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Apparently, TheForce.net has taken it upon themselves to produce Episode VII. After the prequels, how badly could it suck? Might be worth a read for the diehard...

Apparently, TheForce.net has taken it upon themselves to produce Episode VII. After the prequels, how badly could it suck? Might be worth a read for the diehard...

Love the sunglasses from Walmart, dude

SB

Art of the Saber is one of legions of "lightsaber effect" videos made by fans.

TFN Fanfilms has a huge library of Star Wars home movies. Many of them have excellent stories, and do much more than display the rotoscoping skills of the creators.

Duality is one of the most visually impressive, but because of conflicts between the two guys who made it it's not available on TFN anymore.

Possible "Star Wars Kid" cameo in SW3?
10:30 PM -- Friday July 25 2003

WCityMike writes "One of Lucasfilm's official webcams caught the Lucasfilm crew watching the infamous "Star Wars Kid" video (who, coincidentally, just filed suit against the bullies at school who posted the video to the 'Net). Fourteen minutes into the feed, the crew held up a sign that said, "We Love Ghyslain. You Rock!! Jedi Kid." A moment later, she held up a sign that said, "Ghyslain 4 Episode 3? C'est possible, non?" Wouldn't it be hilarious if something originally intended to humiliate the kid instead landed him the role of his dreams? (Hey, if Lucas filmed N*SYNC in Clones ... )

• Atom Films
• IFilm
• TheForce.net fanfilms
• Filmwatcher

• Recommendations:
• More (Brilliant)
• Fan made Star Trek epsiode (Hilarious!)

True, seems like there would be more stuff out there, but there are some great ones like these to keep your eyes open for.

Realplayer has certainly tried to beat them in the realm of streaming content, but due to such little things as shit for quality and lack of content, they didn't do so well.

For the longest time "shit for quality" made me hate RealPlayer...but have you seen the newest ones? Awesome quality...heck, it was even good enough to be included in a doom9 codec comparison. So "lack of content" might be because people won't use might be because they remember the "shit for quality" days or because of the competition from media player, I don't know, personally I think media player's codec (wmv) isn't all that big myself, but I guess popularity is increasing.

Quicktime...while it has done fairly well, never really got quite big

Hold on a second...what media content sites do you browse? Almost every online clip is in quicktime...movie trailers, fan movies...you get your eventual real video clips now and then (most of them old ones from the crap quality days) and if you visit a microsoft site, you get some wmv, but that's still the least common.

Microsoft hasn't been offering much competition in the codec department (although it's been pushing the new windows media 9 a lot, to the point where T2 Extreme Edition comes with the entire movie encoded in that format). Now...using the player...it's compatible with divx, mpeg, wmv, and a whole bunch of other formats except for quicktime and real video, and it comes installed with your OS, so people don't bother looking at the other players to play the formats media player can handle, and I guess that's the "unfair competition".

Not sure 'bout that. What if... and let me be very clear here... WHAT IF the planet you are living in happens to be next to a Death Star. Bad luck or just a coincidence??? Keep watching. =)

Yes Yoda is a little green pimp.

An ever-increasing number of archival projects from other studios are also readying the THX team for a time when Lucas will be available to focus on releasing the classic trilogy on DVD. "We have an advantage that some very great work was done by Rick McCallum and his group back in '97. So we have restored films and we have a lot of work that was put in that first step with the restoration job back then," says Dean.

"I've certainly heard that there's a lot of material that has been in the archives that never has come out. I imagine it will be a very, very long, tedious process to make it work," he speculates. "Frankly, that's why DVD is just not something that you jump into. There is a lot of planning behind that."

When will the classic trilogy come out on DVD?
The films of the classic trilogy will eventually come out on DVD, but it won't be this year.

Actually, this has been done. See this link for a video. (Sorry, it's quicktime only). Disclaimer : I am not a star wars fan. I still think it's funny.

That really depends on how they're built. The Puppeteer Mk 4 with Hyperdrive 2 was like 95% (from memory) big heavy engine and 5% everything else (including living quarters). The Death Star's mass has been a source of in-depth analysis on the internet. The mass turns out to be important in determining the fate of one little moon of Endor (verdict: Doomed).

Let us not forget the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, a collection of near industry-quality analyses of Star Wars tech, put toghether by a Ph.D with a lot of time on his hands.

There's a couple of weeks of engrossing reading there. Highlights include Warships of the Empire, The Endor Holocaust (an interesting examination of probably ecological fallout on the sanctuary moon due to the explosion of the Death Star II), and The Injuries of Darth Vader.

Let us not forget the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, a collection of near industry-quality analyses of Star Wars tech, put toghether by a Ph.D with a lot of time on his hands.

There's a couple of weeks of engrossing reading there. Highlights include Warships of the Empire, The Endor Holocaust (an interesting examination of probably ecological fallout on the sanctuary moon due to the explosion of the Death Star II), and The Injuries of Darth Vader.

Let us not forget the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, a collection of near industry-quality analyses of Star Wars tech, put toghether by a Ph.D with a lot of time on his hands.

There's a couple of weeks of engrossing reading there. Highlights include Warships of the Empire, The Endor Holocaust (an interesting examination of probably ecological fallout on the sanctuary moon due to the explosion of the Death Star II), and The Injuries of Darth Vader.

Let us not forget the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, a collection of near industry-quality analyses of Star Wars tech, put toghether by a Ph.D with a lot of time on his hands.

There's a couple of weeks of engrossing reading there. Highlights include Warships of the Empire, The Endor Holocaust (an interesting examination of probably ecological fallout on the sanctuary moon due to the explosion of the Death Star II), and The Injuries of Darth Vader.

sorry charlie. according to theforce.net, Episode 3 will start much the same way as Empire strikes back. the clone wars will be nearing an end, and the movie will carry on about the end of civilization, or something like that.

i kinda expect a lot of veiled attacks on george bush, actually. in keeping with lucas' record of veiled jabs at politicians he doesn't like. but that's really another topic.

It's been said before, and much better.

Someone wrote an article on this a few years back, theorizing what would have happened to the Endor moon in the years following the destruction of the second death star. Basically, the fallout / debris would completely decimate the moon, rendering it uninhabitable in a few years, and the ewoks would be unable to survive the changes. I think it was even mentioned in some of the books (Zahn's trilogy, I believe).

I pulled that from memory, but you can read the entire thing here.

http://www.theforce.net/theater/

View Quick Time Film: Running Time:
Lo-Quality 1:36/6.3 MB
Hi-Quality 1:36/12.4 MB


Story
What if a Japanese film company had decided to remake Star Wars on a budget using the noble art of folded paper? Origami fighters, cardboard gun emplacements...This film is the result of such a question.


Website
Inertia Films

View Quick Time Film: Running Time:
Lo-Quality 1:36/6.3 MB
Hi-Quality 1:36/12.4 MB


Story
What if a Japanese film company had decided to remake Star Wars on a budget using the noble art of folded paper? Origami fighters, cardboard gun emplacements...This film is the result of such a question.


Website
Inertia Films

View Quick Time Film: Running Time:
Lo-Quality 1:36/6.3 MB
Hi-Quality 1:36/12.4 MB


Story
What if a Japanese film company had decided to remake Star Wars on a budget using the noble art of folded paper? Origami fighters, cardboard gun emplacements...This film is the result of such a question.


Website
Inertia Films

Easy-to-click link
Troops is my personal favorite--It's a very funny spoof of Cops with Stormtroopers and Jawas.

Easy-to-click link
Troops is my personal favorite--It's a very funny spoof of Cops with Stormtroopers and Jawas.

In the SW storyline, this may give you an idea of the creativity being cultured online for fan fiction.

Look at the success of Troops. Granted there hasn't been another one made, but while this falls under the parody aspect, creating something within a genre doesn't have to be a parody, and if well done can actually gain the blessing of the original creator. I remember I was one of the luck few at DragonCon 1998(?) where they debuted a film short made by an Australian troup depicting the delivery of the Death Star plans into the hands of the Alliance. They focused on Mara Jade, a definite Lucas/SW copyrighted character, and were blessed by George himself. This was *not* a parody at all.

> > Unless you want to spend your online time manning some post on Hoth

> aka "the ass end of space"

No, no, that's Tatooine, silly.

Hoth is the "ice cube"

-JC

If you pound it into dust with nukes, won't it be highly radioactive dust??

For some reason this thread reminds me of the highly detailed dissertation about the Endor Holocaust that attempts to prove that Luke killed all of the poor little Ewoks when he destroyed the death star. Yes, the proof is tongue-in-cheek, but it still gives some interesting science about what happens when a large mass is destroyed within range of a planet.

I have a feeling that this cartoon series is related to this news tip (while we're all waiting for episode 3 movie to be completed) from TheForce.Net's archive:

I work in a bookshop in England. Yesterday our friendly Penguin/Dorling Kindersley rep was in and was going through new books for next year. He showed me the cover for Star Wars - The Worlds of Episode II and told me an interesting story.

Very recently, the head of LucasFilm UK was giving a small presentation to the Penguin Group. She was telling them how Episode III was going to be the biggest thing ever, partly because of it being 'real time'. "You mean, "asked a quizzical rep,"it will only cover 2 hours of Star Wars time?"

No. What she meant was that when Episode III opens in May 2005, the Clone Wars will be just finishing as the film opens. The Clone Wars last for three years. "So the Clone Wars are happening now," she said. Ergo, Episode III takes place exactly three years after AOTC. Cool huh?

Oh, you mean this Dark Redemption, the freely available on the net fanfilm that was entirely independently created (not using Lucasfilm sets no matter what you've heard), on the virtual shelf right next to several other good entries on TheForce.Net.

The fanfilm scene is alive and well - don't anybody remember Duality?

And post-ROTJ, very uninhabitable...

Endor Holocaust

The books are not canonical. I get the impression from Brin's writing that he is clued enough about SW fandom to exclude the books because of that, rather than because he isn't aware of them.

See the article at The Force.net

Why would I want to buy an R2, when I can just build my own droid.

Yeah, cheesy free stuff like this compared to the sophisticated, highly polished mass media for sale by the "professionals".


(Jesus H. Christ, the "offical" SW site is slower than the fan site run out of someone's basement!)
Face facts, "mass media", is dead. We want 20,000 indie bands, not Britney & Nsync. Hell, I'll go all futurologistical on you and say that mass production is obsolete. You heard it hear first!

I would disagree. At the very least, save any sweeping judgments about inconsistencies until the final movie is out. There are lots of interesting threads that look like they will be difficult to resolve, but give Lucas a chance to do so first.

If you think I'm being a shameless apologist, please don't. I have a strong interest in how Lucas is going to bring the new films together with the old. In fact, here's a list I found a week ago when looking up info on exactly that.

If he did, we'd have fun movies

I had an absolute blast watching both episodes I and II. What's funny to me is that a lot of the criticisms being levelled at the new films also frequently apply to the old. I think the audience has changed more than the George Lucas' approach the films.

Stagnation is one theory in the Star Wars rationalization camp. The other major theory is the idea that they've effectively maxed out their technology. It is established canon that a trip across the galaxy is a matter of hours at most, the energy specs on the weapons are absurdly large, computers have reached human-level intelligence (and we can assume there is no higher intelligence possible for the sake of argument), and the Empire could build most of a "small-moon sized" battlestation in 8 months.

Granted, we believe that more progress could be made in the AI department in the real world, for instance, but for the sake of suspension of disbelief it is plausible to accept that human-level intelligence is the maximum possible, and that the other demonstrated limits are indeed the insuperable maximums of the universe.

(Note I am neither propounding nor defending either theory, just pointing out their existance.)

This site and this site are kick-ass explorations of Star Wars (and the first site does Star Trek in passing) rationalizations. Do not go if you have work to do; if you merely like science or Star Wars, those sites will suck you in for a couple of days.

Been mention here before, but here's a lengthy read - part of a larger site from someone who has a great deal of time on his hands.

Throughout the Iran/Iraq war, it wasn't nuclear bomb dropping tactics that the US was teaching the Iraqi army. The world's fourth-largest standing army at that time was learning conventional military techniques from the Americans.

Here is an analysis of the explosion of the deathstar. If the gravity changes caused by its present weren't enough, its destruction would certainly finish off the planet.

...what if the DVD had all three versions...

Not gonna happen.

This is from theforce.net:
Not sure if you have seen this yet, but in the new issue of Star Wars Insider, George Lucas doubts he will include the original theatrical versions of the 1977-1983 trilogy on DVD. He says that, for him, the special editions are the finished versions. And Bryan Wahrer of Alderaan Online follows up with this exact quote:
'Asked if there's a possibility of including the original versions as alternate tracks, to show the evolution of the films, showcase the state-of-the-art of the era, and preserve film history, Lucas said simply, "I don't think so. I think of the film as The Special Edition. I don't think of it as the early version, any more than I would put early rough cuts on.... I consider The Special Edition as being the final version at this point. I don't even worry about the other ones, because it went through a lot of incarnations to get to the final stage."'

I haven't read the book, so I won't comment on its merits. pinkunicorn, however, does seem to be a bit mistraken about what makes good science fiction.

True science fiction--at least good SF--has nothing to do with technobable. Rather, science and technology are important characters in the story.

For example, Larry Niven takes the idea of a Star Trek style transporter, and examines what it would do to society. Perfect murders go unsolved, protests and riots spontaneously appear and disappear, pickpockets run rampant.

Timothy Zahn creates a super-soldier with implanted weapons and sends the soldiers home. They're feared and hated, develop terrible wasting diseases, and eventually flee to create their own society.

James Hogan explores virtual reality and the effects of total immersion in an unreal world. Alan Dean Foster creats a society of fanciful aliens with a specialized socialst structure and then throws humans into the mix. Frank Herbert creates a self-aware computer that becomes God--or is it the Devil?

There are related genres. Good space opera, like David Weber's works, is classic adventure storytelling set in a detailed and internally consistent technologically-advanced future.

Star Wars and friends is perhaps best classified as science fantasy. The story may be entertaining, but it makes no attempt at basing itself in reality. What psuedo-technology there is serves as colorful background. If Star Wars were truce science fiction, it would have spent more time on the Endor Holocaust than the (admitedly entertaining) final swordfight between Luke and Vader.

So don't expect me to get excited about a story just because it has intelligent cleaning robots and mechanical computers, especially if the plot isn't too complex. If I want intelligent cleaning robots, I'll read Doug Adams and get a great plot and good laughs. If I want mechanical computers, I'll read William Gibson and get a great plot, social commentary, and a fascinating exploration of human nature.

Why SF and fantasy are lumped together is beyond me. What Tolkein and Vernor Vinge have in common besides great creativity and command of the English language escapes my attention.

</rant>

b&

I give you... Super Console Wars!

I really like the Super Star X-Box chasing the poor Blockade Game Boy in the opening scene.

I found myself watching it the first time for "what happens next". I went again this weekend and enjoyed it WAY more because I watched what was happening. The subtle detail in each scene put a smile on my face more often than not.

TheForce.net had a good thread running about "the little things" in the film.

I think the repeat business will keep Clones going for a little bit.

-techwolf

Some English names for other peace makers are the class of ship known as the "Destroyer", air craft names such as "Vampire", "Mosquito", and "Hellcat". With a little more reflection, you will see the truth and utility of such names.

Remember the destruction of the Death Star killed many innocent sentient beings. Did you know that there was a day care center on the Death Star? No you did not! Nor did you care about all of those innocent children, just like the Oklahoma City bombing. Have you ever considered the environmental consequences destroying the Death Star had? It was a global extinction level event. A whole planet perrished. See what your petty morals get you when you fight law and order?

Feel the power of hatred, let it make you strong and one with the Emperor. Fight for what is orderly and strong.

Actually the rebels already took care of that.

belbo

Well the first half hour or whatever of Star Wars shows that C-3PO and R2-D2 had never met before.

When R2-D2 and C-3PO are talking to Luke about this Obi-Wan character C-3PO states that "Our last master was captain Antillies" Ours would imply that R2 and 3PO knew each other I would think.

Or at least that C-3PO was totally lost of Tatooine

Well, C-3PO did state that he didn't know what planet he was on, and Luke's answer "If there is a bright center of the universe this is the planet that it's farerst from" didn't actually reveal that they were on Tatooine.

For a much better dicussion about the droids check out the Star Wars Technical Commentaries. This explains a few of these nagging issues with the droids

There was just recently a story about this on theforce.net, old Lucasfilm publication (1981) indicates that the Stormtroopers are clones.

TIE pilots are possibly clones also, based only on the resemblance of the armor they wear, but not necessarily, so Luke could have been considering this career direction...

But I would guess if you go to the Academy and get drafted into the Imperial Navy/Army you get to be one of the guys that wear the black salad bowls on their heads, or an officer, etc.

Spaceballs is probably the best thing to come out of star wars.

Actually, there have been some other great parodies like Thumb Wars and Hardware Wars.

Some really decent fan films, too.

Spaceballs is the only one in my collection, so far.