From JediInsider.com, we have footage smuggled out from Celebration IV from the upcoming season premiere of Family Guy, where they bash on Star Wars something fierce. See it quick, because I’m sure it’s going to be taken down any minute:
Hat tip: Lisa Sullivan.
This little homebody has had enough of running around in The City. Sometimes you just have to stay home and collapse before facing another workweek, and what better way to relax than with another reading of some fine ComicMix columns?:
And some listening to Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s most recent podcasts?:
And by phrasing everything in the form of a question?
I just got back from Star Wars Celebration IV in Los Angeles and, boy, are my X-wing tired. (Bada-bump)
What follows are my impressions and meandering thoughts of the event and of Star Wars as well as the thirtieth anniversary of the first movie (now, perversely, Episode IV – A New Hope) is, well, celebrated. I came out as a guest of Dark Horse comics because my artist (and partner in crime) Jan Duursema and I have just completed the first 12 issues of our new SW comic, Legacy. Jan and I have worked other SW projects for DH for maybe seven years now and have managed to attract our own following.
The thing is – as I’ve written/said elsewhere and, if you’ve heard this before, feel free to skip this paragraph – I was a SW fan from before the first movie came out. I’d seen the novelization on the counter at my local comic book shop and decided to pick it up. It was a good, fast paced, fun read and I thought if they could get maybe half of what was on the page up on the screen, it would be a fun movie. For those of you under 30, this was back when the height of sci-fi special effects was 2001 or Dr. Who. Yeah, the stone age.
George Lucas, of course, got 200% of what was on the page up on the screen and melted my widdle mind. He changed not only sci-fi films and special effects, he changed summer releases, he changed the technology in the making of the films and invented modern movie merchandising. I mean, the studio gave those to him because they saw very little use to them. Today, the merchandising of the film rakes in more bucks than the film itself.
Every few years, a Star Wars Celebration takes place and they switch locales around the country doing it. This year the place was LA (appropriate perhaps considering the 30th anniversary) and the venue was the LA Convention Center. The place is huge but C4 bid fair to fill it. I was only out there two days so I can’t claim to have caught more than a sliver of it. I was doing several signings and a panel and the news I learned is closer to what I was involved in. End of caveats.
The Con was organized to a fare-thee-well. The staff knew what they were doing and, while friendly enough, stayed firmly in charge. Despite all that, there was a bomb scare during the opening ceremonies on Friday night. Oddly enough, the corridor in which people were standing to get into the ceremony space was evacuated but not the room itself. Of course, it turned out to be nothing but you almost can’t have an event like this without having something like that these days, can you?
The Con itself was the almost the size and density of the San Diego con and yet, at the same time, more intimate. I chalk that up to the fact that Celebration has a single theme/topic – Star Wars – and everyone is there because they love SW. They’d better; C4 admission wasn’t cheap and there was plenty of things inside on which to spend more money. Some of the media coverage was, predictably, condescending (along the lines of “Get a life!”) but within the Con was safe harbor. You could dress up and become an instant celebrity; if your costume was good, people would stop and want your photograph or to have their photograph taken with you. It was a large family.
There were some costumes that I saw or heard about that had a sly sense of humor. There was a Wookie about five foot tall, wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt and a cap, taking pictures everywhere as he went – Tourist Wookie. There was a stormtrooper who wore all the armor except the helmet. Instead, he had on a big plastic Burger King head like they use in those commercials of which I’m so fond. There was Stormtrooper Elvis – again, no helmet and the white spangled half cape Elvis wore along with the pompadour, shades, and sideburns from the 80s.
There was a lovely young lady in Slave Leia get-up who I saw in the lobby with a baby stroller. No, I don’t think the stroller was part of the look she was going for, but it was an interesting look nonetheless. (more…)
Man, those Seths (Green and MacFarlane) just can’t get enough. First it’s the Robot Chicken Star Wars on June 17…
…and now word comes down that Family Guy will kick off its fifth season this fall with an hourlong episode that retells the "Star Wars" saga using "Family Guy" characters.
Lucasfilm has blessed the event, which has the Griffins acting out all the key scenes and narrative from Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope, or as we call it, Star Wars. Peter Griffin will play the role of Han Solo, Lois will appear as Princess Leia. Brian the family dog will serve as Chewbacca, while son Chris is Luke. R2-D2 and C-3PO will be handled by Cleveland and Quagmire, respectively, while creepy old guy Herbert plays Obi-Wan Kenobi. Stewie will be Darth Vader, of course.
But wait– shouldn’t Meg be playing Leia? I mean, Chris-Meg is creepy enough, but Chris-Lois… ewwww.
Let us help you slide back after the holiday with a nice pile of new comics & DVDs to ease the pain – plus news on DC’s plans for the fall, George Lucas encourages to do you own STAR WARS sequel & a little ditty from a guy who had The Beatles as his opening act!
If you PRESS THE BUTTON – Rosie will never come back to THE VIEW – we promise!
Seventy -three years ago today, as was foretold in prophecy, a child was born, a child destined to answer the question of what happens to an enfant terrible when he’s no longer an enfant.
Happy birthday, Cousin Harlan. (Yes, we’re cousins, at least, as is Neil Gaiman. Ariel David calls him Unky Harlan and calls me Unky Glenn, therefore we’re cousins-in-law at least.) Now if we could only figure out what to get you for your birthday… you wouldn’t want these extra tickets to the Star Wars convention, do you?
(Check out the ComicMix interview with Cousin Harlan – part one and part two.)
A long time ago (30 years ago today) in a galaxy far, far away… actually, for me it was the old Fox Theater on Route 347 in Setauket, on a screen the size of a battleship… a little film called Star Wars was released.
Worlds lived, worlds died, and the cinematic universe would never be the same again.
As for us, we here at ComicMix will be pulling up all sorts of personal memories all day, along with other Star Wars oddities we find on the net, and John Ostrander is already out at Celebration IV in Los Angeles signing copies of the new Star Wars: Legacy trade paperback at the Dark Horse booth with Jan Duursema, so if there’s any breaking news, he’ll let us know.
But really, how could we be bigger fanboys than Steve Sansweet? He literally wrote the book on the matter.
In the meantime, to kick things off, here’s a little bit of what we love about it.
Congrats, George. Love It. So when’s Clone Wars coming out?
It’s May which means, out in TV-land, it’s the final sweeps period of the season. Yeah, a few of the final shows have yet to air but I might as well look back on what I liked/disliked over the past season. This may not be what you watched, liked or disliked but, hey, it’s my column.
Battlestar Galactica. I finally succumbed and started looking in on the series. I’d been afraid that it would be too dense at this point, that there was too much backstory, to be accessible to late viewers like myself but I found I was able to pick things up as I went. Yes, it would be better if I knew more of the backstory and I plan on picking up the DVDs but I’ve gotten into the series. I’m not certain why finding Earth is such a good idea for these people or why so much of their culture seems to be very post-1940’s American culture but I’m willing to hang in and find out. Yes, I liked it overall.
Boston Legal. A tip of the hat to ComicMix head inmate Mike Gold for getting me to watch this series. Mary and I started watching late last season and it’s become one of our favorites. I was resistant because I’m not really a big David E. Kelley fan but this show causes me to laugh out loud. It makes brilliant use of some old pros – James Spader, Rene Aubenjois, Candace Bergen, and the simply amazing William Shatner – as it talks about current issues, goes consistently over the top, touches the heart and simply entertains me more than almost any other show in a given week.
Deadwood. Big fan of this show and I can’t tell you how pissed off I am that HBO didn’t let it continue. Yeah, they talked about two movies to finish it up but a) that’s not the same and b) I haven’t heard that those are actually going forward. Creator David Milch had said that the concept was the advance of civilization as seen through the focus of the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, originally a boom camp for the gold found in the hills nearby. Real historical figures intermingled with totally fictional creations much the same way real history was mingled with a lot of inventive writing (and serious profanity). It’s not a technique unknown to me; I did the much the same thing when I wrote my historical graphic novel The Kents. The show boasted some fine performances topped by Ian McShane’s incendiary Al Swearingen.
All that said, I have to confess that Season 3 turned out to be a disappointment to me. The through line was the gradual take-over of the town by George Hearst (given a dynamite performance by Gerald McRaney). Hearst was an actual historical figure, the farther of William Randolph Hearst who, in turn, was a model for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and that was both the attraction and the problem. The actual Hearst himself never visited Deadwood, so far as my researches showed, although he did wind up owning several big mines there.
The problem in Season 3, for me, was that it was headed for an almost apocalyptic showdown between Hearst and his men versus the citizens of the town who, although usually at violent odds with one another, were brought together by a common threat. The season built in tension to what should have been a staggering climax and then – Hearst simply decides to leave town. Go on to his next location. The tension dribbles away.
I prefer not to tell my editors – including ComicMix’s own Mike Gold – how I spend my workday. They’re generally happier thinking my nose is always to the grindstone but, as the ever delightful Elayne Riggs has pointed out in her column this week, you can’t be writing 24/7 and that, sometimes, playing a video game helps clear and even focus the mind.
My Mary recently turned me on to a web-based game called Boomshine and I play it usually once a day. It’s a simple game: on the screen bounce a number of colored dots, like the ball in the old Pong game. They randomly float around, bounce off the borders, come back. There are twelve levels in the game and the number of dots bouncing around vary from five in the first level to sixty in the last one.
At each level, you can click only once and this creates an explosion – a boom, a circle of light. Boomshine. Any dot hitting that circle also becomes a circle of light and so on, often in a chain reaction fashion. You have a goal pre-set for you at each level of how many dots you must change, from one at level one to fifty-five at level twelve, before you can go on to the next level or complete the game. The goal is the minimum amount of dots that must change; you actually want as many changed as you can get to increase your final score. Your final score determines where – and if – you place on the list of daily/weekly/monthly high scores.
Music accompanies all this. There’s a vaguely New Age piano playing under the game or you can click the speaker icon at the start of the game and a single random piano note plays every time a dot changes, which is what I prefer.
The motion and speed of the colored dots are random and the “explosions” where they change to circles of light appear to affect this. It’s not really predictable and, outside of when and where you place your initial explosion, you have no control on what happens next. It just happens.
Like life.
I’ve found myself doing a form of meditation while playing Boomshine. I don’t do well with meditations that ask me to sit quietly and let my mind go blank and just open myself to the Universe. My mind has to be tricked. It has to think I’m doing something. There’s a whole series of meditations that are like that; I know them as “moving meditations.” My church has a labyrinth pattern where you walk a pattern in to the center and then out; the repetitive act of walking as I follow the pattern frees my mind. Same thing happens when I follow my walk around the block – at some point, my monkey brain shuts off and allows other thoughts to come. I’ve sorted out plots this way sometimes. Almost any repetitive act will do that.
As I’ve played Boomshine recently, some observations – perhaps insights – occurred to me.
You can try to plan when and where is the best spot to make the first “boom,” but the little dots don’t always do what you expect them to do. They slow down; the boom seems to send them away; they skirt the edge of the circle of light without actually touching it, without transforming, and escape. Control is an illusion. That thought touched another in my mind and – boom – another little explosion. That’s Iraq. Those who brought us into the situation thought they had it under control; they had a clear vision of how things were going to be. They still think they can make it what they will. However, there are all kinds of random elements at work and there is no control over those elements. (more…)
On Friday, the Visual Effects Society announced the results of a membership poll, naming the 50 most influential films of all time in terms of special effects. According to VES Executive Director Eric Roth, hese films have had a significant, lasting impact on the practice and appreciation of visual effects as an integral, artistic element of cinematic expression and the storytelling process."
Comics fans will be arguing about the placement of Sin City (43) and Superman (44). No other comic book-inspired films made the list.
The films will be the backdrop of the 2007 VES Festival of Visual Effects, which those of you in Los Angeles can enjoy at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills from June 7 through June 10. There, a panel that includes Douglas Trumbull, Richard Edlund, Dennis Murren and maybe John Dykstra (he’s tentative as we write this) will discuss the list.
After the jump, the whole list.
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