Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi Contribute to This PageRett BirthdayJosiahs BirthdayStarwars BirthdayBb8 BdayBooger BirthdayDarth Vader Birthday PartyStar Wars Birthday Party Ideas For BoysStormtrooper PartyJohnny BirthdayForwardStar Wars Free Printables including invitations, a welcome sign, cupcake toppers, themed food cards and thank you cards! Well, I survived another year at the San Diego Comic Con. It was either my 25th or 26th year (I’m still not sure if I started in 1990 or 91′). 😀 **** Slight rant coming on ***** Read through till the bottom though, I promise, its worth it 😉 I feel a lot like this model when I go to Comic Con I realize I’m very lucky to have gone for the past quarter century, of course its only been in about the last 10-15 years where it went from being a fun Con to becoming the Mecca of all Pop Culture madness that it is today. I also realize that having the job that I do allows me to go to many conventions every year, its literally part of my job to be at them. Ho
wever, this year I just wasn’t feeling the Comic Con love. I have to admit, I have a love/hate relationship with Comic Con. I love seeing all the cool things, great cosplay, and everything else that makes Comic Con worth visiting, but ever since Hollywood took over its just not as fun as it used to be. Maybe if I were younger (and I’m not that old), or maybe if I didn’t remember a time when you could easily walk up to the door a purchase your ticket that same day, a time when the legendary Hall H (where all the biggest panels are held) wasn’t near impossible to get into, and a time when there weren’t as many celebrities, but those that were here it was possible to actually meet without sleeping over night to get their signature. I don’t go to Comic Con like regular fans go to Comic Con, I mainly go to network and see friends that fly in to work Comic Con. It may seem like 5 days of fun, but believe me, its work. And by the end, when you feel like you’ve been run over by a Mach truck, that’s when you know you’ve survived Comic Con yet another year. I
think part of the problem too is that now that I go to a lot of LEGO Conventions, I find that they are just way more fun. Sure they are smaller, but they are less hectic. No resellers, not as much drama. And we have better after parties too. ***** Okay rant over ***** So, back to the fun things about Comic Con. This year I focused mainly on LEGO naturally. I don’t go to many panels any more, mostly I just go to the LEGO ones and ones that my friends are on. And there was a heck of a lot of LEGO this year! Prominently displayed right across the street from the convention center was the LEGO Dimensions Display They took over the top floor of the Hard Rock Café and covered the entire outside. I have to admit, until I finally got to play the game I’d been on the fence about it. Sure it looked cool, but I wanted to sample the gameplay. I watched the people ahead of me play the Scooby Doo level and then I played the Doctor Who level (both of which are available as expansion packs) I also got to see all the expansion packs — some will be available in late September, some in November and some in January
The game has the same feel as traditional LEGO video games but because of the reader platform, it also has a lot of new features that make it unique and much more than a normal LEGO game. Of course you need to buy all the expansion packs to play all the levels and characters, but who are we kidding, its LEGO and its a video game. Considering that I have all the other games, in both the PlayStation and Gameboy versions going back to the original LEGO Batman and Star Wars I’ll be getting it, and most likely getting it all. 😆 There are a lot more LEGO Dimensions pics on my SDCC 2015 Flickr Album. Another of the cool models was the life size Mstery Machine Mosaic with all of the Scooby Doo gang They also were selling all the new sets at the LEGO booth, I took pics but didn’t pick any up There were life size LEGO raptors at Petco Park And Chris Pratt on his motorbike at the LEGO booth Someone even cosplayed as Chris The LEGO booth unveiled the new Batmobile for Superman vs. Batman
Created by my friend set designer Marcos Bessa I went to Marcos’ panel There’s a ton of pics from that panel on the Flickr album too, but here’s just a few There was also a life size Stormtrooper from Star Wars 7 Not the greatest pic, but I saw the new Ninjago Tower set, it really is awesome! And LEGO also has a sneak preview of the new Big Bang Theory Set There’s way more, check the SDCC 2015 Flickr Album for the other pics I took. So here’s the extra surprise — A San Diego Comic Con giveaway! I know I just did one last month, but hey, I’m allowed to do them when I feel like 😉 Not only is there the new LEGO Ideas Big Bang theory, I’ve also managed to get a LEGO Marvel Avengers poster and the exclusive LEGO Justice League comic. There will be three ways to enter — 2)Like my Model Building Secrets Facebook page and then Like, Share, and Comment on my link about this post 3)Follow me on Twitter @MariannAsanuma and reply to my tweet about this post with the #SDCCLEGOGiveaway
There will be one winner. Yes, you can enter once all three ways. I will leave the giveaway open till midnight July 22nd (pacific standard time). This will be international, so as long as I can mail this to you, I will. And if you are willing to wait, I can get the comic signed by the illustrator Paul Lee (it helps that he’s my friend 😉 ) Thanks to all my fans and Good luck!Rest assured, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits its target like the filmmakers were Luke Skywalker bullseyeing womp rats in his T-16 back home on Tatooine.That's not just a too-clever comparison, either. The farm boy-turned-Jedi's memorable boast from Star Wars: A New Hope was Luke claiming he could shoot a two-metre-wide thermal exhaust port on the Death Star that, if hit precisely, would blow the whole thing up.Rogue One is the story of why the moon-sized, planet-killing super weapon had that singular flaw and how the Rebel Alliance secured the top-secret Death Star blueprints that R2D2 would later deliver to Obi-Wan to kick off the original film.
Many have preemptively called this new Stars Wars film superfluous. Admittedly, this darker-hued, smaller-scale tale of bravery during wartime is arguably not a necessary addition to the canon for casual fans who don't care about filling in plot points.But the movie is far more than its functional linkage between the two completed trilogies.For one, it's the first Star Wars movie to be truly led by a woman -- Daisy Ridley's Rey was a breakout character in The Force Awakens, but Felicity Jones's Jyn Erso is the undeniable star of Rogue One.It also has a cast diverse enough to inspire an boycott by the alt-right, a U.S.-based white nationalist movement.Trump supporters launched a #DumpStarWars campaign after the election in response to screenwriters Chris Weitz and Gary Whitta, who respectively tweeted "Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist (human) organization" and "Opposed by a multi-cultural group led by brave women."The tweets were deleted, but Weitz's subsequent twitpic of the Rebel symbol with a safety pin through it was left up:Star Wars against hate.
/Dtf5uqpxba— Chris Weitz (@chrisweitz) November 11, 2016.Of course, neo-Nazi sites like Daily Stormer had been complaining since August about the lack of white male characters, which apparently counts as "white genocide." (They tried to do the same to The Force Awakens for having female and black leads, and that worked out well for them.) Those of you who are sane, however, can again rest assured that there is zero tokenism to the multicultural cast's instantly iconic portrayals -- Mexican actor Diego Luna's Rebel captain, Cassian Andorby; African-American icon Forest Whitaker's radicalized Rebel leader, Saw Gerrera; British Muslim actor Riz Ahmed's Imperial defector, Bodhi Rook; and Chinese stars Jiang Wen playing bad-ass insurgent Baze Malbus and Donnie Yen as blind warrior monk Chirrut Îmwe. Yen, in particular, is destined to become a fan favourite, as is new droid K-2SO, a comic relief character voiced by a Firefly pilot Alan Tudyk that is to C-3PO what BB-8 was to R2-D2. This Jyn-led team is as well-cast as Guardians of the Galaxy, another film that some argued pre-release was an unnecessary part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a massive risk.
Rogue One is the first of what Disney is dubbing their "Star Wars Anthology" movies, morphing the film franchise from a narratively straightforward, nine-part story into a Marvel-style shared universe. Now, George Lucas always structured his concept as three movie trilogies. That's why the first film was "Episode IV," and back when I was a kid we always imagined what the other movies might one day contain thanks to onscreen references to unseen "historical" events like the Clone Wars. But that was the movies, and part of their power was the notion that even though we were following the Skywalker family, other stories were unspooling elsewhere. Indeed, decades of licensed comic books, novels, cartoons and video games long ago turned this galaxy far, far away into a sprawling shared universe.(Disney's cinematic resurrection kicked much of this "Expanded Universe" content out of official canon, albeit to reboot a new slate of "interconnected storytelling [that] will allow fans to explore this galaxy in deeper ways than ever before.")
This sort of storytelling may seem like a cash grab to the uninitiated, but not to fans of Marvel and DC comic books, which have always been similar to jazz in that different writers and artists come in and riff off core themes before stepping aside so someone else can solo. The same approach applies to tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, video games like Halo, fantasy books like Dragonlance or even J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth which contained more tales than just The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.All of these art forms focus on world-building so that any number of stories can take place within a shared setting. In fact, one could argue that this tradition goes all the way back to the Bible which pulled together an incredible amount of loosely connected stories spanning millennia. In the introduction to the 1996 re-release of the first Star Wars novel, 1978's Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which was set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas himself wrote:
"After Star Wars was released, it became apparent that my story -- however many films it took to tell -- was only one of thousands that could be told about the characters who inhabit its galaxy. But these were not stories that I was destined to tell. Instead, they would spring from the imagination of other writers, inspired by the glimpse of a galaxy that Star Wars provided. Today, it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga."The creative success of Rogue One simply proves that this applies as much to movies as to the other media that Lucas' Star Wars saga has expanded into. Director Gareth Edwards is able to play with our nostalgia through self-referential visual cues, meta dialogue, Michael Giacchino's John Williams-nodding score and, of course, the pre-established story skeleton. But being relatively self-contained from the main series provides an unexpected freedom that comes from telling a smaller side story, even if we already know how this particular tale fits into the larger narrative puzzle.