Tag: starwars.com

His fantastic set of Star Wars images on Flickr is gone. It’s not too surprising, with the collection’s latest burst of popularity, that he got a C&D, but it’s still a big loss for the fandom. In his entry addressing the situation, he’s pretty brutal on Lucasfilm and StarWars.com, and I can’t entirely blame him:

Anyway, the take-down is a fair legal move as it were, even if I don’t (obviously) agree with it. After all, the collection was an attempt at remedying the exact _lack_ of such similar resources from Lucasfilm. Thousands of people have passed through the collection and been ecstatic at the chance to peek in behind the scenes at a mythology and a series of films that are forever, and I think that it is remarkable that even now, we all carry these films with us.

This is what starwars.com should be doing! But instead of its initial potential, it has grown into a tired, empty husk of a marketing machine, not only poorly designed technically (and a usability nightmare!), but also trying so desperately to promote the Clone Wars show that it has forgotten the very magic that once propelled the world into the stars, on May 25th, 1977.

As I said last time I linked him, I truly hope that one day LFL themselves would someday set up something similar. But in today’s economic climate, even a corporate behmouth like Lucasfilm probably isn’t supporting its website in all the ways it could. I can’t be angry at the StarWars.com folks – they do what they can, but a handful of people can only do so much.

The beauty of the internet is that we can do it ourselves, and often do – look at Wookieepedia. But then something like this happens, and we end up wondering why we bother.