I have yet to see any video that plays upon the news that Star Wars Episode VII has a new title: The Force Awakens. But twitter was abuzz yesterday with alternatives. So, here is two of mine: ...
I have yet to see any video that plays upon the news that Star Wars Episode VII has a new title: The Force Awakens. But twitter was abuzz yesterday with alternatives. So, here is two of mine: ...
With tomorrow being May 4th, it is only good and proper that we mark the eve of that most awesome of nerd holidays with this video. I have a serious case of envy. It would be a heap of fun to do...
Twitter went nuts when President Obama said he could not get the Republicans to do what is right because of his finite powers, that he could not do some sort of Jedi mind-meld! He mixed his space...
Ok, this is late for Friday but we didn't have an entry, so here we go:
And this week, in problematic-representations-of-indigenous-populations-on-children's-television, Lucasfilm brings you Nomad Droids: Well I guess some foreign policy subtext in TV for eight-year-olds is a step up from 99.7% of what's on American prime-time. Thanks to Clone Wars, my kid is quickly becoming fluent in such concepts as strategic depth, diversionary warfare and humanitarian mission creep. Last week he learned, for example, that real soldiers treat disaster relief as an annoying distraction from their actual job; that, though not bothering to understand what the locals need might...
In the waning days of classes, one of my colleagues asked a student if she’d been among those celebrating outside of the White House the night that President Obama announced the killing of Osama Bin-Laden. “Of course,” she responded, “I mean, they got Voldemort!” For many readers who aged along with its titular hero, the Harry Potter series inextricably intertwines with the war on terrorism. This connection stems from more than a mere accident of timing. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) provides readers their first glimpse of the Death Easters as they carry out a terror attack...
(A blog response to "The Academy Strikes Back" by Dan Drezner.)Also, see here and here.
My son and I finally saw Clone Wars this weekend. Afterward, I went back through some of the reviews I'd been ignoring during the past month of moving and settling in. No one seems to think the movie was great, but people are disappointed for different reasons. David Germain of the AP writes: You'll know you're in a different galaxy within the first seconds of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," which substitutes the Warner Bros. logo and theme music for the familiar 20th Century Fox searchlight and fanfare. Whether because of its cartoony format or its relatively lightweight story, "Clone Wars"...
For members of generation X like myself, Star Wars is one of the constitutive myths of our childhoods. The Force, lightsaber duels, the Millennium Falcon, "I am your father," "he's my brother," "I've got a bad feeling about this," and so on . . . this is what we grew up with. And because Star Wars was such a mega-hit, the characters and tropes and themes spawned a whole slew of allusions and invocations that continue to infiltrate popular public discussions of all kinds of things. Few pop culture artifacts achieve that level of saturation; few artists are able to shape the common cultural...
"Store Wars", the pro-organic food Star Wars parody, gets 1,268 hits on Technorati. The infinitely superior, but much older, "Troops" receives only 43.1I remember when my wife brought home "Troops" on zip disk from her job at an internet startup. We were living in New York, in a tiny apartment, and I weighed a lot less than I do now. Anyway, we still have the disk lying around somewhere, although internet technology and the lack of a zip drive make it irrelevant. So, all of you youngsters who thought "Store Wars" was thumbs-up funny, watch "Troops" now! Oh, yeah: Plan 9 from George Lucas is...
I stumbled across Orson Scott Card's review of Star Wars whilst reading Lawyers, Guns and Money, which itself links to the article via Lance Mannion. There's been some disappointment over the tenor and quality of Card's article, but this is what jumped out at me:As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you’d expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There’s no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on unselfishness and oath-keeping. Power comes from the sum of all life in the universe, and it is manichaean, not Christian — evil is simply another way of using...
In response to Time Burke's "Rampant Geekery: Star Wars Thoughts [SPOILERS]", I made a comment about what I called "nerd hermeneutics": the analysis of the text and media of speculative worlds, such as Star Wars and Star Trek, as if they were complete, self-contained systems. In a followup, Tim expands masterfully on this concept. He talks about it as "ways in which a fiction like Star Wars invites a particular kind of reader to make it into more than it is, to fill in its gaps, invent coherencies, see themes that are only barely there."Reading my comment with the benefit of, well, actually...