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Slow News Week: Brian Liveblogs his iTunes Library on Shuffle

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Update #15 2:09 PM

There’s no getting around it. This has been an extremely slow news week and bloggers are getting desperate for content. So desperate that many of us are resorting to some non-traditional posts to keep our front pages alive*.

*Someone that’s actually doing something cool is Dunc over at ClubJade who is currently running an Ask Dunc Anything open thread. 

So yes. Desperation. I threatened this on Twitter but alas, no one listened. Strap in, I’m about to blog about music. Tune in for a continually updating thread on my bad taste in music. Make fun of me in the comments, or suggest good things for me to listen to.

To the jump!

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‘John Carter’ Breaks Even

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Good news for Disney, John Carter managed to make back what was sunk into it thanks to overseas revenues.

BoxOffice Mojo reports that John Carter has grossed $254.5 million, a $4.5 million over its budget—currently not technically a profit, considering its advertising budget, but it’s far better than the epic loss that many had feared.

Unsurprisingly, most of this coin has come from overseas. While John Carter earned over $66 million here in the United States, international markets have pulled in over $188 million. Film Buff Online writes that John Carter was #1 in box office receipts for two weeks in a row in China. This profit will keep increasing, as John Carter has yet to be released in Japan, where it will surely put the movie several million dollars in the black.

While it’s good that the film didn’t wind up costing Disney their collective shirts, they’re likely never to escape the bad press it garnered for them. Make no mistake, a $66 million gross in the United States is an embarrassment. The media reviews seemed to get caught up in a revolving narrative of how poor the film was, perhaps overplaying the criticism and driving some theater patrons away. Ultimately, the reason it failed lies squarely at the feet of Disney and the film’s creative staff.

It was a poorly marketed movie. Just about all of my friends who saw it had no idea going in that it was a science fiction film*. Or that it was based on a book that was foundational for sci-fi as we know it. More than that, it just wasn’t that special of a film. The narrative was disjointed, the acting was wooden. It had some pretty visuals going for it, but that was easily the highlight of a very forgettable movie.

*Dropping the ‘Mars’ part of ‘John Carter of Mars.’ Not the most savvy marketing you’ve ever done, Disney.

If you’re looking for a good book-to-film adaptation, you might want to give this a shot instead.

Forbes via Aaron Allston

Check Out Nanci’s ‘Survivor’s Quest’ Retro Review at EUCantina

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Our own Nanci has a new review over her other gig at EUCantina. This time around, she takes a look back at Timothy Zahn’s Survivor’s Quest.

As a self-contained story, Survivor’s Quest doesn’t add much to the main storyline. As a standalone novel, it could easily be passed over if one is trying to catch up with the main storyline.

However, skipping the book entirely would be a grave disservice.

SQ is a must-read for fans of the Chiss, the Empire of the Hand, the Fels, and the 501st Legion. In fact, SQ is the novel that first canonized the 501st, named for the fan costuming organization. We meet two new prominent Chiss, Formbi and Drask, and learn more about Chiss culture and hierarchy. This novel first identified the Empire of the Hand, the government established by Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Unknown Regions.

Check out the rest of Nanci’s review at EUCantina.

‘Star Wars Insider’ Short Story Updates

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Who wants updates? You guys do! Or at least some of you do. There are lots of you. With many different tastes. I’m clearly stalling at this point so let’s just get into it. Star Wars Books released a list of upcoming shorts you can look forward to in future issues of Star Wars Insider.

-Issue #132 (on sale now) features Jason Fry’s short story “The Guns of Kelrodo-Ai” and stars the “Rebel Destroyer” Shea Hublin (with some beautiful art by John VanFleet!).

-Issue #133 will include the tale of Parella the Hutt, hunter extraordinaire, from Star Wars: Scourge author Jeff Grubb.

-Issue #134 is your first taste of post Fate of the Jedi action as author Christie Golden brings you a story starring Jaina and Jag.

-Issue #135 sees Karen Miller return to the SWEU with an exciting story starring Myri Antilles.

I’m definitely looking forward to issue #135. Myri Antilles as the lead of her own short? Yes, please.

If there’s a short you’d like to see, leave a comment on the announcement post.

Trope Tuesday: Red Shirt

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It’s another edition of Trope Tuesday, the segment where we highlight a literary theme or device that makes our favorite fictional entertainment work. On the docket this week is an old standard: Red Shirts. Hit it, TV Tropes!

 The color of shirt worn by the nameless security personnel on the original Star Trek series. Their only job was to get eaten, shot, stabbed, disrupted, sped up and killed, frozen, desalinated, or turned into a cuboctahedron and crushed. Their death would give William Shatner and DeForest Kelley a corpse to emote over, and Leonard Nimoy a corpse to, well, not emote over.

A Red Shirt is the Good Counterpart of Evil Minions and Mooks — set filler for our heroes’ side. Their purpose is almost exclusively to give the writers someone to kill who isn’t a main character, although they can also serve as a Spear Carrier. They are used to show how the monster works, and demonstrate that it is indeed a deadly menace, without having to lose anyone important. Expect someone to say “He’s dead, Jim“, lament this “valued crew member’s senseless death“, and then promptly forget him.

As you can tell, the trope namer is That Other Star Franchise. Isn’t that right, Ensign Ricky?

This trope tends to be used a great deal in the Star Wars Expanded Universe to prove that the heroes are in grave mortal peril (even though the only way the Big Three will ever die is if The Maker allows it to happen). Michael Stackpole’s X-Wing novels loved this trope. See someone new on the roster that wasn’t there in the previous book? Chances are fair that character is going to suffer a Red Shirt Death.

Of course, Star Wars has also subverted the Red Shirt once or twice …

via Kevin Bolk

Paul R. Urquhart Talks ‘Essential Guide to Warfare’

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Were the endnotes from Jason Fry not enough for you? Suvudu has a lengthy piece from Essential Guide to Warfare co-author Paul R. Urquhart discussing all sorts of fun little details that went into crafting the book.

But what do you do when you’re writing a book that needs to describe the technicalities of how an Ewok defeats a Stormtrooper? You have to come up with straight-faced explanations that don’t seem completely crazy or compromise the inherent fun and lightness of the saga.

That’s the situation I found myself in when I was asked to co-write Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare – a new guide to the warriors and weaponry of the Star Wars saga. Of course, I jumped at the chance, and thus, I became a sort of kilted Boba Fett sidekick to lead author Jason Fry’s baseball-bat-wielding Darth Vader.

And then I realized just what I’d gotten myself into.

How do you describe the technicalities of how an Ewok defeats a Stormtrooper?

The authors clearly had fun putting this book together and you do have to admire how they straddled the line between taking things too seriously and preserving the often amusing absurdities of the epic space opera. Occasionally the Expanded Universe feels like its too caught up in making itself edgy and dark. Essential Guide to Warfare is a lovely change-of-pace.

For more, head on over and read Paul Urquhart’s first Suvudu post.

Facebook Chat with ‘Scourge’ Author Jeff Grubb This Week

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Another week, another Facebook chat with an Expanded Universe novel. This time, it’s Jeff Grubb to talk about his latest release: Scourge. 

We’re very pleased to announce that we will be hosting a chat with STAR WARS: SCOURGE author Jeff Grubb on our page this Thursday, April 19, at 4:00 EST. SCOURGE (on sale next Tuesday) is Jeff’s first STAR WARS novel and he’ll be answering all your questions about Hutts, Jedi, the galactic underworld, and what it’s like writing a galaxy far, far away for the first time. Please stop by and welcome Jeff to SWBooks

The chat will take place this Thursday on Star Wars Books’ official Facebook page. Once again, remember that this isn’t the place to ask about post-Fate of the Jedi plans or when Karen Traviss will come back to the EU (she won’t).

Via Star Wars Books

Revised ‘Star Wars: Ultimate Visual Guide’ Coming Soon

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DK Publishing announced today that Ryder Windham’s Ultimate Visual Guide will be updated and expanded.

Among the new additions to the book is a foreword by Ashley Eckstein, voice of The Clone Wars’ Ahsoka Tano and the mind behind Her Universe.

For more information, visit the official Ultimate Visual Guide page.

Third Batch of ‘Essential Guide to Warfare’ Endnotes Hits

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Over the last week, EG to Warfare author Jason Fry has been releasing notes from the book’s development. The trend continues this week as he posts a third batch of end notes.

Whenever an author is working on a comprehensive guide that has to seamlessly fuse together numerous eras and writings from other countless authors and publishers, things tend to go sideways as far as canon continuity goes. One area where the canon often contradicted itself was the tricky subject of just what constitutes a capitol ship in the Galaxy Far, Far Away.

All the systems agreed that capital ships began with corvettes (100m-200m), after which came frigates (200m-400m) and then cruisers. Above cruiser, things were fluid in terms of which names to use and where to divide the classes.

My first stab at the Anaxes War College System divided cruisers into three subclasses:light (400m-600m), medium (600m-900m) and heavy (900m-1,600m), followed by battlecruisers and dreadnoughts (4,000m and longer). In addition, I proposed a shorthand system of three generic classes – gunships, cruisers and battleships – that I imagined would be used by officers in the heat of battle. The generic classifcations were good cover for a host of contradictions from the movies and books (lots of things are called “battleships” in lots of sources), made the all-over-the-map use of “cruiser” slightly more sensible, and meant I could stop writing things like “big capital ships” in Warfare.

As a self-professed fleet junkie, I was thrilled to see Fry put together such a clear and concise classification system. Sure, this might trump some obscure canon in already-written books, but authors finally have a reference to go to moving forward.

For more tidbits from the third batch of notes, hop on over to Jason Fry’s Tumblr.

Two More Guests Confirmed for Star Wars Weekends

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Last week the initial guest list for Disney’s Star Wars Weekends hit. As of last Friday, you can add two more names to the lineup.

Star Wars Weekends takes place from May 18th to June 10th at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida. As someone living on the other side of the country, let me just tell those of you in closer proximity that I’m insanely jealous of you all.