Club Jade

Bootleg time! Yoda and Anakin have a chat in this clip from the forthcoming bonus content from what would have been season 6 of The Clone Wars, as shown at Star Wars Weekends down in Orlando.

Because. Just because.

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Nerdvana‘s ‘insider’ tells them that the new film will focus on a child and grandchild of Han and Leia’s – which may or may not give hope to those wedded to the novel continuty. On that note, the source claims “there are three new books we want Timothy Zahn to write.” Novelizations? Intriguing…

And here’s what they have to say about Abram’s contract:

JJ’s contract has a clause for all three movies and an additional three of Lucas/Disney choosing if everyone melds well on the first one. This is typical of these types of contracts; gives everyone an out if needed.

They also say that the Big Three have contracts already (right…) and that George Lucas himself has nixed the Yoda spin-off: He’s “a supporting character and will stay that way.” That last one I actually hope is true.

Though he hasn’t heard anything from Lucasfilm, Frank Oz would be willing to return to voice Yoda, according to Hero Complex. But don’t expect another puppet version:

“I think it depends on the story, but I think at this point you can’t go back to the puppet,” he said. “The reason George [Lucas] did the CGI, which I supported, was that he wanted to tell a story that would have been hampered by the physical limitations of the puppet.”

However, remember that while it’s been confirmed that there are spin-off plans in the works, the Yoda film is still just a rumor.

Rumor time! While we’ve heard before that Disney was interested in doing Star Wars movies not in the main storyline (looking at you, Zack Snyder’s Seven Samurai-inspired film), but here’s a new rumor to add to the wall: Ain’t It Cool News reports that the first standalone film is going to focus on Yoda.

The first Stand Alone film is going to center upon YODA. At this stage specifics are sparse, but Kathleen Kennedy is putting together a STAR WARS slate… I’m wildly curious for more details on the YODA film – would this be a young or old YODA tale?

As always, it’s a rumor, until we have official confirmation.

Also mentioned in the same post: Star Wars theme land in Disney’s California Adventure.

The Phantom Menace is coming upon us yet again, and the press has been piling up. We’ll have more of a roundup tomorrow, but for this afternoon let’s start off with The Hollywood Reporter’s feature on Star Wars George Lucas. In it, we learn the franchise raked in $3 billion in licensing revenue last year. (That’s a lot of lightsabers – in the accompanying photo gallery, they say the franchise has raked in $20B in licensed goods alone.) Overall though, the feature doesn’t hold much for informed fans – merchandising rights, The Clone Wars, etc. So what’s really making waves among the geeky internet is a Q&A sidebar, where Lucas talks reaction to his Star Wars tweaks (“…when I make the slightest change, everybody thinks it’s the end of the world.”) and Han not shooting first:

Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

He also talks about CGI Yoda, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and SOPA, but you know what’s getting passed around the internet for the rest of the evening…

Meh. There’s a free app as well.

Guess Maul won’t be headlining all the promotional materials for The Phantom Menace 3-D… A Russian poster features the CGI version of Yoda. Click on the thumbnail at right to see the full poster.

It’s no surprise that the CGI version will be featured, since the subpar Phantom Menace puppet version was entirely replaced on the Blu-ray version of the film, but it’s an interesting bit of trivia nonetheless.

The 42-year-old driver dressed as Yoda was returning home from a Halloween party early Sunday morning when he had a collison that “lightly” injured a pedestrian. The police caught him, confiscated his license, and made him walk home.

“The officers were especially surprised to see … Grand Master Yoda at the wheel,” said the statement from police in the city of Darmstadt, near Frankfurt in western Germany.

“The hapless Jedi returned home on foot,” said police. “In this case, the force was not with him.”

Perhaps next time he’ll be wise enough to enlist Obi-Wan as a designated driver.

Yoda gets a remix in this video from the Symphony of Science. (via)