Oh no. Disney is buying Lucasfilm!
My first reaction:
The official press release:
From USA Today:
“Disney expects to more aggressively expand the Star Wars film schedule, Disney CEO Robert Iger said in a statement. Following the release of Episode 7 in 2015, “our long term plan is to release a new Star Wars feature film every two to three years,” Iger said in the statement.”
Well, that could be good. I don’t really know what to think about this right now.
Six years ago, a guy known as Adywan started making his own edit of the original Star Wars movie in an effort to fix the problems Lucas and his team left in the 2004 DVD release of the movie. This guy knew nothing about editing movies, yet managed to make a cleaner cut of the movie than Lucas an all his millions of dollars worth of resources. Here’s an example of Adywan’s work compared with the 2004 DVD release of Star Wars:
YouTube – Adywan Death Star Attack Comparison
The biggest changes are color corrections, but there are some very impressive visual effects improvements as well:
He’s done an amazing job of fixing up colors and correcting brightness and contrast in the film. Keep in mind that this was all done by someone with no previous film editing experience whatsoever.
YouTube has lots more video clips from Adywan’s work. You should be able to find his Star Wars edits on your favorite Bittorrent sites. Adywan is currently working on fixing up Empire Strikes Back (which suffered from a serious overdose of blue filter at the hands of Lucas).
FaceBook Group: Adywan’s Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope Revisited
Now, witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational jack-o-lantern!
The Lego AT-AT I ordered from Lego.com came in the mail today!
The coolest ground assault vehicle ever to be put to film, the AT-AT Lego model weighs in at over eleven hundred pieces! It’s gonna take me some time to put this bad boy together. And I finally got a snowtrooper mini-fig! Sweet.
Interestingly enough, this model comes with a motor and battery pack. The model is actually supposed to be able to walk! I can’t wait to check that out.
The Lego company also gave me a free golden mini-fig from ordering this set directly from them (the AT-AT Lego model is not available in stores):
Not too shabby.
Man, I thought I was done collecting Lego a few years back, but, nooooo, they had to come out with the Space Police series this year, which sucked me back in. Damn you, Space Police!!!
Behold my collection of modern (i.e. year 2000+) Star Wars astromech droid action figures:
I believe I have them all except for R5-F7 (still trying to track him down at a reasonable price) and some versions of R2-D2. I’m not really interested in getting all the incarnations of R2-D2, since they all look pretty much the same. The back row in the image above consists of duplicates, but all the other figures are unique (yes, even the two black, cone-head droids on the left side of the second-last row). The front row and the three left-most droids of the second row are all versions of R2-D2; the rest are other droids from various sources (movies, comic books, Star Tours, etc.).
Thanks to Don Solo and his checklist of astromech droid figures for helping me find some droids I was missing.
Update: Here is the original image with names attached to each droid:
And now for some World of Warcraft humor.
Here’s a short screencap-comic of how my World of Warcraft raiding guild — The Dreadnaughts — would fare if we were in the Star Wars universe rather than the Warcraft universe.
Check out some neat, hyper-technological Victorian-era custom Star Wars action figures at Sillof’s Workshop. Very nice!
I like the little tuft of steam coming out of the smokestack on the R2 unit.
This guy has made a lot of other custom stuff, too. The Gaslight Justice League features DC comic superheroes in a late 19th century style. And the Star Wars: 1942 Biker Scout is great!
I’ve got almost all of my carded Star Wars figures on display now.
I just finished up preparing a part of a wall in my bedroom to display my carded Star Wars figures. I put hooks into the wall near the ceiling and hung those plastic product-strips with the hooks on them that you see in stores (I swiped a bunch from Walmart — new product comes pre-packaged on them, so I figured I’d grab some instead of having it take up space in a landfill).
I still need some more plastic strips, though. I have about a dozen more carded figures to put up there.
BTW, that’s a mini-Ark-of-the-Covenant sitting atop my LCD monitor. I got that along with an Indiana Jones figure not too long ago.
LOL! Regarding yesterday’s post about having to buy two-packs in order to get certain Star Wars action figures, I went to the same chain of stores after work and saw that those items were 50% off now. Fortunately I had saved my receipt and was able to get half the money back that I originally paid for the Order 66 2-packs. Sweet!
(click for super-sized image)
