In part two (part one linked here) of his interview with Tv Guide, George Lucas talks about Clone Wars and the live-action series. Also: He likes Rome! (via TOSblog)
The Saturday catchup
All the stuff that got spaced
- Allies in The Clone Wars: TV show is a global production.
- Family Guy: Blue Harvest concept art
- A Sithly go-round for the classic circus poster.
- Know A Legion: Bloodfin Garrison
- Bonnie urges R2 Builders to join the space race.
- Are Artoo and Threepio robo-wimps?
Hyperspace
Catching up with Labor Day weekend
George Lucas is becoming ‘increasingly involved’ with the Clone Wars animated series. Good? Bad? Gungan? Only time will tell! In other CW news, Disney really wants the broadcast rights.
Infodrop
- American Heritage covers ILM before computers. (via)
- Dan Wallace spotlights Michael Allen Horne, who authored two pivotal RPG guidebooks for West End Games.
- The Legacy Revealed reruns Thursday.
- The new Insider is shipping. It also appears on the latest Diamond shipping list (for comic stores) so probably available in standard book shops as well.
Listings
- The Empire Strikes Back makes Premiere’s list of twenty biggest plot twists.
- USA Today’s Whitney Matheson picks Vader’s lightsaber as the most awesome movie prop.
Weird & Wacky
- Steamtroopers! Steampunk stormtroopers, Fett and an Alien pal spotted in Dubai mall. (via)
- The Darth Vader lamp. Well, that’s… ironic. (via)
Clone Wars gets dedicated section
CE newsblast, last of Disney
Clone Wars folks going to Celebration Europe. What mystery celebrity will beg for the clip this time? And! Yet more collecting panels.
Meanwhile, last weekend was the final Disney weekend of the year.
Book contract: New one exists, TV is separate?
A few vague words from Sue Rostoni yesterday regarding the book contract.
The new contract has been agreed upon, but the papers haven’t been signed yet and until they are I can’t reveal the publisher or number of books involved. The contract is with the legal folks and I have no clue how long it will take for it to go through the rounds, whether it would be weeks or months. I hope weeks, but we’ll see.
Keep in mind, doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a new publisher; also doesn’t mean they’re not staying with Del Rey.
However, I found this bit particularly interesting:
The animated and live action series are separate and will be contracted out separately — discussions haven’t begun for either of these yet.
What’s the ETA on Clone Wars now? 2009? If it was still 2008 I’d expect them to be in talks by now… Can’t have a major release without a Making of book! (Or maybe LucasBooks is just busy with Indy 4.)
CIV: The one we’ve been waiting for
The biggest thing to come out of this Celebration was, of course, the much-anticipated and yet totally unexpected (well, unannounced) Clone Wars footage. As disappointed as I was to first hear that the animated series would be yet another dose of the Clone Wars, I must admit it looks pretty cool. There’s a report from the C4 panel at the StarWars.com Celebration blog. Alas, due to my schedule I never made the actual panels, although I did manage to catch the footage itself on screen, and it’s fantastic in high-def. I hope everyone who could caught it that way.
The fan-produced “3-D animated stills” mentioned is probably the ‘Tales from the New Republic’ project. While impressive for a fan production (and more in line with what I hoped for the animated series, sigh) the image quality suffers in comparison to the CW footage. Still, it’s a great idea and a lot of work, and I hope they can pull it off!
Even if… umm… no comment.
Check out the digitals on these guys!
See the Clone Wars cast for the very first time. But who’s that the in the back? No doubt we’ll find out soon enough…
Clone Wars coming to CIV! (Sort of)
Producer Catherine Winder and Supervising Director Dave Filoni will present a Clone Wars behind-the-scenes presentation on Sunday at Celebration.
Stradley takes on Clone Wars
In a MySpace entry on writing comics, Randy Stradley of Dark Horse reveals that he’s scripted an episode of the animated Clone Wars series.
By way of contrast, last year I had the opportunity to write an episode of Lucas Animation’s upcoming Clone Wars TV series. It was an interesting experience, and it came with a substantially better pay day than a comparable amount of work in comics. I wrote an outline (based on a synopsis provided to me), then rewrote the outline based on notes received from the producer, director, and head writer. Once that was approved, I wrote a script. Again, after a round of notes, I rewrote the script. At that point, my involvement with the script ended, but based on various production concerns (the expense in animating certain sequences, or changes in direction of the series as a whole made after my participation), my script was rewritten by other writers a number of times. I’m told that there is still one scene in the episode that is more or less as I wrote it.
Now, based on what I’ve seen of the show, I doubt very much that I will be disappointed with the quality of “my” episode (heck, I’m sure it will make me look better than I deserve), but I can’t deny that there’s a part of me that wishes I had more control. In comics, I would.
Stradley’s blog as a whole has a lot of interesting insight on comics and writings. Check it out!