Not only was it a weak effort (at best), but it added a new phrase to the lexicon: nuke the fridge. Kind of like “jump the shark” but dumber. Dang, George.

Who watches the watchmen? Better question: who owns the Watchmen?

I don’t know how I’m going to reconcile J.J. Abrams’ reboot (?) of Star Trek with established canon, but I’ll have no qualms about consigning it to “alternate timeline” territory if comes down to that. Something about this enterprise (pun intended) doesn’t feel right, and the shift to a 2009 release date is also bothersome.

The less said about it, the better.

I’ll take Posthumous Academy Award Nominees for $200, Alex.

It wasn’t much of an anniversary year this year. No special DVD box sets, but lots and lots of talk about the still-in-production Clone Wars cartoons and the live-action series. But Luke’s ROTJ lightsaber did go into space. Yee-hah.

Another movie that got the royal treatment the OT should have gotten. Thanks, George. :frustrate:

I couldn’t make up a sillier name if I tried. We kept getting snippets of info on this flick, trying to allay our fears about GL’s involvement. I’ll continue to hold my breath.

Well, Windows users…downgraded to XP yet?

(Us Mac users can’t laugh. Leopard was six months late.)

SW fans and Halo fans have something in common: we think guys in armor rock.

Smile, Bilbo! We’ll get to go “There And Back Again” with you in 2010!

Traditionally, on the last day of a convention there’s a “dead dog party”, usually for the con committee, but sometimes for whomever is still around. So I’ll use this day to wrap up my end of the con.

Special LFL announcement. Didn’t happen. Lots of rumors floating around the internet about an Episode 0/pre-PT movie. Nope, just the new Clone Wars thing. Speaking of which…

The Clone Wars cartoon. Or, should I say, video game cinematic. Lots of oooh and aaah. And Grievous. And Asajj. And…there is some kind of story here, isn’t there? If there is, let me know. It won’t guarantee I’ll watch it when it does come around. By the way, what kind of funky tech is SW.com using now? I got only sound when I tried to watch the video. It eventually got to YouTube, so I watched it that way.

My one-movie marathon. I know they showed all the movies back-to-back, but I only watched Star Wars. I’ll write about my experience tomorrow.

Future debt. Sideshow’s Ben Kenobi looked absolutely…I just don’t have the words, and that’s a good thing! And I am so glad I didn’t do the stupid thing and cancel Asajj. (I don’t like the extended wait for her, but what can you do?)

I’ll have more to say once I stop trying to hack up a lung. I hate being sick.

These are still not the movies you’re looking for. Move along, move along.

40 years old, and you can still get classic ST episodes without the CGI icing. Nice.

It took a sequel to beat the daylights out of a Prequel. Who’d have thunk it?

On a soundstage somewhere in California:

GEORGE LUCAS: Come on, we’ll just put in Indy and the bad guy in post. Nobody will know! And can we shoot the movie in digital? Pleeeeeeese?

STEVEN SPIELBERG: For the thousanth time, George, NO!

Heck, this has a whole lot more of a chance of getting made than Indy 4. :pfft:

• I watched the Clone Wars cartoons for the first time last night. First impression: I expected Samurai Jack to be slicing and dicing alongside the Jedi. :pfft:

• Going to watch the first Spider-Man movie for the first time ever tonight.

• I wish I could tell Amazon not to ship my stuff with UPS. My last order (in which I got Clone Wars and Spider-Man among other things) got to me a week later than I wanted them. I paid for it to ship in two days, and the numbskulls couldn’t deliver it when I wanted. So, because of the Thanksgiving holiday, I got my package yesterday instead of last Wednesday. This isn’t the first time they’ve done this. I’ve never had any problems like that with FedEx or the postal service.

• I’ve been catching the spiffied-up classic Star Trek, and I’m not really all that impressed with the updated special effects. They tried to make them look dated, but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. At least you can still get the un-spiffied-up versions, unlike some other franchise I could name. :hitwall:

• The war between New Line and Peter Jackson and company won’t let up anytime soon, so it’s probably a good bet that he won’t helm The Hobbit or a LOTR prequel movie. The hair on the back of my neck stands up in cold fear when I hear the word “prequel”. I guess this second movie might be one of the stories from The Sillmarillion. I’m not too happy about someone else being on this project, but if New Line has any smarts about them (any smarts left), they’ll get the best there is out there to do this. Can lightning strike twice? Who knows. :sus:

• On the collecting front: Darth Maul should be in the warehouse this time next month, so I probably won’t get mine until January. I did pre-order Asaaj Ventress earlier in the month, even though I don’t know that much about her. After watching the Clone Wars cartoons, I glad I did get her.

• Still no Sith announcement from SS. (AV is not a Sith, no matter how you cut it.) With next year being the 30th anniversary of SW, I’m hoping we’ll get a Vader or a ROTJ Emperor.

No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the planet, or gone over to the Light Side and stopped bashing the PT. Had personal business to take care of, and after that, I was just plain tired. I managed to get out a few posts for the Commentaries blog and do some of the usual webmaster drudgeries. Maybe once the month turns over, I’ll get my fire back. It’s hard to do much of anything when you’re taking 10-hour naps. :pfft:

• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest has become the third film to ever break the $1 billion mark in worldwide gross. The other two movies? Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

• Star Trek contracts CGI-tis: CBS Paramount is going to re-do the original series in HD and have much of the effects digitally upgraded. Some of the upgrades (via TheDigitalBits):

• ST turned 40 yesterday. Odd note: the first episode ever broadcast, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, was not the first episode ever made. The series’ only two-parter, “The Menagerie”, contains parts of the pilot episode entitled “The Cage”. NBC wanted a new pilot made because they considered the first episode “too cerebral” and thought it didn’t have enough action.

Han arrived safe and sound yesterday, and I just can’t get over how great he looks. I’ll get deeper into my impressions later. Obi-Wan and Mace should be coming in a couple of weeks.

I’ve been hearing little drips and drabs about the rumored Super-Titanium-Mega-Ultra-Spiffy Boxed Edition of the SW movies that’s supposed to be coming in 2007. Nothing definite, though. I guess it’s too much to hope that a DVD-quality version of the O-OT will be in there.

For all the dogfights, shootouts and the discharging of weapons in general in SW, I don’t think there are enough fights. See what I mean tomorrow…

• Concern: Sideshow will be shipping their Obi-Wan and Bespin Han figures in June or thereabouts. That’s going to put a bit of a squeeze on me moneywise. Too close together.

• Rant: Rebelscum.com has recently reorganied its message board and created a section for Hasbro stuff. There’s a forum for 12″ figures, but that’s not going to get much traffic since they don’t make them anymore, Sideshow does. The 12″ collectors are a small lot and it makes no sense to split things up that way. There are a lot of discussions comparing Hasbro and Sideshow, so it should be one place.

• Point & Laugh: A while back I ripped that Lucas bashing entry in Wikipedia. Back then, there wasn’t a footnote with sources. Between then and now, somebody cited some sources, including a post from this blog. All I did was repost a piece from a thread at the JC and added a bit of commentary. The article has had a rocky history, being moved around and retitled, and was threatened with deletion. It’s still rediculously biased. :pfft:

“At Wal-Mart today I saw one of their promos for their ROTS sales blitz in April. On it was Yoda in mid-jump brandishing his lightsaber. I wanted to be sick.” – March 23

“GL is now comparing ROTS’ emotional and dramatic content to Titanic. So instead of comparing it to the any of the other PT movies, he’s comparing it to a sappy, mushy, overblown piece of melodrama. Okay, George. I’ll take your word for it.” – March 18

“‘GL: It’ll be dark! DARK, I tell ya! Darker than…what’s that other movie’s name? Something about an empire and striking…Did I say it was gonna be DARK?’” – April 30

“Vader’s hulking presence IS Star Wars. Right from when he first stepped out of the smoke aboard the Rebel blockade runner. Now it’s just a pretender simply wearing the suit, trying to be Vader.

And I hate that this will be the last image of Vader anyone sees.” – April 5

“So the Jedi flounder around, chewing their nails and pulling out hair about this Anakin kid. ‘Is he the One?’ ‘Is he not the One?’ ‘Will he save us or destroy us all?’ You should already know that!” – July 10

“It didn’t seem so big and bad once you saw it up close. In fact, it was drastically underwhelming. What should have ended with a bang just fizzled out. I got sold a mediocre product, and that’s what I’m very upset about. At least when AOTC came out, I had hard, solid reasons to hate it. It was horrible. You got to work hard to be bad–-or good for that matter. To be mediocre you do…nothing. It was a half-hearted sweep to get everything in under the gun, and it felt rushed, disjointed, and uninspired. With ROTS I had one the biggest disconnects from a movie I’ve ever had, and that should never have happened.” – June 19

“AND YODA AND PALPATINE WITH LIGHTSABERS IS STILL WRONG!!!” – May 3