Results tagged “starwars”

I'm going to be offline for a little while (some would say that last rant of mine was a sign I should have gone offline a bit sooner) so I thought I'd leave you with some good sites to check out that you may not have been enjoying.

• Dan C's Lost Garden. Though nominally about gaming (particularly Flash gaming), it's among the most consistently thought-provoking tech-oriented blogs that I read. Every idea of his is one I want to steal, and nothing exemplifies that pattern more than his recent work on Ribbon Hero.
• Sleevage. Album covers, one at a time. Single-topic blogs run by passionate individuals (instead of paid blog barfers) are still among the best sites on the web. This one is a perfect example.
• Modcult. Though I am Jeb's number one fanboy, I will begrudgingly concede that all of the authors of this venerable group blog are awesome curators.
• Mixtape Maestro. Probably the single music blog that comes closest to my own fixations on the production end of pop; I miss its erstwhile spinoff 90s R&B Junkie (the archive is still online), but this is one of those few sites where I try to read every single post and feel let down if I miss one.
• RC3. Rafe Colburn is living proof that some folks really hone their craft at blogging after being at it for a decade.

And then, two newcomers, from a genre I'm dubbing "Under a Rock" blogs:

• Hobbited, where my friend Natalie is mirthfully blogging her way through her first-ever reading of Tolkien's classic The Hobbit.
• Tellywonk, where Anna Pickard is documenting her first viewing of Lost, by trudging through every episode.

Both of those last two blogs touch on a recurrent fixation of mine, the myth of the cultural canon. No matter how ostensibly ubiquitous or universal a particular work of art is, no matter how frequently it's referenced or alluded to in culture, the majority of people have probably never seen it.

My friend Meg told me the other night that, as an early-to-bed morning person, she's never really seen an episode of a late night talk show. I would love to read a blog of her watching an episode of each of the major shows, documenting the things that seem remarkable or bizarre. I've toyed with the idea of blogging my way through playing Beatles Rock Band, since I've never actually listened to any Beatles album all the way through and only know their work from its pop culture ubiquity. This, despite my love of pop music in general. (I first heard "Eleanor Rigby" from Aretha Franklin, "Norwegian Wood" from P.M. Dawn, "We Can Work It Out" from Stevie Wonder, and probably have more examples like that than I can count.)

Inevitably, people react to that revelation from me with something between shock and dismay, often evolving into disgust or revulsion. But it doesn't much bother me; There's lots of culture that I haven't gotten around to participating in. I've never been to an opera, either.

What I'm curious about, though, is how people who are fairly culturally literate and very well-educated respond to works that pervade culture. Under a Rock blogs are great for showing how ideas percolate through the media world, and how those ideas are imperfectly absorbed.

So, confess: What have you never seen, heard, or read?

Imagine you'd just spent millions of dollars creating cutting-edge special effects technology, and millions more to market a re-release of a beloved movie. And then you stumble into a review meeting, and the image that confronts you on the giant, costly movie screen is this:

This really happened! I know it's been a dozen years, and that this image was made a little less shitty when Service Pack 2 for Star Wars came out with the release of the DVD. But still — imagine that meeting, and coming out of it with the boss saying "Yep. That's good enough."

Interested in the pre-history of the coolest bounty hunter in the Star Wars universe? The Birth of Boba Fett chronicles some fascinating backstory, including what looks like a downright goofy first screen test for the costume, which was then painted white.

The article does show how well LucasFilm understands the reasons behind its characters' popularity:

By the time Empire rolled out of theaters in May, 1980, fans were well-aware that Fett would be making an appearance in the hotly-anticipated sequel. They may have been surprised, however, by the small amount of screen time given to a personality which had been trumped up by Lucasfilm for nearly two years. Though Fett's character suffered cutbacks in script rewrites, the ultimately short amount of time he spent on screen probably helped bolster the mythos which surrounds him. With so little revealed about the "galaxy's best bounty hunter," fans were allowed to fill in the details, making for a much more evocative and intriguing character. And with the filmed saga now complete, there seems to be no waning of interest in Boba Fett, whose character effectively embodies the danger and mystery found in the darker corners of the Star Wars universe.