Star Wars with occasional sarcasm
Christian Simpson on the search for the original voice of Nien Nunb, Kipsang Rotich, on StarWars.com in two parts. Spoiler: They find him, and he reprises the character’s voice in The Force Awakens.
→ Objections have been raised to the new font in The Force Awakens‘ opening crawl. (As a font geek, I remain undisturbed.)
→ Word on the street is that the making of book isn’t cancelled, and that we’ll hear more… Eventually.
→ ILM is putting on a concept art challenge.
Another May 4 has come and gone, and only the puns remain standing.
→ Remember the old Episode VII rumor about Luke’s hand floating through space? Well, in yesterday’s Sun interview, Mark Hamill confirmed that it was indeed in the script at one point. On that note, Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff takes a look back at The Force Awakens and the challenges of making a remake/revival fun. Meanwhile, io9 is looking for VIII clues in yesterday’s Daisy Ridley video.
→ Chuck Wendig shares the first line of Aftermath: Life Debt. ComicBook.com has the first look at The Force Awakens comic adaptation. It’s scripted by Wendig, but the preview features only Luke Ross’s interior art.
→ John Jackson Miller talks about writing Star Wars with Omni.
→ Room’s Jacob Tremblay is fishing… He did get a response from one future Star Wars director, so that’s promising.
→ R2-D2 and C-3PO hung out in Entertainment Weekly’s elevator.
→ The Revenge of the Sith soundtrack is getting a limited release on vinyl.
→ StarWars.com has a look at upcoming The Force Awakens Funko Pop figures, including General Leia and Luke Skywalker.
→ And finally, my favorite new product: Star Wars Tiki cups.
‘Jabba Flow,’ the new ‘Cantina song’ from The Force Awakens, is now up on iTunes. Or, if you just want to give it a listen, head over to StarWars.com. This is the first time the song by Shag Kava (aka Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda and J.J. Abrams) has been available outside of the film itself.
Miranda and Abrams performing the song today:
As part of their annual report on LGBT characters in movies, the anti-defamation group GLAAD is pushing Star Wars to introduce gay and lesbian characters into the films. Per Variety:
“As sci-fi projects have the special opportunity to create unique worlds whose advanced societies can serve as a commentary on our own, the most obvious place where Disney could include LGBT characters is in the upcoming eighth ‘Star Wars’ film,” the report reads. “2015’s ‘The Force Awakens’ has introduced a new and diverse central trio, which allows the creators opportunity to tell fresh stories as they develop their backstory. Recent official novels in the franchise featured lesbian and gay characters that could also be easily written into the stories.”
The introduction of gay and lesbian characters into the canon Star Wars novels has been controversial, but really, what isn’t?
Also at Variety, Brent Lang looks at why major blockbusters like Star Wars and Marvel have been reluctant to add LGBT characters.
Rifftrax has given The Force Awakens the MST3K treatment. I chuckled! The full audio track is available now.
Remember when a respected publication wrote about The Force Awakens fanfic? Well, here’s an intriguing follow-up of sorts: Tumblr user DestinationToast on the Archive of Our Own stats for the fandom.
Archive of Our Own (aka AO3) is arguably the most important fan fiction archive for general fandom. This isn’t a complete picture of Star Wars fan fiction, as Star Wars has always been a bit of an outlier to overall fandom trends, but The Force Awakens is the first major Star Wars film to come out since AO3 launched in 2008. Toast does look briefly at the numbers for old standby Fanfiction.Net (FFN,) plus relative newcomers Tumblr and Wattpad.
Another major outlet for Star Wars fic is TheForce.Net’s Jedi Council boards, but no doubt the message board format makes these sort of things much harder to track. I do hope that authors on the JC have gotten better about double-posting their works to FFN or AO3… A lot of fics were all but lost when TFN migrated their boards to a new system several years back, causing posts of length (aka mostly fanfic) to be truncated beyond readability.
Although it was never officially announced, it appears that The Making of Star Wars: The Force Awakens book from Mark Cotta Vaz and J.W. Rinzler has been canceled. A listing for the book appeared before the movie – usually a reliable indicator – and it was pushed back to October before the film’s release. However, it now it no longer appears on the publisher’s site, and Florian at Jedi Bibliothek found a listing on BookManager that says it’s been canceled..
All-out cancellations are rare, but I don’t expect we’ll get any word on the reasoning anytime soon. (Again, it was never actually announced.) My only guess is that it may have something to do with the lawsuit over Harrison Ford’s on-set injury. Note the incident isn’t mentioned in the official behind-the-scenes documentary on The Force Awakens Blu-ray – and may be off-limits until the legal issues have been worked out. Everyone loves the original trilogy Making of books, but here’s hoping we won’t have to wait 30 years for this one.
→ Speaking of the accident… Something we overlooked during the big Rey parentage debacle was J.J. Abrams revealing exactly how Ford’s injury actually helped the film.
→ A great new behind the scenes video from Discover Ireland.
→ Casting director Nina Gold talks about finding Daisy Ridley and John Boyega (plus some Game of Thrones folks) in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
→ Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and actor Oscar Isaac are among of Time’s 100 most influential people.
→ Custom BB-8s created by Star Wars stars and luminaries, being auctioned for charity.
There was a brief panic Friday evening after J.J. Abrams, speaking at at the Tribeca Film Festival, said “Rey’s parents are not in Episode VII. So I can’t possibly say in this moment who they are. But I will say it is something that Rey thinks about, too.”
Ric Olie says: Neither of Rey’s parents being in The Force Awakens would scuttle the popular theory that she’s Luke Skywalker’s daughter.
The panic was short-lived, though, because Entertainment Weekly got Abrams to clarify: “What I meant was that she doesn’t discover them in Episode VII. Not that they may not already be in her world.”
The Rey Skywalker theory lives to fight another day. The only things we have that even resemble firm denials are that she’s not a Solo or related to Rogue One’s Jyn Erso. But until something actually shows up in a movie, it’s still really anyone’s game. (Although I certainly wouldn’t put any money on the Erso theory.)
Though seriously folks, it’s not worth sniping over. This is not Star Wars’ first go-around with unanswered questions, and it won’t be the last. We will find out eventually and, yes, some of those answers might (or might not) surprise you. Don’t stake your theory flags too deeply.