Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
Happy Real Star Wars Day!
Thirty-five years ago today, Star Wars: A New Hope hit theaters and gave birth to the wonderful and occasionally nutty fandom that we all love so dearly. As you can expect, the entirety of the Internet is getting in on the action and celebrating both the 35th anniversary of A New Hope and the 29th anniversary of Return of the Jedi. To keep tabs on what’s going on around the web, keep your eyes on this Club Jade post.
A little more CVI related news today. The creative forces behind Robot Chicken are heading to Celebration VI. Could they be bringing news of their secret Star Wars project?
The twisted masterminds behind Robot Chicken — Seth Green and Matthew Senreich — will be attending Star Wars Celebration VI this August 23-26, 2012, in Orlando, Florida as special guests. Star Wars fans from the very beginning, Seth and Matt have been honored guests of past Celebrations since their hilarious Robot Chicken show moved beyond just the occasionalStar Wars sketch to full-fledged specials showcasing the hilarious side of a galaxy far, far away. Three Robot Chicken: Star Wars specials later, they’re still mining the saga for comedy gold, including working as consultants for the team developing a new animated Star Warsseries at Lucasfilm Animation.
For more, head to the official site.
Tom Taylor just made my month with this tweet.
So what do you get when you take Rob Paulsen, Maurice LaMarche, Tara Strong, Billy West, John DiMaggio, Kevin Conroy, Jess Harnell and then give them a Star Wars script? The most incredible thing ever. Introducing the Star Wars Trilogy radio play performed at Emerald City Comicon 2012.
(And it goes without saying, with this group there’s a NSFW warning)
So you’ve got Batman narrating Star Wars and fans suggesting characters for the voice actors to read lines as. For example, Tara Strong reading Darth Vader as Bubbles, Maurice LaMarche reading Leia as Vincent Price, and a Rob Paulsen reading a stormtrooper as Pinky.
Shut down everything, the Internet has been won.
Are you heading to Celebration VI, the Star Wars convention to end all Star Wars conventions? Do you want some wardrobe to commemorate the event? Well you’re in luck, for $30, you can pre-order the official CVI shirt.
Keep in mind, you must have a ticket to the convention to order. To get yours, head on over to the Celebration VI show store.
Bioware Austin has announced that staff layoffs have occurred as part of a “restructuring” move by the Electronic Arts owned developer.
“BioWare has restructured its studio in Austin today. Of the employees impacted, some will be able to join other projects within EA, others will leave the company. These are very difficult decisions, but it allows us to focus our staff to maintain and grow Star Wars: The Old Republic,” a spokesperson told Game Informer.
“BioWare Austin remains a large and important part of BioWare and EA, working with other studios around the world to continue to deliver a high-quality service and exciting new content for Star Wars: The Old Republic.”
After losing nearly twenty-five percent of its subscription base, this was perhaps inevitable. Totals peaked around 1.7 million but those numbers have crashed to Earth in recent weeks with upwards of 400,000 canceling their subscriptions. It’s a big disappointment for both Bioware and Lucasarts, which had pinned a great deal of hope on the game taking a bite out of the crowded MMO market.
Unfortunately, the end result seemed to be a game that didn’t please nearly enough people. Those hoping for a robust MMO like World of Warcraft were left disappointed by the somewhat shaky gameplay mechanics and those wishing for a storytelling experience on-par with the Knights of the Old Republic franchise didn’t quite get the depth they were promised.
For Bioware, it’s been a year they’ll wish to forget. In addition to the struggles of The Old Republic, their marquee release of the year in Mass Effect 3 was met by fiery scorn by hardcore fans for what they deemed to be an unacceptable ending to a critically acclaimed trilogy.
Case study in this trope.
Welcome back to another edition of Trope Tuesday, our weekly sojourn into the abyss that is TV Tropes. Each week we aim to look into a literary theme, device, or quirk that gives some color to our favorite entertainment. On the docket this time around: Depending on the Writer.
In some stories, a character is very different every time they appear — so different that it’s almost a different character with the same name. This is particularly common with Long Runners and comic books, due to the large number of writers on staff. But there are some characters where even the same writer makes them different every time.
This is not Character Development — nothing happens in the story to justify the personality change. Writer on Board or Creator Breakdown might, though.
Don’t get this confused with characters with some actual depth. Just because you can’t predict a character’s moves 100% of the time doesn’t mean they’re inconsistent. Now, if you can predict a character’s moves 100% of the time only when you know who’s writing, then they’re definitely inconsistent.
Different writers with different ideas and understandings of the work are also the usual culprit of Continuity Drift.
Talk about a trope that is tailor-made for the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Let’s just take a look at the last major series that wrapped up, Fate of the Jedi. In my review of the series as a whole, I hit on something that really hurt it in my mind: the stark differences in how Luke Skywalker was written. On the one hand, you had Aaron Allston who erred towards the Luke you saw in the films. Somewhat optimistic, someone who hadn’t strayed too far from his Tatooine farmboy roots. On the other hand, you had Troy Denning’s Luke Skywalker, who regularly says that family members and sixteen-year-old girls are beyond redemption. Yeah.
Two ends of the personality spectrum for one character. These are the kinds of things that happen when you have so many different authors working with pre-established characters. You might get a Allston-style Luke, who feels very grounded into the source material. You might also get a Luke that veers perhaps too much into Darker and Edgier territory. When it gets really strange is when you get these different Lukes in back-to-back books. Going from Vortex to Conviction was a relief in one sense because the latter felt significantly more like Star Wars than the former, but there’s no denying the jarring shift in tone and themes when jumping between authors in a series like Fate of the Jedi.
We’ve got the first entry for the Replace the Catsuit Contest! Gorram Girl checks in with a lovely piece of fanart.
Now doesn’t this look way more functional than a banthahide catsuit? Love the jacket. Really, really dig the headscarf.
Thanks for submitting this entry! And remember, the new deadline to help costumers out is August 15th. That should give you plenty of time to get something put together for the late summer convention season.
One of the most popular responses, Winter Celchu
There’s no getting around it. It’s been another slow news spell and really, things have been dry since the Internet’s Bad Star Wars-Themed Pun Day. Which is why we decided to crowdsource blog content to you. Again.
This week’s Twitter List asked you to tell us your favorite non-Force sensitive Star Wars Expanded Universe characters because we firmly believe you don’t need a connection to the Force to be a badass. To the jump!
All of those awesome new shirts and items that Ashley Eckstein and Her Universe have been previewing for the last several weeks officially went on sale at the site today. Some of these new products include …
Clockwise: Looking For Love In Alderaan Places tee, Sith racer back tank, Calavera Vader Scoop tee, and the Self-Rescuing Princess children’s tee.
To purchase one of the above or to check out the other new offerings, head on over to Her Universe.
In this week’s batch of endnotes, author Jason Fry talks stormtroopers and women among their ranks.
A Female Stormtrooper Remembers: The femtroopers you see at cons are serious fans and work as hard on their costumes as anyone else does. Check out the work of Sith Vixen: Yes, she looks amazing in femtrooper gear, but she also looks great as Maul or a Kaleesh warrior, costumes that demanded an enormous amount of work.
That said, midriff-baring stormtrooper armor always struck me as a bit unlikely in-universe — I figured the Empire had female troopers, but I was pretty sure they weren’t wearing armor that looked like that. With this in mind, “female stormtroopers” was one of the first things I wrote down when beginning to work on the outline for Warfare.
This batch of notes has a lot of great material about stormtroopers in general. For more, head on over to Jason Fry’s Tumblr.