Club Jade

A couple months ago, the LIFE photo archive went up in Google, fully searchable. Plenty has been done with them since then, but it didn’t occur to me to look for Star Wars until today. There isn’t a ton there – the bulk of images that come up are from The Phantom Menace premiere – but there are a few things of interest, like Time covers, some vintage toy pics and this shot of Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness and Mark Hamill at a party celebrating the tenth anniversary of A New Hope. You get about the same amount of shots searching for just George Lucas, and even more for Harrison Ford, but clearly Sir Alec wins. (Wait! Was it really a party for ANH? Now I doubt.) But perhaps most amusingly: Jar-Jar and Madeline Albright? Or Peter Cushing in Hamlet?

Off the fannish track, two of the more interesting uses I’ve seen around the web have been Jezebel’s The Way We Were features and Typophile’s book cover meme.

There’s a lot of io9 in this one… I probably ought to stop saving them up. Anyway, one of their readers spotted some Star Wars folks on Google Street View. Which isn’t that much of a surprise given that they’re hanging out on Hollywood Blvd., but whatever.

• TV The season premiere of The Simpsons features a cameo from sci-fi’s most famous bounty hunter.

• Lists: Skywalkers (and a Splinter of the Mind’s Eye reference) in io9′s most surprising family ties, while Biggs gets one of the twelve coolest deaths. Um, okay. And over at IGN, a countdown of the worst Star Wars characters, including little Ani, Jar Jar, and some “Punk-Ass Jedi Knights.” Just the high level of discourse we can always expect from IGN.
• Something different: This is technically yet another list, but too good for the crowd: Ten reasons why the designs of Star Wars are awesome. Also, you might actually learn something about design.

Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls (she has a solo album coming out in September! Whoo!) sings a song written by Neil Gaiman.

At least according to Lycos: “Natalie Portman” is their #1 most searched-for Star Wars term, followed up by Oola, Endor, Harrison Ford, and Yoda. Interesting, but I wonder what Google or Yahoo’s search stats would be…

Is this the Lars Homestead, really? A likely story!

Star Wars appears to be the 100-pound gorilla of movie-related searches, according to Google Zeitgeist. (via starwars)