The official Course of the Force recap video of the second day of the lightsaber relay is now up, hosted by Chris Hardwick, Carrie Keagan and Ashley Eckstein, with plenty of shots of the relay participants in San Francisco from AT&T Park to across the Golden Gate Bridge. Today, before heading down to southern California, the Course of the Force made some stops at some of the different tech giants in the Bay Area, visiting Google and YouTube. Check out more Course of the Force coverage from the first few days in the Bay Area.
Course of the Force, the lightsaber relay from San Francisco to San Diego raising funds for Make-A-Wish, kicked off on Tuesday with a special celebrity run at Skywalker Ranch, then proceeded on Wednesday around San Francisco, ending with a concert and conival. Ashley Eckstein, one of the co-hosts of Course of the Force, was at Skywalker Ranch to help start the relay and covered it for the Official Star Wars Blog.
Day 2 started off in San Francisco’s South Beach neighborhood, and the relay continued along the bayfront, ending with a crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge, with 38 relay participants scheduled for the morning race. The Conival at San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza featured a concert by Journey Unauthorized, and had booths ranging from Otter Pops to Qualcomm and State Farm. Chris Hardwick joined co-hosts Carrie Keagan and Ashley Eckstein for the end of day dueling. My favorite costumes: a family dressed as the Avengers!
Today, the Course of the Force takes a little breather as the lightsaber flies to Los Angeles before picking up for the Southern California segments of the relay from Friday to Tuesday as it travels from LA to San Diego and Comic-Con. Check out the daily schedule of relay segments and conivals. And if you’re on the lookout for Team Hondo, you’ll find the three members of Team Hondo in motion on Monday, July 15 in the morning in the Oceanside and Carlsbad segments – I’ll give out exact details on twitter at @jamesjawa. (And there’s still time if you still want to donate to Team Hondo’s fundraising efforts for Make-A-Wish Foundation chapters in California! I’m currently aiming for $1,250 and I am closing in on it.)
And to put you into an even weirder Course of the Force mood, join Billy Dee Williams, Patton Oswalt and Chris Hardwick for some Star Wars Cantina Karaoke:
The Clone Wars brought home the gold at the Daytime Emmys, presented over this past weekend, taking home two awards: Outstanding Special Class Animated Program, and Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program for David Tennant as the voice of Huyang, the droid who mentors Jedi younglings in constructing lightsabers.
David Tennant’s award was given out on Friday at the Creative Arts presentation and Dave Filoni remarked on Tennant’s tenure on Doctor Who as a reason to cast him as the droid: “I absolutely loved what David Tenant was doing on Doctor Who. There was such a quizzical nature to his character, a sense of whimsy, but he could still get very powerful emotion out of the character — a lot of intensity, a lot of anger — just an incredible display of range.”
After switching to Saturday mornings for its final season, The Clone Wars was eligible for Daytime Emmys and earned seven nominations after the show’s cancellation.
The full size LEGO X-Wing Starfighter that was first put on display in Times Square will be appearing at LEGOLAND California in Carlsbad next week. The world’s largest LEGO model, which is over forty feet long, weighs 23 tons, and is made of 5,335,200 LEGO bricks, was unveiled on May 23 in New York City to promote the release of LEGO Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles, but will now be on display in southern California from June 13 to December 31. To celebrate the Times Square event, LEGOLAND California recreated the happening with a LEGO X-Wing unveiled in their New York City miniland display. Continue reading “World-record LEGO X-Wing lands at LEGOLAND California next week”
The makers of The Jedi Path and Book of Sith have a new book coming out later this year: The Bounty Hunter Code: From the Files of Boba Fett, and Paul Nicholasi of Idle Hands got a sneak peek of it at BookExpo America this past weekend. Like the previous two books, it is set as an ‘in-universe’ document, comes in an ultracool electronic case, and has a handful of inserts. In-universe commentary is provided by such galactic denizens as Boba Fett, Bossk, Aurra Sing, Greedo, Jango Fett and Hondo Ohnaka!
As items collected by Boba Fett prior to his dip in the Sarlacc, The Bounty Hunter Code includes a copy of the Bounty Hunters Guild Handbook and a volume from Death Watch, and Cradossk’s memoirs, and is scheduled for release in October 15, 2013. Amazon lists the authors as Dan Wallace (author of The Jedi Path and Book of Sith), Ryder Windham, and Jason Fry. Hop on over to the link above to see some pages and art from the book, including instructions on how to hotwire a landspeeder.
With today being the release date of the fifth and final issue of the Fire Carrier story arc for the Star Wars: Dark Times comic, I wanted to highlight this fantastic comics storyline, so I got the chance to discuss the story with Randy Stradley, the writer of Dark Times as well as senior Star Wars editor and VP of Publishing at Dark Horse Comics.
Let’s hear what Randy has to say about writing the latest adventures of the Whiphid Jedi, Master K’Kruhk and a group of younglings under his care, posing as refugees on an Imperial backwater world. We won’t spoil the final issue, but if you want to learn more about the story so far, you can check out my reviews of all individual issues at Big Shiny Robot: #1#2#3#4#5. Continue reading “Interview with Randy Stradley on Dark Times: Fire Carrier“
The second annual Star Wars Reads Day has been announced for Saturday, October 5th, 2013. As it was with last year, I’m sure there will be plenty of Star Wars Reads events happening in libraries and bookstores across the US (and perhaps beyond).
With less than two months to go for the second annual Course of the Force lightsaber relay prior to Comic Con in San Diego, Nerdist Industries has kicked off a multi-part webseries to help promote the relay that supports the Make-A-Wish Foundation In this first episode ‘Lightsaber’s Lost’, Matt Mira goes to Lucasfilm to pick up this year’s lightsaber, only to find that it has been stolen, and has to report in to Chris Hardwick. Also, R2-D2 quotes Office Space and dances like JT.
The 2013 Course of the Force relay will be headed from Skywalker Ranch all the way to San Diego from July 9 to July 16. Will Matt Mira retrieve the missing lightsaber in time? Is he really our only hope? (Hint: There is a another, if Wil Wheaton is available). New webisodes will appear every Tuesday from now until July 2.
In other Course of the Force news, all of the relay spots for the San Francisco and the Pacific Beach to San Diego legs of the relay have been filled, and they are now taking a waitlist for those two sections. Sponsor Otter Pops is giving away a free spot in the relay to someone willing to show their Otter Pop pride!
Don’t forget: the first episode of LEGO Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles airs tonight (Wednesday, May 29) on Cartoon Network at 8 PM ET/PT. Entitled ‘The Phantom Clone’, it stars Jedi Master Yoda and a group of padawans taking on the latest dangers from Count Dooku and Darth Sidious. James interviewed The Yoda Chronicles writer Michael Price last week, and we know the show is going big – after all, they unveiled the world’s largest LEGO construction, a full-size X-Wing fighter to Times Square last week to celebrate the launch!
If you want to catch up on the previous LEGO Star Wars specials, you’re in luck, Cartoon Network is airing The Empire Strikes Out at 7 PM, and The Padawan Menace at 7:30 PM. Michael Price has gone on the interview circuit in the past week:
Toon Barn has a great interview with him at the X-Wing unveiling event
Today we got a few more updates for Star Wars Celebration Europe, coming up in only two months:
Friday night will include a free outdoor screening of Return of the Jedi for its 30th anniversary, in the park next to the Messe Essen convention hall. I’m hoping that actual fireworks will go off over Grugapark after the Battle of Endor!
Sound designer and voice actor David Collins returns as a Celebration host for the Digital Stage, which usually showcases animation, effects, and other multimedia panels. A veteran of many Star Wars games for LucasArts, Collins might be best recognized as the voice of PROXY from The Force Unleashed.
With Mary Franklin hinting at the mammoth programming schedule she is preparing, the Celebration website has started listing the ongoing Celebration activities with the Continuous Daily Program. Check out what’s always available for Celebration attendees each day of the show.
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Today we got a few more updates for Star Wars Celebration Europe, coming up in only two months: 