StarWars.com wins ‘Best Official Site’ in the Movies.com Readers’ Poll, while Star Wars got voted Favorite Franchise. There’s plenty of other Star Wars (and Johnny Depp) love in the rest of the poll. And proof of ballot-stuffing gone horribly wrong – TheOneRing.net beat TheForce.net for Unofficial Movie Site. Ha ha!
Go about your business
Pablo lets us know that this is not the MySpace profile you’re looking for.
Guess who’s blogging?
It’s Helen! The book she co-authored, The New Essential Guide to Alien Species, comes out at the end of October.
Truth behind the Youtube ‘crackdown’
Straight from the horse’s mouth – the mass removal of fan and parody vids at Youtube was a mistake. Lucasfilm did ask Youtube to remove video containing ‘material taken from starwars.com’ (probably the Force-powers game concept vid, which was only released to Hyperspace members) and Youtube misunderstood. LFL has asked the site to restore the deleted videos.
Give me five more years, damnit!
Lucasfilm needs a Director of Online Programming and Operations. In other words: Want to be the boss of starwars.com? Here’s your chance.
Adventures in Audiocasting
Latest audiocast (Hyperspace members only) is a look at Star Wars publishing and an interview with Troy Denning.
Mostly it’s a short interview by Jacob Bronstein, executive producer of SW audiobooks, with a few clips from the Dark Nest audiobooks.
Troy talks at length about the Killiks – from inspiration to whether he’s really a bug-lover; putting characters in mortal danger (surprise suprise, he enjoys it;) and who he considers the coolest characters. (The answer may surprise you.)
Overall, the interview was interesting enough. I could really have done without the audiobook clips, though. I can’t stand the things: they get way too melodramatic, and the heavy descriptive passages read outloud are… vexing. I don’t know if this series will be worth getting Hyperspace for, but if you have it already, it can’t hurt to try. Especially if you have a much higher audiobook tolerance than me.
“Are you an angel?”
Trying to keep up, but my internet is still fond of taking long vacations and I have to go to work tomorrow. Work? In the middle of this? What was I thinking?
On starwars.com: another new commercial, and a blogging service for Hyperspace members.
ROTS is up and off at Cannes, and they loved it. Although possibly for political reasons, but you take what you can get. ( Lucas says differently.) TFN has more Cannes stuff, if you have an overwhelming urge to see what Natalie Portman looks like bald.
The movie is still riding high with 81% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes, bless their review-gathering hearts.
However, any review that starts with a paragraph about things coming out of nostrils is probably not going to be positive. Sure enough, The New Yorker was unimpressed with ROTS. I also have to wonder if the reviewer has ever seen A New Hope or his eyes ever registered the Millenium Falcon, with him going on about how ‘sterilized’ the GFFA is. And, horror of horrors, he quotes some Anakin/Padme dialouge that might make me retch more than the “angel” line from TPM. That’s about when I stopped reading. (Via kottke)
Luckily, I got to cleanse my brain with an article on Ian McDiarmid, a slideshow from Forbes on Star Wars flops , and for extra bitterness, IGN’s list of the lamest characters, half of which, if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably forgotten existed. If that’s a little too much bitterness, they also have a 10 best background character list. Corpsey the Ewok. Hehe.
Episode 3 in the Databank
The official site has updated their databank for ROTS with new information on Anakin, Padme, Obi-Wan, Bail, Palpatine and one completely new character. The entries themselves are fairly vague, but there are several new photos.