Category: conventions and events

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Star Wars Reads Day is Saturday

sw-reads-day-ii-logoTomorrow, October 5 is the second annual Star Wars Reads Day. Last year, over 1,000 bookstores, libraries and schools got into the action with events to promote literacy combined with Star Wars, and this year aims to be bigger!

Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million are hosting events chainwide, and there are at least a dozen local events where Star Wars authors and illustrators are participating. Many locations will also be getting visits from their local chapters of the 501st Legion, Rebel Legion, and Mando Mercs costuming clubs.

Check out the list of author events at the official Star Wars Reads Day page, or view a larger list of participating libraries and bookstores by state (and even some outside the US). Aaron Allston, Tim Zahn, John Jackson Miller, Pablo Hidalgo and Jason Fry are among some of the authors hitting up their local shops for Star Wars Reads Day.

Bonus: Helen Keier of the New Essential Guide to Alien Species will be at the Mahopac Public Library, in Mahopac, NY for a reading and Q&A.

If you can’t make it to a participating venue, there’s also an online author chat on Saturday on GoodReads with John Jackson Miller, Jason Fry, Ryder Windham, Chris Alexander, Tom Angleberger and more. Or just watch the fun on the Star Wars Reads facebook page.

The Star Wars Reads Day program is sponsored by all of the main publishers of Star Wars books (Del Rey, DK, Dark Horse, Scholastic, Chronicle, Quirk, Abrams, Titan, Randon House Audio, Workman), and We Love Fine has the official Star Wars Reads Day tees (in men’s sizes only, seriously?!):

SW-reads-tshirts

In honor of Star Wars Reads Day, Dark Horse Digital is having a 50% off sale on a bunch of digital comics this weekend, mostly from the Star Wars Adventures and Clone Wars digests.

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Pablo Hidalgo giving Rebels presentation at NYCC

Rebels: The GhostThere’s one major media con left for the year: New York Comic Con. And Lucasfilm’s Pablo Hidalgo will be there for a presentation on the upcoming cartoon Rebels, StarWars.com announced today. The panel, subtitled ‘Might of the Empire,’ will be held Saturday, October 12 at 2:45 p.m. Here’s the description:

What happens when the Galactic Empire takes over a planet? What if Imperials took interest in your world, and garrisoned Stormtroopers and TIE fighters to maintain order? Star Wars Rebels, the thrilling, all-new animated television series from Lucasfilm for Disney XD will ask those questions — and so will this panel hosted by Lucasfilm’s resident Star Wars expert, Pablo Hidalgo.

Details on the show are closely guarded, but fans at NYCC will get a first look at new art from the series, and learn new information about the formidable forces of the Galactic Empire. Star Wars Rebels is set between Episodes III and IV, and it is a dark time in the galaxy. In the spirit of the original trilogy, the Empire is once again the preeminent villain of the saga, and Star Wars Rebels puts the awesome might of Imperial forces in the spotlight.

The series is still a year away, so don’t miss this chance to get an early look at its development.

We got our most extensive look (so far) at Rebels from Dave Filoni at Celebration Europe in July. It’s expected to begin airing next fall.

There will also be panels on The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi with J.W. Rinzler and Jason Fry, origami with Chris Alexander, “Blast-A-Trooper” with the 501st Legion and several licensees, including Del Rey and Dark Horse.

And before you ask…

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Interview: Randy Stradley & Douglas Wheatley on Dark Times

And you thought my con coverage was over! Here’s Randy Stradley, writer of Star Wars: Dark Times, and Douglas Wheatley, artist of Dark Times, discussing the start of the current arc, ‘A Spark Remains’. If you haven’t checked it out yet, Issue #1 came out in July, just before Comic-Con, and the second issue comes out today. While setting the stage for the activity in the first issue of ‘A Spark Remains’ (check out my review of #1 on Big Shiny Robot), the pair kept mum about the future of Jedi Dass Jennir and his friends, as well as other projects being worked on. Bonus: we get photobombed at the very end by a certain Sith voice actor.Dark Times: A Spark Remains #1

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Disney teases Star Wars attraction(s) at D23

Well, what do we have here? It’s a series of ‘Orange Harvest’ (nuk nuk) crates labeled as containing (or previously containing) various items from the Star Wars galaxy. And… There are blueprints. Will we be getting some kind of theme park announcement after all, or is this it? Patience!

More pictures at Inside the Magic.

Get a closer look at the blueprints under the cut.

Continue reading “Disney teases Star Wars attraction(s) at D23”

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Video: Best of Star Wars Celebration Europe

Here’s some of my favorite videos from Star Wars Celebration Europe. Up above, Warwick Davis and Ian McDiarmid re-create the Yoda/Sidious battle from Revenge of the Sith. (Trigger warning: Ewoks are stomped upon.) Davis would try to do a bit with each cast member in a segment called “Stage Wars” and below, we have Davis and Carrie Fisher returning to the first encounter between Wicket and Leia. And there’s even more below…CelebrationStageCrew_LowRes Continue reading “Video: Best of Star Wars Celebration Europe”

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Video: Warwick Davis and the Five Fetts

Sunday at Celebration Europe was the Fett-tastic Four panel, which quickly turned into a quintet with the surprise arrival of Temuera Morrison to join Jeremy Bulloch, Daniel Logan, John Morton (who filled in as Boba Fett for a few days in The Empire Strikes Back), and Dickey Beer (Boba Fett stunts in Return of the Jedi). The stage show was quite a bit of fun, with Bulloch making his appearance in his 501st Legion Boba Fett costume, and Warwick hosting a series of games to see which of the four Boba Fetts was the best: in shooting Nerf guns at Ewoks, and emoting after Jango’s beheading (aka Four Fetts and a Funeral). Here, Warwick Davis chats with the Fett family about the enduring popularity of Boba Fett.

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Celebrations to go without numerals from here on out

Celebration VII Verifying what many of us had already guessed, TheForce.Net says that Lucasfilm has told them that future Celebrations will no longer use the roman numeral designations, but be called by their location and/or year – so instead of Celebration VII, the 2015 convention is offically “Star Wars Celebration 2015” or “Star Wars Celebration Anaheim.”

The decision seems a little odd as, with Episode VII, the cons would still actually line up with their corresponding movies. Is it a hint that the conventions will be moving to a yearly schedule to keep up with the spin-off films as well as the Episodes?

The Celebrations began with Episode I in 1999, and were tied to movie release years during the prequels. After Revenge of the Sith and Celebration III (2005) the U.S. Celebrations kept to the triennial schedule with Celebration IV (2007) and Celebration V (2010.) With 2012’s Celebration VI, the con was moving to a biannual schedule. What the future holds for them after 2015… Well, we’ll see, I guess.

Still, Celebration VII will remain Celebration VII in our hearts… Or at least, our tags.