Tag: history

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Star Wars celebrates an important date for the Expanded Universe – and Club Jade – today!

This Day in Star Wars

StarWars.com has been featuring a number of important dates on both the site and through social media – and today’s is one particularly relevant for our purposes! The Facebook numbers are pretty impressive, even for the official account – More than 13,500 likes, more than a thousand shares and almost that many comments.

And, of course, without the Thrawn Trilogy, would there be a Club Jade? Probably not.

The tweet’s doing pretty well, too!

Why don’t these guys have a Tumblr yet? (If you want to reblog it there, we did the honors.)

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Kitbashed and the origins of Star Wars

With all the movie and TV news coming out, it’s easy to get caught up in the future.  Because the future, as a wise man once said, is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.  But if you’ve got an even passing interest in the past, you should definitely check out Kitbashed.

Writer and designer Michael Heilemann has been on our radar for years, but with Kitbashed he’s delving deep into the origins of Star Wars – not the saga, not the franchise, but the movie.  Heilemann connects Star Wars to everything from famous documentaries to Star Trek to a baffling magazine ad.  He’s also especially good at analyzing George Lucas’ student films and early works.

Even when his observations are relatively familiar, Heilemann presents them in a novel way.  For example, don’t miss his spellbinding video on the war movies which influenced the Death Star trench run.  Citations are included for further reading, and the site itself is gloriously easy on the eyes, clean and straightforward and uncluttered.  Kitbashed is an absolute joy.

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How to get a job at Lucasfilm (in the 80’s)

A peek at Tim Schafer's infamous cover letterGame designer Tim Schafer shares the tale (and scans) of how he got his first job in the industry, at Lucasfilm Games. (The LucasArts name didn’t join the party until 1990.) There’s some quality hilarity here:

I called David Fox right away and scribbled all the notes you see while I was talking to him. I told him how much I wanted to work at Lucasfilm, not because of Star Wars, but because I loved, “Ball Blaster.”

“Ball Blaster, eh?” he said.

“Yeah! I love Ball Blaster!” I said. It was true. I had broken a joystick playing that game on my Atari 800.

“Well, the name of the game is Ball Blazer.” Mr. Fox said, curtly. “It was only called Ball Blaster in the pirated version.”

Gulp.

But the best part may be his cover letter – which is in the style of a text adventure.

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SDCC ’09 Roundup: And so it begins…

Seriously old-school at SDCC '76Thursday is officially the first day of San Diego Comic-Con, but in these days of Twitter those of us stuck at home are even more aware that people are beginning to pour into the city and get in the con-going mood. (StarWars.com is already posting pics.)

io9 has today graced us with some SDCC history. Of course, let’s not forget that Star Wars was among the first films to appeal to the Comic-Con crowds.

In other news. The trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland leaked this afternoon and was promptly removed from a variety of sites. That means if you look hard enough, you can probably find it now… But I’m much too lazy for that. Look for it all over the internet officially tomorrow afternoon.