Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
Rancho Obi Wan publicist and all around awesome person Consetta Parker announced another guest for Star Wars Weekends, Clone Wars voice actor Cat Taber.
Hurray! @cattaber will be attending #Disney #StarWars Weekends June 1-3!
— Consetta Parker (@parkerpublicist) May 8, 2012
If you’re in the Orlando area that weekend, you can catch Taber and other guests at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Beloved children’s author Maurice Sendak passed away today at 83.
Known for breaking children’s books norms by incorporating somewhat dark illustrations and tone into his works, Sendak was considered by many to be the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century. Many of us are familiar with perhaps his most famous work, Where the Wild Things Are.
I loved this book growing up, but I admit this isn’t my fondest memory of Sendak’s work. For me, it was December every year when my family would go to Benaroya Hall to watch the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s world-class production of The Nutcracker. It was Sendak’s costumes and sets that transformed the classic production into an extraordinarily visceral event.
Bad news for Electronic Arts, Bioware, and Lucasarts. Their massively-online Star Wars IP is having a very hard time retaining subscribers as 400,000 have left the virtual universe according to an EA earnings statement.
To put this into perspective, subscriber totals peaked around 1.7 million and have crashed down to 1.3 million. Nearly 25% of subscribers have bolted since the game’s launch. Those are numbers that no one involved with the development of the game ever wanted to see, especially this early in the game’s life.
You have to wonder, would a proper Knights of the Old Republic III have been a better choice in the long run?
And continuing our Avengers post-mortem, The Wall Street Journal dug up a pretty interesting little tidbit today in a piece examining why Marvel’s newest film is pretty much printing money.
3) Multi-Generational Appeal: Characters like Captain America have been around since the 1940s; Thor, The Hulk, and Iron Man have been around since the 1960s. “The Avengers” felt fresh to kids, and was comfort food to adults. Half the attendees were over twenty five years old. 40 percent of the audience was female, so the film didn’t just appeal to boys.
I should say so. As I was sitting in the theater on Thursday night waiting for the movie, I couldn’t help but notice just how evenly split the gender ratio was. Good on you, Marvel. You’ve got yourselves a franchise we all can enjoy.
I think we all expected Marvel’s The Avengers to do pretty well on its opening weekend. I don’t think we expected it to do quite this well.
Hulk, smash.
That’s what Captain America tells the Incredible Hulk to do in “The Avengers,” and that’s what the Marvel Comics superhero mash-up did at the box office, smashing the domestic revenue record with a $200.3 million debut.
It’s by far the biggest opening ever, shooting past the previous record of $169.2 million for the debut of last year’s “Harry Potter” finale.
If these numbers hold, it would be the first time in cinema history a film has opened north of $200 million domestically. That’s not even factoring what it made in overseas gross. It’s two-week run beyond the US brings the film to a staggering $641.8 million worldwide.
Kneel before Joss, The Avengers is a winner.
USA Today with the news that Dark Horse heavy hitter John Jackson Miller will be bringing the Lost Tribe onto the pages of a five-issue comic series.
Writer John Jackson Miller is just one of many guys who digs that galaxy far, far away, and he’s going way, way back in it for his new five-issue Dark Horse Comics series Star Wars: The Lost Tribe of the Sith, launching Aug. 8.
The comic removes three aspects that are some of the most essential of the Star Wars films — technology, starships and Jedi knights — and focuses on the Tribe, an ancient group of Sith believers stranded on a remote planet for 5,000 years. (The Sith, by the way, tap into the dark side of the Force.)
The Lost Tribe of the Sith project began three years ago with the Fate of the Jedi novel series, which found this group escaping their prison in the time of Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker and threatening the galaxy.
For more, head over to USA Today.
May the Fourth be with you indeed.
The official site has gotten their hands on a whole boatload of Expanded Universe shininess including a nifty Essential Guide to Warfare art timelapse video, an essay from the Fate of the Jedi authors, and a cover and preview from the new Darth Maul: Death Sentence comic from Dark Horse.
Most importantly, however, is the entire second chapter from one of the year’s most anticipated novels: Timothy Zahn’s Scoundrels.
For more, head on over to the official site.
Brace yourselves, the news drought appears to be ending today.
The official Celebration VI website has confirmed that Princess Leia herself will be in attendance this year. Also in the fold are two incarnations of Boba Fett, Jeremy Bulloch and Daniel Logan.
Expect more news to drop, as today is the Somewhat Randomly Selected Day of Star Wars Celebration That Has Been Highly Influenced by a Pretty Awful Pun.
A few weeks back, Lucasfilm eighty-sixed plans to build a brand new movie studio in Lucas Valley in San Rafael, California. Citing too much pushback from estate homeowners in the region, Lucasfilm abruptly pulled up stakes and shifted their efforts towards finding a new home elsewhere in the state.
The victory for homeowners may ultimately prove to be tragically short-sighted, reports the North Bay Business Journal.
Several professional firms had been contracted to work on Lucas’s Grady Ranch project during its development, providing services such as environmental consulting and architectural planning. Including the indirect economic activity for restaurants and other local businesses, the two-year construction phase was expected to add nearly $134 million per year into the local and regional economy, according to an impact study released last month by the Marin Economic Forum.
That phase was also expected to generate 690 new jobs in Marin County during construction, and nearly $5 million in combined annual state and local tax revenue, according to the study.
Yet with the announcement on April 10 that George Lucas and his real estate company, Skywalker Properties, would no longer proceed with the project, the possibility of direct and indirect economic stimulus for the region’s economy has evaporated.
In efforts to keep a movie studio out of their estate communities, the residents of Lucas Valley may have cost the region countless potential jobs and a staggering influx of hard cash. According to the article, for every 100 employees Lucasfilm brought in, Marin County businesses could have generated as much as $82 million in revenue and $3.8 million in combined state and local taxes.
Watch for that one slowly growing and then gradually fading light in the box.