Holy Crap on a Cracker! They’re Making a New Star Wars Film

Truly, I never thought I could say those words.  Well until, I can’t believe I am saying this, Disney saved Lucas Arts.

George Lucas has been accused of greed and milking a franchise for 30 years by releaseing, editing, re-releasing, adding 3D and re-boxing Beta, VHS, Laserdiscs, DVDs, and BluRays all to force fanboys into ponying up another $100.00 bucks to re-watch the same film with a new tidbit.  Today Lucas unselfishly stated in a statement, “It’s now time for me to pass ‘Star Wars’ on to a new generation of filmmakers.”  Don’t rush to lift him on a pedestal as a philanthropist, he took a minor payday of 4 billion dollars for his part in the deal.

Disney announced it’s plans to release Episode 7 in 2015, followed by 8 and 9 in the future with plans to continue releasing movies every two or three years for generations to come.  The idea that my child and maybe his children will be able to enjoy a continued saga is a great thing, and before you think it can’t be done, just look what has happened with the James Bond franchise which is set to release it’s 24th film and already in development for it’s 25th chronicle of 007.

Will Disney work on the years following Return of the Jedi starting with Truce at Bakura?  I doubt that, it would be odd picking up days following RotJ with new actors.  Maybe the Thrawn Trilogy or the Jedi Academy?  Maybe they will jump a hundred years in the future for the ancestors of Skywalker as seen in tales like Legacy.  Could they return to the past and make a Knights of the Old Republic franchise?  Who knows.

The biggest failure of the prequels (if you can call it a failure) is the loss of any suspense.  As a child you were devastated and shocked when Vader first revealed his identity to Luke on Bespin, so watching Anakin grow up in the prequels only had one direction to go and you knew who lived and died for the most part based on a cannon history that was determined during the first three films.  Going away from already expressed cannon would make for the best films, the biggest flop in our film industry has been the constant remakes, no matter how well you redo a franchise you already know how a story will end, and the biggest allure of a story is its mystery.  We want to be amazed again.

 

Darth Vader and the Ghost Prison

These are the comics that make Star Wars such a valuable property, the SWU is so deep and diverse that in a hundred years if people still care they can still be writing stories within the scope of Episode 1 through the New Republic and if the writers stay original so will the stories and ever-growing character pool.

Focusing mainly on characters we have never even heard of before Dark Horse may have release the best Star Wars comic in nearly a decade since the end of Star Wars Tales.

Amid the timeline of the first Death Star’s construction a terrorist student uprising at the Imperial Academy takes control of Coruscant with the intention of luring General Tarkin to the facility and destroy the Empire’s prize weapon before it is complete.

Thinking that Vader and the Emperor have died during the initial attack and release of toxic gas throughout the palace the rebels bide their time for the arrival of the seemingly third and final piece to bring down the blossoming Empire.

Lieutenant Tohm, the sole loyal cadet of the class assists the escape of a dying Emperor, Vader and  Moff Trachta who travel to the secretive Jedi Prison previously know only to the High Jedi Council where they care to the aid of their leader and devise a plan to take back their home base before similar thinking worlds rush to the aid of the surprise army.

Deciding to free the prisoners Vader pits them against

The Mars Rover Caught an Interesting Photo Today

Is this proof of intergalactic life, or just coincidental image pixilation

Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi, You’re My Only Hope

By Charles Q. Choi | SPACE.com

The discovery of the first alien planet with two suns — like the “Star Wars” world Tatooine — residing in its parent star’s habitable zone is good news for the search for life beyond Earth, scientists say.

The planet, known as Kepler-47c, is a gas giant and therefore probably not suitable for life as we know it. But its existence hints that smaller, rockier worlds may inhabit other two-star systems’ habitable zones —that just-right range of distances where liquid water can exist.

And that’s important, because there are a lot of binary systems out there, scientists say.

“Roughly half of the stars in the galaxy are in binary systems,” study lead author Jerome Orosz, of San Diego State University, told SPACE.com. “I thought it would only be a matter of time before we found a system like Kepler-47 where a planet is in the habitable zone.” [Gallery: The Tatooine-Like Kepler-47 System]

The Kepler-47 system, whose discovery was announced Tuesday (Aug. 28),