The worst Star Wars exhibit ever. It’s bad enough that even Gawker is not exaggerating here.
Need a laugh? Corey Feldman wants to play a Solo
I have a not at all irrational hatred for and dread of fan castings – that is, random fans picking actors to play their favorite characters. So, naturally I do not expect the pre-casting period for Episode VII to be a whole lot of fun in that respect.
But I have, for the most part, been able to shrug off most of the actors who’ve so far suggested or been asked if they’d like to be in the new movies. (Yes, even RPatz, that delightful little troll.) I mean, how many actors are actually going to say they don’t want to play a Jedi when asked point-blank?
But this? This, I have to admit, is a whole new kind of hilarious: Corey Feldman wants to play Han Solo’s kid.
I think Harrison Ford’s son is a really great idea, actually. Fans have always said that I would make a great Indiana Jones, a great Young Indiana Jones. We look very similar, we have the same type of bravado. The same character persona with the whole Edgar Frog thing. It is a good fit.”
Bwah. Delusions of grandeur indeed.
The ‘fake geek girl’ is back, and no one is impressed
College Humor is not making many friends in the comics blogosphere, lately. The ad at right has appeared on the back page of several DC Comics books, and… Well. Take it away:
WonderAli: That Joke isn’t Funny Anymore. “College Humor, and DC by association, are perpetuating the message that comics simply cannot possibly be enjoyed by girls. They are for BOYS ONLY–mouth-breathing, women-hating boys at that. Sorry, intelligent woman who is enjoying the hell out of Wonder Woman, this book is not for you!”
The Mary Sue’s Susana Polo: So, The Back Cover Ad on Batman This Month Is a “Fake Geek Girl” Joke. “I just can’t decide which is more depressing to imagine: someone in marketing at College Humor (whose work I generally enjoy) pitching this specific example from their series of real life comic book “villains” to DC for an ad… or someone on DC’s marketing team saying “These ‘villains’ you came up with are all super funny, but you know… Some of our readers might feel targeted by the “guy who gets angry on forums” joke or the implications that they’re not good at personal interaction. And we probably shouldn’t use the one about executives… seeing as how we’re employed by them. So we’ll use the one that’s a girl. Girls don’t read comics anyway.””
iFanboy’s Jim Mroczkowski: Real Geeks Only, Ladies. “Funny how people who were bullied throughout their childhoods will become the most hateful bullies themselves at the first whiff of a victim. Hang on: when I typed “funny,” I misspelled “unimaginably depressing.” A round of applause for human nature, everybody.”
Are we seriously not past this crap, yet? UPDATE: Becky Allen says the same, only much better than I.
Here are all the ‘supervillains,’ if you’re really curious. Or, simply skip straight to restore your faith in humanity.
Slurp Sabers? Someone did not think this through
Joining the latest parade of Phantom Menace tie-ins is Gogurt, which is packaging their yogurt in glow-in-the-dark lightsaber packaging. Neat, sure. Until you get to the part where they call it a ‘Slurp Saber,’ at which everyone with a remotely dirty mind facepalms their brains out. Way to go, marketing geniuses!
Belgian chain to offer scary-looking Star Wars burgers
A Belgian fast food chain, Quick, will be offering several Star Wars themed burgers to tie into The Phantom Menace rerelease. They do not look all that appetizing, but if you happen to be in France or Belgium for the month of February, you can go ahead and give them a try. Or not.
Yes, there is a Star Wars porn parody
And the trailer is safe for work. It looks awful! Shocking.
SWTORstrategies.com offers lessons in lazy plagiarism
I realize that the internet is a wild and crazy place, populated by people who are perhaps a little unknowledgeable abut the basics of a civil society. So I was only a little surprised to run across a site that copied and pasted items directly from us and other sites – without permission. Now, this happens – someone thinks that pulling in an RSS feed entitles them to reskin it as their own. Most of the time, the audience for such sites is so small that it’s not even worth the trouble.
But there is an actual human running running swtorstrategies.com, and over the weekend I discovered 17 posts from clubjade.net – all written by me – copied and pasted on their site. To their credit, I contacted the webmaster and they removed or replaced the offending posts overnight. But there is still plenty of plagiarized content on the site.
Some of the posts did indeed link back to us, but not as a credit. A ‘via’ or ‘source’ link, as used by many blogs in these parts, does not mean this post is by [source] (Particularly when someone else – sQren – is the post’s ‘author’.) A via link means I discovered this information thanks to [source]. You take that information, write your own post, and as a courtesy link back to where you you found it.
(The only posts that contain proper credits do so because EUC and NJOE contacted the webmaster after he took their posts.)
Further study found posts pinched from TheForce.Net (original / plagiarized,) SF Signal (original / plagiarized,) and of course countless selections from StarWars.com. A few other examples I found last night and tweeted about have also vanished, so I encourage fansite folks to take a close look at the site and contact them if you find anything of yours.
At least some of the stuff on the site is semi-original – take a look at this post on gaming action figures, which sandwiches an (attributed!) ForceCast quote in-between text swiped from Kotaku. Or not… The middle part is actually swiped from Ask a Jedi.
Some of the site’s content – many of the gaming posts, of course – does look to be all-original. Which makes the decision to swipe all this other stuff just lazy. These are not the most extensive of posts they’re taking. No one really cares if you embed the same video or videos or use the same (attributed) quotes. We’re all covering much of the same news, so these things do happen. (Though, of course, a linkback is good manners.) All ‘sQren’ had to do was write their own text. Their own sentence, in many of these cases. A paragraph. Hell, they could do a bullet list instead of lifting 11 of my new release posts.
Is this a huge deal, these tiny posts? Maybe not. We all exist at the mercy of LFL, after all. But it’s not just about copying and pasting – it’s about having the decency to not take someone else’s work and pass it off as your own. And I’m not going to let that fly just ‘because it’s the internet.’ It doesn’t matter what the subject is: There’s no suitable excuse for plagiarism, particularly when it’s this pathetic.
Today’s awful thing: The ‘sexy’ Chewbacca costume
It’s a known fact that Halloween brings a brigade of cheap, ill thought out, hilariously ‘sexy’ character costumes for ladies. (News? Learn from Cleolinda, my friend.) Previously, we hoped that maybe it couldn’t get much worse than Sexy Optimus Prime.
We were wrong. Behold: The Sexy Chewbacca. Yandy.com calls it the ‘Sci-Fi Furry Costume,’ like that’s any better. I don’t think it’s quite enough to not get their nearly-bare butts sued… (It saddens me that I know this – thanks, Internet! – but that girl is showing far too much skin to be an actual furry.)
Also in the offering is a ‘Sci-Fi Commander’ and ‘White Soldier,’ but been there, done that.
On the other hand… At least it’s not yet another slave Leia? (via)
Will Sandman finally be adapted… For TV?
Various movie adaptions of Neil Gaiman’s highly-acclaimed and much-beloved Sandman comic series have ended up stuck in development hell over the years – much to the relief of the fans.
Now, however, a new challenger emerges: TV. The Hollywood Reporter said Wednesday that Warner Bros. is looking to get the rights for the series from DC Entertainment, and Supernatural creator Eric Kripke is their first choice to helm it. Neil Gaiman is not (yet?) involved.
As a fan of Sandman, I’ve never really wanted it on screen: The story works wonderfully as a comic, and I can’t see how doing it otherwise would any favors. (With all apologies to Dark Horse and their Star Wars folks, it was Sandman that finally showed me of the heights the format was capable of.)
I can’t pretend to be an expert on Kripke, but his name does not exactly install faith in the project: I’ve never been able to make it through an entire episode of Supernatural, and little I’ve heard about the series makes me want to keep trying.
If Gaiman gets on board, I would be a little less OH HELL NO about the very idea. But for now? Here’s hoping for another round of development hell.
One way or another, now is a good time to check the series out if you haven’t already. The first volume is a tad shaky, as all newborn comics are, but things start shaping up with the second.
Weird merchandise: Lightsaber bookends
I’m sorry, but the coloring of the melted metal or plasma or whatever the hell that’s supposed to be makes me think of, uhh, the end result of liposuction. Yeah. A for effort?
Call me when they bring back the trash compactor, ‘kay?