You’re Far Too Trusting: Marvel Reclaiming Star Wars Comics License From Dark Horse In 2015

Remember a little more than a year ago, when The Walt Disney Company bought the license to Star Wars from George Lucas? Who had owned the rights since its creation as a concept in 1974 through 2012, and had spent years made sure that the people creating stories in that universe were of the finest possible calibre? You know, except when he forgot to vet that rotten hack who wrote and directed Episodes 1 through 3, which nearly steered the entire franchise into a ditch? Yeah, Lucas should’ve eviscerated that rotten bastard… but I digress.

Anyway. At the time, there was a lot of speculation that Disney would take the Star Wars comic book publishing license away from Dark Horse Comics (who has held the license since the very early 1990s, when they published Dark Empire and when the only people who gave a shit about Star Wars were unfuckable members of Generation X – Hi, Kevin Smith and me in college!) and return it to Marvel Comics, who had the original license back in 1977 and held it until the late 1980s, when it was no longer cool or needed to save the company when it was in danger of going down the shitter in 1976.

However, that was all speculation, and year-old speculation at that. And it would be laughable to revisit that speculation if it hadn’t turned out to be completely and utterly true: Marvel will be the sole comic book publisher of Star Wars as of 2015.

Matters, Nothing Really, To Me – Star Wars/Bohemian Rhapsody Mash Up

The opening shot of this Star Wars and Bohemian Rhapsody mash up reads, “A long time ago in a karaoke bar far, far away…” and that is about right. Bohemian Rhapsody: Star Wars Edition is a labor of love from the Arizona geek community. It is exactly what you think might happen if a bunch of cosplayers got a little too drunk at the San Diego Hyatt bar after the SDCC Saturday night Masquerade and got busy with a camera and Pro Tools. And we are all the better for it. Ok, Sexy Boba Fett at 1:29 and Sexy Vader at 1:45 are kind of disturbing, but that’s why I’m never far from a bottle of whisky and a shot glass. But, there’s more to enjoy here than to cringe over and it’s always great to see what kind of cool projects a fandom can produce. Enjoy!

According to the fine folks over at io9:

The Students and Faculty of the Digital Video Program at University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona, produced this video with the help of their cosplayer performers. Stephen Panagiotis, Jamall Richards, and Paul DeNigris wrote the new lyrics, and Adam Newton provided the vocals. Hit the closed caption button to follow along with the lyrics.

Ok – laptop, closed captioned lyrics, bottle of whisky. I have my plan for the evening. I hope Rob understands…

Brain Bleach – Santa The Hutt

I’m just going to leave this here:

Yeah.

So, anyway, that not enough Star Wars Christmas cheer for you? There’s more, after the jump.

Fishing In Cold Waters: Possible Open Auditions For Star Wars: Episode VII

Things are a little busy here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office today, because, well, we didn’t understand the full range of capabilities inherent in a hot water heater. You see, we thought that all a hot water heater did was to, well, heat water to the state colloquially known as “hot.” We had no idea that they could also blow out an element in a way that resembles a power surge that resets all your home theater components and causes a burning wire insulation smell that makes you think your entire home office is mere minutes from burning to the ground! And even better: it turns out that hot water heaters have good enough programming to do this late on a Saturday night after you’ve had ten beers and are half convinced that the real reason you’re smelling burning insulation is because you’re having a massive stroke!

Anyway, a nice man is ripping out our old hot water heater in favor of one less multi-talented, meaning I only have a few minutes before I have to run back down to the basement and ask him if our sinks should be screaming in this fashion. This is not an activity that the rich and famous have to deal with, so perhaps I will take the opportunity to throw my hat into the ring and audition for Star Wars: Episode VII.

Two Legends Talk About None Of The Things You Want Them To Talk About: Gaiman Interviews Abrams

There isn’t a lot of hard news in this interview video – by which I mean there isn’t any hard news in it – but it caught our attention because of the people involved.

J. J. Abrams has been doing the press circuit, not for Star Wars, but for a book called S, which Abrams conceived of and which was written by Doug Dorst (The author of something called Alive in Necropolis, which is, as you’d expect based on the title, a zombie story) and is comprised of not just the book, but “handwritten” notes and letters detailing a fiction investigation about the book and its author. And promotion for that book brought Abrams and Dorst to England and the BBC… where they were interviewed by an obscure journalist whose reporting is best known in a book called Don’t Panic, a long out-of-print companion book to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide series published in 1988.

That journalist? Some dude named Neil Gaiman. If that is his real name.

This Will Be A Day Long Remembered: Star Wars Episode VII Gets A Release Date

Well kids, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that we finally have a hard and fast release date for Star Wars: Episode VII. The bad news is that it is about six months later than everybody originally anticipated, meaning that the guy who is inevitably already first in line at Grauman’s Chinese Theater will, by release time, only smell like an authentic Star Wars character if you take on faith that Boba Fett is really 150 pounds of rotting potted meat stuffed into a cardboard facsimile of Mandalorian armor.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Disney has announced, via StarWars.com, that they will be releasing the J. J. Abrams-directed, Abrams and Lawrence Kasden-scripted (You know, Lawrence Kasden. The guy who did the final draft of The Empire Strikes Back? The writer most fondly known these days as “Not George Lucas”?) new movie on December 18th, 2015.

Which means that there is gonna be one hell of a case of Skywalking Pneumonia going around starting Wednesdayish, December 16th 2015.

Video – Harrison Ford And Benedict Cumberbatch On Star Wars Sequel Casting

Normally, I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch BBCA’s The Graham Norton Show. However, the season premiere is going to include an interview with Harrison Ford and Benedict Cumberbatch, in which their potential involvement with the Star Wars sequels is going to be discussed. Harrison Ford is…noncommittal. Hillariously noncommittal.

The Graham Norton Show season premiere will air on BBCA on October 19. Star Wars Episode VII will drop some time in 2015, precisely, as Boston comedian Rich Gustus would say, “the second Saturday after I get my shit together.”

Making Star Wars For Dummies

Everyone knows that J. J. Abrams is working on Star Wars: Episode VII, and most people consider this to be good news. This is partially because J. J. Abrams is not George Lucas, or at least we can’t conclusively prove that they are the same person, despite some significant evidence based on the Star Wars-ification of Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness.

However, there is a certain amount of trepidation over the idea of a new Star Wars by Abrams, by which I mean I have some trepidation. As much fun as I had with Abrams’s Star Trek movies, they are not exactly what you’d call Star Wars material. Sure, they’ve got the action, but the bridge of the Enterprise looks like an Apple Store, for Christ’s sake. And the closest thing we have to a selfless Jedi Knight is Mr. Scott’s little mutant / alien buddy, and the “we’re boning” subtext of that relationship means that I will require sedation and talking therapy if someone refers to it and “The Force” in the same sentence.

However, a dude named Prescott Harvey, in conjunction with agency Sincerely, Truman, has put together an open letter to Abrams in an animated video, that hits four points that any Star Wars fan will agree wholeheartedly with. But allow me to add my own fifth: let’s keep the human / alien homoerotic subtext out of the Han / Chewie relationship, shall we?

Anyway, you can check the video after the jump.

Accuracy By Volume: A New Star Wars Movie Every Year, or: 48 Hours In Space

We all know that Star Wars Episode VII (a film as yet to be subtitled, but allow me to pitch one of our old podcast titles: The Fist of Justice) will be coming out in 2015 – a summer that will be so geek supersaturated, between Star Wars, Batman Vs. Superman and Ant Man that I should be allowed to retroactively wedgie the jocks who knocked the The Dark Knight Returns trade paperback out of my hands back in high school.

We also all know that Disney, the new owners of the Star Wars property, not only intends to make more big trilogies, but that they intend to make Star Wars movies that do not fall within the scope of another epic trilogy. But exactly what kind of ancillary movies they intend to make hasn’t really been totally clear. Would they be cartoons for kids? Political dramas? Porn?

Well, according to Disney’s Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo, who spoke about Star Wars at an investor’s conference yesterday (Rumors that the second order of business was to ratify Disney’s new corporate mission statement of “Kneel before Zod!” remain unconfirmed), said that those non-trilogy flicks will be prequel stories. Which has historically been a good decision when it comes to Star Wars movies.

And unconfirmed rumor is, that the first prequel will be Han Solo’s origin story.

Oh, shit.

Red-Headed Stepchild: The Star Wars #1 Review

Reading Dark Horse Comics’ The Star Wars, the adaptation of George Lucas’s first draft of the Star Wars screenplay from back in 1974, is, if nothing else, a strange experience.

And it is strange on a couple of levels; first, there’s the simple cognitive dissonance that occurs seeing an old dude with a white beard named Luke Skywalker, a dude with a greasy Guy Gardner haircut named Darth Vader, and small two-man fighter ships called Star Destroyers. Second, it is strange because this comic is coming out about 18 years into the Internet age, and any movie fan worth a damn has already long ago downloaded one of the early drafts of the Star Wars script from Drew’s Script-O-Rama (at one time or another, the first four drafts were out there for the taking), and already knows at least some of what’s coming in this comic.

And third, having glanced at those early drafts, we know that what is coming really isn’t all that great, at least compared to the real Star Wars. After all, this is a story originally written by George Lucas, who based on the prequels, clearly caught lightning in a bottle with that final revision of the shooting draft for Star Wars, and if this was a just universe, he then would have immediately had the language center of his brain scraped away in a lobotomy-like procedure.

And you will see a lot of elements of the prequels in this comic book, with some of Lucas’s worst instincts in Star Wars storytelling on display… including a little blond moppet shouting, “Yippee!”

But on the positive side, unlike in the prequels, you will also see that little blond moppet die like a pig in a chute.