starwars.com posted a couple of days ago 6 Clone Wars Fortune Cookies To Take To Heart. (Fortune cookies are those sayings at the beginning of every Clone Wars episode.)
Meanwhile, it pains me to bring up the hellish clan known as the Kardashians but I saw this picture of an extremely preggers Kim Kardashian taken a few days ago:
I wondered where I saw this dress before and then I remembered:
Mike Klimo is at it again…
This time he compared the Rotten Tomatoes scores for the prequels along with scores he came up with based on 173 reviews of ANH, TESB, and ROTJ, using RT’s methodology. He also disregarded reviews issued upon re-releases, like the Special Editions and the TPM 3D re-release in 2012.
Now I’ve had issues with Rotten Tomatoes and what critics think isn’t all that meaningful to me. Especially since totally boring crap gets 92% fresh and not a single Star Wars film can even crack that number. But the results are interesting. The highest scoring Star Wars film to date is…ROTS, followed by ANH:
Klimo even got the attention of the Telegraph.
Update: Check out Clone Corridor’s take here.
Sideshow Collectibles is taking pre-orders for its Darth Maul Duel On Naboo Sixth Scale Figure.
Due out in the fall of 2016 (!), Maulsy can be yours for $240 plus shipping and tax.
Now they need a Qui-Gon and a TPM Obi-Wan to go with it!
While prequel fans are more or less a united front now, I am a little concerned that as of December that won’t be the case anymore. Let’s face it: some of you will love TFA, some of you will hate it, and some of you will fall somewhere in between on the spectrum. I don’t want the basher vs. gusher wars that plagued Star Wars fan sites and message boards during the ’00s. I want all prequel fans to continue to be comfortable interacting here and on SWPAS media elsewhere. This is after all a pro-PT site, not an anti-ST, anti-Disney, anti-whatever site. How I’m going to accomplish that in December is up in the air; I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
But in the meantime, fans who are perplexed at anyone having doubts or reservations about TFA ought to remember that this isn’t exactly like when other SW films have been released. What we’re experiencing now is unprecedented: this is Star Wars by (mostly) strangers. By Hollywood strangers, even. Those concerns probably aren’t going to be alleviated until they see the movie for themselves. That’s definitely the case for me. I’m going to be skeptical of their understanding of the saga and their ability to do right by Lucas until then. It’s the trade off for a secretive campaign designed to give very little away in advance.
I also think a lot of prequel fans are dreading this will again draw negative attention back at the movies for various reasons, regardless of whether TFA succeeds or fails. Really, it already has based on what I’ve seen in the media and on the internet. Speaking for myself, I feel pretty burned by throwing in so much support for the prequels only to be treated like a chump for doing so, and as a result I’m keeping more of an emotional distance. Plus, Pegg cooties. It might be a bummer to see other fans not as enthusiastic as you are but it is extremely annoying to be constantly told how you are supposed to feel. On the other side of the coin, fans who have doubts or reservations about TFA should not go out of their way to rain on other people’s parade. You can express your opinion without being a jerk. Let them have their fun and excitement.
In 1999, TPM was released on staggered dates throughout the world. North America got it May 19 and much of the world got it on various dates through the summer, with France bringing up the rear in October. Simultaneous worldwide releases were relatively new then but Star Wars fans outside of the U.S. and Canada weren’t going to wait two or three months to see the movie, especially with that newfangled thing called the internet threatening to spoil the movie months before it arrived on their shores. So what was a fan to do? Book a vacation to the U.S. of A., of course! I don’t know how many people traveled to New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, and other easy hop destinations from the UK and the rest of Europe but it was enough to get media attention. One of my friends actually made the trip.
It was less of an issue with the releases of AOTC and ROTS, which opened the same date worldwide (with a few exceptions like Japan). However due to differing time zones, if you lived in Australia or New Zealand, you got at least a 16-hour jump on the U.S. and Europeans who had to schlep to New York in the past were enjoying midnight showings just as their U.S. East Coast counterparts were driving home from work.
Fast forward to 2015 and I spot an ad from Air France on Twitter promoting a “Flight And Cinema” package deal: “Star Wars VII: See The Movie 2 Days Before!” That’s right, France gets TFA on December 16, two days before its opening in North America, so now it comes full circle with American fans booking flights to Paris to see the flick first.
With your plane ticket (must be booked on specific flights departing December 15 from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York) you get a free ticket to the flick at a EuroCorp Cinema theater (designed by Luc Besson) and a free ride on a special Star Wars shuttle from the airport to theater. Sweet, non? As much as I love Paris, I would be so horribly jet lagged, I’d fall asleep within the first 20 minutes. Especially in those La-Z-Boys and lounge chairs the EuroCorp Cinema chain apparently has. But if you’ve got money to burn and want to toast TFA by the Eiffel Tower then hit Disneyland Paris afterwards, check out Air France’s offer here. And hope the movie isn’t dubbed in French!
However, I think Italy gets first dibs on TFA December 15. Ball’s in your court, Alitalia!
A fan made a video cut with all of the existing Star Wars films. Hey, anyone else remember the bit on “Seinfeld” about Leo Tolstoy originally calling his book “War: What Is It Good For?”
Bryan Young has an article as part of his “Cinema of Star Wars’ series on the influence of the animated film “Akira” has had on the prequels and Clone Wars.
And a guy on Coffee With Kenobi, while admittedly not a big prequels fan, has had it with prequel bashing.
Clone Corridor posted its own take here, but I’m going to discuss more the hype and reactions to trailers during the PT era and today rather than content.
It’s hard to pin down what exactly was the first “event” trailer but I’d have to say on a smaller level, it was probably 1996’s “Independence Day.” The internet was too slow and poky for that kind of video so it was mostly a theatrical thing but the trailer quickly became a must-see in anticipation of the summer alien invasion film.
Following that was perhaps the second “event” trailer, this time for the Star Wars Special Editions. The first one was attached with some prints of “Independence Day” and it quickly became a hunt to find which theaters were showing it. A second trailer (or maybe it was the same one, who knows) was released in the fall of 1996 on a more widespread basis. Again it was mostly a theatrical experience because of internet limits of the time. I remember paying to see “First Contact,” “Space Jam,” and “Jingle All The Way” just to catch the trailer more than once.
But it was all nothing compared to the debut of the first TPM trailer in November 1998. If ID4 and the Special Editions made trailers must-sees, TPM permanently made trailers as big a deal as the movies themselves. While many fans paid to see the trailer at a movie theater, many others spent an hour or so downloading it at home. It set a record for the number of downloads at the time and if that wasn’t enough, just about every media outlet you can think of showed it at least once. It made news all over the world. When TPM’s second trailer debuted in March 1999, I watched it online first and then I saw it on t.v. several times thereafter. AOTC had a short teaser, an internet only trailer (that you had to unlock with a TPM DVD), and two other theatrical trailers, one of which debuted on t.v. during Fox’s Sunday night lineup. ROTS’s trailers were also all over the internet and the media. Its second trailer debuted during a broadcast of “The O.C..”
Trailers once had no fanfare and were made on the cheap. Now they are flashy productions with announced debut dates and social media buzz. People don’t have to buy movie tickets anymore to see trailers; now they expect not to. TFA built up on the strategies first launched with TPM. Its first teaser trailer in November 2014 debuted online the same day it was supposed to debut in theaters and it was shown on every broadcast outlet worldwide. Its second trailer in April 2015 debuted at Celebration Anaheim but was put on the internet and shown on t.v. all over the world just moments later. Its third trailer debuted a week ago during Monday Night Football and was shortly thereafter put on the internet. Lucasfilm claimed that 16 million viewers caught it on ESPN and online, it was viewed 112 million times within 24 hours of its debut. See, now they’re putting out press releases after the trailers too! But it shows that greatly improved internet capabilities, outlets like YouTube, and the availability of video on social media can allow the experience to be just as good on your device of choice as on your television. It also lets you watch it over and over and over with relative ease.
Sadly though, not Jar Jar. Hmmm. From IGN:
The Minecraft Star Wars Prequel skin pack adds a number of new character skins to Mojang’s wildly popular sandbox game, including key characters like Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padme Amidala, Darth Maul, Mace Windu, and Count Dooku, among others.
This follows Minecraft skins featuring characters from Eps IV-VI.
Filmmaker David Salazar has a guest post on the parallels and connections between mother and daughter in the Star Wars saga:
Speaking of Padme’s fate, Darth Vader force chokes her at the end of Episode III and calls her a “liar” and unleashes his anger at her betrayal. At the start of “A New Hope,” Darth Vader calls Leia a “traitor” and is later seen entering her cell to question and torture her. In “Revenge of the Sith” Padme goes to her husband to get information from him regarding his incriminating actions; in “A New Hope” it is Vader trying to get incriminating information from his daughter. The first image of Leia is in her white gown in “A New Hope;” Padme wears a white gown prior to her death. Both characters are also linked with droids that provide essential information to Obi-Wan. In Padme’s case, the maternity droid tells him of the twins’ birth and her death; in Leia’s case, R2D2 carries the crucial message that will ultimately save Leia’s life. Moreover holograms are also associated with both characters. A hologram with tints of blue looms over Padme on her hospital bed; Leia is a blue holographic image when Obi-Wan and Luke first see her.
