Star Wars with occasional sarcasm
The booklet of Star Wars novel excerpts that Del Rey was giving out at Celebration Anaheim is now available to all as a free download. You can get it at Amazon or from your preferred eBook vendor.
It contains excerpts from the upcoming Dark Disciple by Christie Golden and Battlefront: Twilight Company by Alexander Freed, as well the other new canon books that are already out.
Jedi News pointed out a page on ReedPop’s site where they confirm the reports that some 60,000 fans attended Celebration Anaheim. That’s a definite record – two previous Celebrations (IV in 2007 and VI in 2012) topped out at a mere 35K.
There’s still content from Celebration dropping, as Carrie Fisher talks to James Arnold Taylor backstage about Leia, the slave outfit, reprising Leia, and poor Gary’s exhaustion. Also joining James backstage are Ian McDiarmid and Anthony Daniels.
Plus there’s the Pablo Hidalgo and Leland Chee interview from the livestream.
The Clone Wars story reels from Celebration are up. If you weren’t at the con or missed the ‘Bad Batch’ screening, StarWars.com has you covered.
Did more than 60,000 Star Wars fans really attend Celebration Anaheim? We know the con sold out of passes, but we don’t know (officially) what the actual number is. Previous Celebrations (IV in Los Angeles and VI in Orlando) have topped out at 35K.
Backstage at Celebration, Mark Hamill chats with James Arnold Taylor about Star Wars and shared some family photos from the Return of the Jedi set. (The Force Awakens stuff starts at 7:20. #Beardwatch!)
A bunch of other Celebration videos have gone up over the past few days as well, most pulls from the livestream, including interviews with Billy Dee Williams, Ray Park, Joel Aron, Doug Chiang and Christian Alzmann, among others. And then there’s con highlights that played during the Closing Ceremonies…
The latest Entertainment Weekly has a spread on The Force Awakens. You can read the print article here, but they’ve also been posting expanded interviews with some of the cast.
So far we have Carrie Fisher, who called herself “the custodian of Leia” and reveals that her part in one of the sequel drafts “wasn’t what I thought Leia should be.” Then Daisy Ridley, in what may be her first major Star Wars interview. And today, we heard from John Boyega.
No Oscar Isaac yet, but he did do a nice interview with IGN where he revealed some of the research he did for the part.
You couldn’t step into The Force Awakens exhibit without seeing at least a dozen cameras snapping away, so I have no doubt you’ve seen much of this already. There may be many like it, but under the cut is mine. Continue reading “Photos: The Force Awakens exhibit at Celebration Anaheim”
→ The New York Times had a great feature on BB-8 over Celebration weekend, revealing two things. First, that the version during filming was “a prop built on rollers” – not the fully functional one we saw on stage last week. As mentioned by Kathleen Kennedy onstage, Disney CEO Bob Iger connected the dots, bringing in Sphero to help produce a practical model. And secondly, that a mini toy version – about the size of an apple and controlled via smartphone – will be in stores this holiday season. Bigger versions will (naturally) show up at Disney Parks. Of course, if you can’t wait that long, you can always get a Sphero and make your own….
→ Also in the NYT, a nice look at the folks behind Celebration and Star Wars, including Mary Franklin and Matt Martin.
→ StarWars.com has posted many of the livestream bits (Day 1, 2, 3, 4) as standalone videos: Interviews with Bob Iger, Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Peter Mayhew and John Knoll and a very beardy teaser breakdown
→ Tosche Station were MVPs this Celebration. They have a thank you to Kathleen Kennedy and a nice roundup of what we learned about The Force Awakens. They also recorded several panels, including John Jackson Miller’s Writing in a Shared Universe, an interview with Ashley Eckstein, the (painful) canon panel, Star Wars Journalism, Del Rey, the Aaron Allston tribute and What Leia Means To Me
→ Mike Cooper at Eleven-ThirtyEight didn’t join us in Anaheim, but he did do some analysis of the teaser and other things we learned about TFA there.
→ An ode to Gary Fisher.
So. Celebration. A new trailer. You know the drill. Continue reading “I vaguely remember someone crying: Best #StarWars, #SWCA and #TheForceAwakens tweets for April 15-20”