Club Jade

Like these movies won’t be hits? As the Star Trek Into Darkness junket clips stagger out into the world, Abrams implies to MTV that the Star Wars spinoffs will depend on Episode VII going the distance.

Also from MTV: Damon Lindelof on Abrams and Star Wars, and they even asked Leonardo DiCaprio if he’d like to do future Star Wars. (He famously turned down Attack of the Clones back in the day.)

On that note… Simon Pegg talks about Abrams and Star Wars with Totalfilm – though he clarifies that he has no inside info from Abrams. And yes, they’re still asking random movie folks about Episode VII.

Interview. And finally, for someone who will almost certainly actually be in Episode VII, here’s more from Mark Hamill.

Here’s an official video featuring last weekend’s the Return of the Jedi event… Time to play spot James! Can you find him? Hint: He speaks!

Oh, and I think that pretty much confirms the 30th logo, no?

Or, the grass is green, but if you’re keeping track, here are the pertinent remarks from the Disney earnings call earlier this week, via Yahoo.

“In addition to the Star Wars feature films that we’ve already talked about, we’re also working on opportunities for television and our parks,” Iger said. “It’s still very early in the process. We’ll announce details as these developments evolve.”

Naturally.

Abrams tells HitFix that the new movies must work ‘on its own terms,’ not just depend on the pre-existing love for the franchise.

While we’ve known that the first LEGO Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles special has been coming out in May for several months, StarWars.com finally has announced the series, and revealed the first special’s name: ‘The Phantom Clone’, airing May 29 at 8 PM (PT/ET) on Cartoon Network.

The official site points out that while we’ve had LEGO Star Wars specials in the past, The Yoda Chronicles is first to really introduce new main characters just for the shows, in this case: a clone, Jek 14, who has been “enhanced” by the Force. ‘The Phantom Clone’ and the other two future The Yoda Chronicles specials are produced by Wil Film ApS and written by Michael Price, who wrote the hilarious previous LEGO Star Wars specials, The Padawan Menace and The Empire Strikes Out.

The Yoda Chronicles looks like it will be a full LEGO Star Wars franchise, with guide books coming out from DK, and LEGO building sets coming out in August, and this past May the 4th saw the release of the associated iPad/iPhone game. Check out the show’s trailer below.
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Start your theories, people who care that Lucasfilm registered a bunch of domain names! Fusible was first to notice.

The domains include starwarsrebels.com, starwarsalliance.com, order67.net, wookieehunters.com, starwarswolfpack.com, and wolfpackadventures.net. (Wolfpack, if anyone is wondering, is a clone trooper squad that gained a good bit of traction among Clone Wars fans.)

An extraordinary amount of comment seems to focus on gunganfrontier2.com, gunganfrontier3.com and gunganfrontier4.com, which could mean sequels to a 1999 learning game or just someone at LFL being a hilarious troll.

In any case, the tendency with these domain things is to assume they’re video games, so consider the speculation floor open.

Jedi News quotes a source who tells them that Disney has recently signed a 5-year deal with Pinewood Studios. There’s a new soundstage under construction at their main facility west of London:

Some of the people there are calling [it] the new Star Wars stage. Apparently the Disney deal is for multiple movies and security has started to be tightened up.

From what my friend said, a lot of the construction workers were openly calling it the Star Wars stage.

Pinewood Studios’ main facility is in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire. Several James Bond movies have been shot there – their most famous stage is the 007 Stage, built for The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977.

It may also be noteworthy that Pinewood recently announced that they’ll be opening a facility in the States, near Atlanta.

Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion animation made monsters come alive in films from the 30′s through the 80′s, has passed away, his family has announced. He was 93.

Stop-motion may be cheesey to those of us who grew up in the post-Star Wars era, but Harryhausen’s work – the most famous of which is perhaps the fighting skeletons of Jason and the Argonauts – was hugely influential. (Though to this 80s’ kid, it’s his Medusa in the original Clash of the Titans who kept me up at night!)

“Ray has been a great inspiration to us all in special visual industry. The art of his earlier films, which most of us grew up on, inspired us so much,” said George Lucas. “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars.”

We enter a month-long celebration of all things Star Wars, but first we had to get the puns out of the way… Last week, we celebrated May the 4th, Revenge of the 5th, #IgerWatch and so much more…

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Other than that he’s simply drawing TIE fighters, that is?

It’s hard to believe that I have worked at Lucasfilm almost eight years, and this is the first time I have ever gotten to draw a TIE fighter.

Just doodling, or a hint at this nebulous new show?

EDIT: Filoni also released a different sketch of a TIE on Twitter:

Note that this TIE (though incomplete) has its wing struts at a slightly different angle (which, if using the regular hexagonal wing shape, would have the wing panels touch the ground at a point rather than a bottom edge). Did he realize his goof on the original TIE design and stop with the sketch… or is this a new TIE design?