Club Jade

The blog Tenth Letter of the Alphabet has a great entry tracking the design and development of the Star Wars logo.

With all the movie and TV news coming out, it’s easy to get caught up in the future.  Because the future, as a wise man once said, is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.  But if you’ve got an even passing interest in the past, you should definitely check out Kitbashed.

Writer and designer Michael Heilemann has been on our radar for years, but with Kitbashed he’s delving deep into the origins of Star Wars – not the saga, not the franchise, but the movie.  Heilemann connects Star Wars to everything from famous documentaries to Star Trek to a baffling magazine ad.  He’s also especially good at analyzing George Lucas’ student films and early works.

Even when his observations are relatively familiar, Heilemann presents them in a novel way.  For example, don’t miss his spellbinding video on the war movies which influenced the Death Star trench run.  Citations are included for further reading, and the site itself is gloriously easy on the eyes, clean and straightforward and uncluttered.  Kitbashed is an absolute joy.

These two THX mini-docs – one on soundtracks (above) and another on the system itself, have emerged from the laserdisc era to appear on Youtube. Historical! (via)

Well, the time has come, and GeoCities will be gone for good after Monday – or so Yahoo says. Time to take a last look at an old friend… Or is it? Time (Monday?) will tell.

Game designer Tim Schafer shares the tale (and scans) of how he got his first job in the industry, at Lucasfilm Games. (The LucasArts name didn’t join the party until 1990.) There’s some quality hilarity here:

I called David Fox right away and scribbled all the notes you see while I was talking to him. I told him how much I wanted to work at Lucasfilm, not because of Star Wars, but because I loved, “Ball Blaster.”

“Ball Blaster, eh?” he said.

“Yeah! I love Ball Blaster!” I said. It was true. I had broken a joystick playing that game on my Atari 800.

“Well, the name of the game is Ball Blazer.” Mr. Fox said, curtly. “It was only called Ball Blaster in the pirated version.”

Gulp.

But the best part may be his cover letter – which is in the style of a text adventure.

Thursday is officially the first day of San Diego Comic-Con, but in these days of Twitter those of us stuck at home are even more aware that people are beginning to pour into the city and get in the con-going mood. (StarWars.com is already posting pics.)

io9 has today graced us with some SDCC history. Of course, let’s not forget that Star Wars was among the first films to appeal to the Comic-Con crowds.

• On that note, Galactic Binder offers the 10 biggest Star Wars sights to be seen on the DSCC floor.

• Newsweek thinks you need to know how to be cool at Comic-Con. Because, you know, you’re going to Comic-Con. The only place on earth where you can wear this (or these) and not be laughed out of a room.
• Here’s a closer look at Sideshow’s Grand Admiral Thrawn and some of their other new offerings.
• There’s another Empire Muggs Back profile: Jane Wiedlin.

In other news. The trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland leaked this afternoon and was promptly removed from a variety of sites. That means if you look hard enough, you can probably find it now… But I’m much too lazy for that. Look for it all over the internet officially tomorrow afternoon.

It’s President’s Day here in the U.S., and that means you need to see this internet classic, if you haven’t already. (Note: Some language.)

Beta vs. VHS are my earliest video memories, so I for one am clearly too young for this whole Super-8 thing. Is it the video equivalent of eight tracks? And what’s with the lame slide projectors?

On the topic of obsolete (or not) kiddie technology, anyone know where I can get hold of some vintage Star Wars View-Master reels? The eBay, it has nothing.

Love history? Love Star Wars? Into absurdity? Have I got a link for you… (via)

For years, FanfiX.com was the fanfic archive for Star Wars fandom. The archive started in the late 90′s and was officially dubbed FanfiX.com with the domain purchase in 1997. And then, in 2003, it vanished, and people have been intermittently asking about it ever since. Wombat, one of the site archivists, gives her account.

While FanfiX could never completely archive all Star Wars fic online, particularly after the fandom explosion with TPM in 1999 and the growing popularity of self-upload archives like FanFiction.net during that same period, the loss was a striking blow to the SW fanfic community. Yes, you can still access it via the WayBack Machine, but the possibility was there for a central touchstone for the SW fanfic community.

Are all-encompassing archives like FanFiX or The Gossamer Project practical anymore? Are they even possible? Do we need them? Sometimes I wonder…