With The Phantom Menace 3D out this weekend, Entertainment Weekly checked in with the man behind Jar Jar Binks, Ahmed Best, who gave his thoughts on the Gungan’s diminished role in Episode III. Best also mentioned a scene cut filmed but cut from the finished version of Revenge of the Sith where Supreme Chancellor Palpatine takes a walk with Representative Binks:
“And Palpatine kind of thanks Jar Jar for putting him in power. It’s a really interesting scene, and it shows the evolution of Jar Jar from this fun-loving kid’s character into this manipulated politician. And it was an interesting arc for the character that I thought could have been explored, because the scene is really dark. But it just didn’t fit in the movie, which I understand. But yeah, George’s take on it is Jar Jar is now just a politician.”
Entertainment Weekly’s Christian Blauvelt has a sneak peek at Darth Maul’s Clone Wars debut. (Unless you count the screencap above, from the Opress arc.) His return will take place “at the end of an epic four-episode arc that’s going to tie up a bunch of The Clone Wars‘ loose ends.”
The Phantom Menace is loose! Run for your lives! Or, chill out as we round up some of the press floating around about the movie. (And don’t forget that the new Her Universe stuff is now on sale!) Onward!
Over at Entertainment Weekly, George Lucas talks about the 3D conversions came out of his efforts to get movie theaters to switch to digital, and why the format is beneficial to movies.
If you’re intrigued by some of the details Lucas mentioned in the EW video, learn more about The Phantom Menace’s 3D conversion from movieScope.
I’ve been looking at a lot of Phantom Menace stuff this week, and my favorite thing so far? Next Movie’s Eight biopics recast with Jar Jar. Yes, it’s total clickbait, but you certainly know by now that I love me some funny.
If you’re looking for something (sort of) serious, they also have an item about why Millennials (you know, those kids people us GenXers and GenCatalanos yell at to ‘get off our lawns’) don’t hate the prequels. But it’s in the form of a one-act play, so it’s not that serious.
What’s TPM going up against at the box office? I don’t think it has much to worry about from The Vow, a romantic drama starring Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum… But the kid-friendly Journey 2: The Mysterious Island may also be a draw for the action-adventure crowd, not to mention the 3D big bucks.
Coming Soon is projecting The Vow to take the top spot, but has Episode I beating Journey by several million. Entertainment Weekly projects the same, but with a few more million between TPM and Journey.
Tonight’s episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars is ‘Crisis on Naboo’, finishing the four part story arc involving Obi-Wan Kenobi’s infiltration of the criminal underworld. The Jedi posing as a bounty hunter Rako Hardeen will be teaming up with Cad Bane and the rest of the Box-surviving team to kidnap the Chancellor during a summit on Naboo. Watch the show and talk with the man behind Obi-Wan, James Arnold Taylor, who will be hosting a live chat (8 PM Eastern/5 PM Pacific) during the broadcast on Entertainment Weekly‘s website Also, Catherine Taber talks about working with Matt Lanter and the late Ian Abercrombie.
And for a neck-snappingly refreshing good time, check out this second clip of the bounty hunter team in action:
The Phantom Menace is coming upon us yet again, and the press has been piling up. We’ll have more of a roundup tomorrow, but for this afternoon let’s start off with The Hollywood Reporter’s feature on Star Wars George Lucas. In it, we learn the franchise raked in $3 billion in licensing revenue last year. (That’s a lot of lightsabers – in the accompanying photo gallery, they say the franchise has raked in $20B in licensed goods alone.) Overall though, the feature doesn’t hold much for informed fans – merchandising rights, The Clone Wars, etc. So what’s really making waves among the geeky internet is a Q&A sidebar, where Lucas talks reaction to his Star Wars tweaks (“…when I make the slightest change, everybody thinks it’s the end of the world.”) and Han not shooting first:
Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.
He also talks about CGI Yoda, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and SOPA, but you know what’s getting passed around the internet for the rest of the evening…
I used 10 comic books and poured over the endless panels cutting out various images that appealed to me. Chewie, R2D2, and the Millennium Falcon were ones that I cut out a lot. I found a great piece of Vader dueling shirtless, buff, Luke *hehe* that is the statement on the outside of the left shoe.
The left shoe is the battle between the Rebellion and the Empire. The right shoe is strictly the Rebellion forces. The sole edges are painted in a glittery black paint that reminds me of the night sky (visible in the original picture size linked below) and the upper edges are finished in a black cloth tape and a pin stripe of chrome paint. The heel tip is also finished with the chrome paint.
Later in the comments, she says she used “Liquitex Gloss Medium and Varnish” to seal them, but hopes to use a sealant spray as well. (Can you be too careful?) Seems like a fun project to emulate!
Compiling lots of making-of information with original interviews with several cast and crew members (and even an interview with Blade Runner‘s Sean Young, who had auditioned for the role of Marion Ravenwood,) it’s essentially an super vocal commentary of the first Indiana Jones film. Benning guest-blogged on Empire Online about the making of Raiding the Lost Ark, while PBS dives into Benning’s history of filmumentaries, and GeekDad has a Raiding image gallery
With The Phantom Menace 3D out this weekend, Entertainment Weekly checked in with the man behind Jar Jar Binks, Ahmed Best, who gave his thoughts on the Gungan’s diminished role in Episode III. Best also mentioned a scene cut filmed but cut from the finished version of Revenge of the Sith where Supreme Chancellor Palpatine takes a walk with Representative Binks:
The Phantom Menace is loose! Run for your lives! Or, chill out as we round up some of the press floating around about the movie. (And don’t forget that 
I’ve been looking at a lot of Phantom Menace stuff this week, and my favorite thing so far? Next Movie’s 
