m still getting e-mails and phone calls out the wazoo about it.

I totally missed the opportunity to talk with them on the air about it, but it looks like National Public Radio did a segment about funny political ads and mine was discussed.

So let’s see, the current tally is that my commercial has been reported on by: The New York Times, the News & Record in Greensboro, the News and Observer in Raleigh, The Charlotte Observer, quite a few television stations including some on cable, and now National Public Radio.

Not too ...

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Yes you read that right. And at least two of them. However it looks like they will be made-for-television only. They won’t be about the Skywalker family either.

But hey, it’ll be new Star Wars story and so what if it’s just for television: some of the stuff being done for the small screen lately has rivaled a lot of big-budget cinema. I mean, check this bad-boy out: the now-legendary “atmosphere jump” from this past season of Sci-Fi’s Battlestar Galactica…

Now imagine Industrial Light and Magic getting turned loose like that on the medium. ‘Twould be an awesome spectacle, no doubt!...

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…and it might be set 4,000 years before the time of the movies.

Here’s the story at TheForce.net and it’s breaking out in quite a few other outlets right now too. The full scoop is that, allegedly, BioWare is creating a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG for short) based upon Knights of the Old Republic, their 2003 smash hit which is widely hailed as the best Star Wars game of the past several years. Knights of the Old Republic broke away from the traditional “Rebels versus Empire” motif of just about every previous Star Wars game and went into bold new territory: a time four millennia before the rise of Emperor Palpatine.

I loved Knights of the Old Republic (it equals TIE Fighter as my all-time favorite Star Wars game). It’s an extremely beautiful and well-crafted game. And it’s setting in Star Wars history is lush with untapped potential....

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Serenity, the big-screen follow-up to Joss Whedon’s TV show Firefly, has been named best sci-fi movie by readers of SFX. Number two on the list is the original Star Wars. Finishing out the top ten in order are: Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes (presumably the original), The Matrix, Alien, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and Back to the Future.

I’m glad to see this, because the Firefly universe is a franchise that really deserves to be continued one way or another. I never got to see the show but I thought that Serenity was both entertaining and thoughtful. Maybe I’ll put the Firefly series on Netflix and catch it sometime....

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So two days ago it was my birthday. Which in recent times that’s been a pretty rough thing for me to go through. I guess it’s because a few years ago I spent my birthday as a pallbearer for my grandmother’s funeral and the last thing approximating physical contact with her was carrying her casket to the graveside. Since then I’ve never been able to fully dis-associate birthdays from funerals, life from death. And my grandmother and I had been close, too.

There have been times that it hasn’t been so bad though. The following year after her funeral, during the first year of our relationship, Lisa went far in giving me a fun, upbeat, positive birthday. That included going to Olympic Park in Atlanta, then meeting up with my life-long best friend Chad where he worked at the CNN Building and he showed us around to a lot ...

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Bad news from the Star Wars realm: the novel that James Luceno was writing about Darth Plagueis has been cancelled. The word given is that Lucasfilm “decided that this was not the right time to delve into Palpatine’s back story and Plagueis’s beginnings…”

Bummer. This was the one forthcoming Star Wars novel that I was seriously looking forward to. I was really intrigued by what little we learned about Darth Plagueis in Revenge of the Sith and have been dying to know more about him. Looks like it’s gonna be a long time before we find out anything more definitive about him. There is a positive side to this though, I’m thinking: if the book has been cancelled, then Plagueis may not necessarily have been a Muun, as he’s said to have been since the novel was announced. I think Plagueis should be human, and maybe there’s a ...

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Turns out that it was ten years ago today that Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi Special Edition came out in theaters. It was originally supposed to have opened on March 7th, but the Special Editions of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back were performing so awesomely well at the box office that 20th Century Fox decided to let them play an extra week before introducing the next one. I remember it well: it was a cold, rainy day that it opened. “Weird” Ed, Gary and I caught it that afternoon at the West End Cinema in Burlington. Of the Special Editions, this was the one that I think I’d been waiting for the most because several months earlier word came that in the final moments of the movie we would see the capital planet Coruscant for the first time ever. The Special Edition of Return ...

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Star Wars: TIE Fighter came out in June of 1994. I’d been waiting months for its release: earlier that winter I’d bought the original Star Wars: X-Wing and played it like crazy on my then brand-new 486 25-mhz computer (with 4 megabytes of RAM and a 170 MB hard drive). Well on its release date I was at Babbage’s in Four Seasons Mall right when they opened, plunked down the money and took it home, where I eagerly installed it (from like 6 DOS floppy disks). I spent the rest of the day blasting those bloody Rebels out of the sky, then I had to go to the seafood restaurant that I worked at. I think I spent five hours playing it after I got back from work that night.

Here’s the first thing you’d see when you started the game. From the very first moments of this intro, I ...

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