TCM picks Star Wars as one of their 15 most influential movies of all time

You WILL buy this Falcon playset...

The cable channel Turner Classic Movies turns 15 this month, and to celebrate they’ve named the 15 most influential films of all time. The list also includes Citizen Kane, Metropolis, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Psycho – but, for once, no Godfather movies. Star Wars is the latest film on the list, and one of the biggest moneymakers… Which is precisely why it’s there! Merchandising, baby.

More on Free Comic Book Day’s Star Wars offering

As announced last December, Dark Horse Comics is releasing Star Wars comics as part of their annual freebie book for Free Comic Book Day, which is on Saturday, May 2, 2009.  A preview of the book is up – and it contains a Kit Fisto story, ‘The Gauntlet of Death‘. The free 28 page comic will also contain stories of Emily the Strange, Usagi Yojimbo and other Dark Horse properties suitable for all ages, and has a flip cover. Dark Horse also had a second freebie book for 2009, with a flip cover, helping to relaunch their Aliens and Predator comic tie-in series – check out the preview.

Marvel misses the point yet again

Did Marvel took that one guy’s rant on woman and comics– Remember, the one that unleashed a furious response from the female comicsphere – a little too much to heart? Check out an upcoming mini-series, Marvel Divas, as announced by Dude-in-Chief Joe Quesada:

“The idea behind the series was to have some sudsy fun and lift the curtain a bit and take a peep at some of our most fabulous super heroines. In the series, they’re an unlikely foursome of friends–Black Cat, Hell Cat, Firestar, and Photon–with TWO things in common: They’re all leading double-lives and they’re all having romantic trouble. The pitch started as “Sex and the City” in the Marvel Universe, and there’s definitely that “naughty” element to it, but I also think the series is doing to a deeper place, asking question about what it means…truly means…to be a woman in an industry dominated by testosterone and guns. (And I mean both the super hero industry and the comic book industry.) But mostly it’s just a lot of hot fun.

There’s some hope that the execution could turn out better than it sounds – the writer, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, is on the staff of HBO’s Big Love, a show that has sympathetic portrayals of women in a society that pays even less lip-service to equality than comics. But with an introduction that uses words like ‘naughty’ and ‘hot fun,’ the backlash is likely to be very loud.