Star Wars: a retrospective of sorts

Well, today is the big day. My son and are are going to watch Star Wards tonight. He hasn't seen it before, and we're starting with the first Star Wars movie. I'm excited. I waited until he asked to watch it. I figured when he was ready, he'd want to. And he's ready. It'll be fun.

So, I'm working and my friend David sends me an e-mail with a link to this old television special. If you thought Star Wars Holiday Special was terrible . . . wait until you see this:

Donny and Marie's Star Wars special!

It has everything: dancing stormtrooper, terrible puns, Red Foxx (complaining that this year planet Sanford "has no sun" -- his show Sanford and Son came back in 1980, but it was just called "Sanford"), Darth Vader escaping in the (SPOILER) (what?), jokes about the "farce", jokes about dental hygiene. But, really, you just need to see it to believe it:



I have to say, the designs for the female troopers were kind of cool. And hey, at least they got the whole "Luke and Leia are brother and sister" thing right!

But listen, I can't drop this proton torpedo on you and just leave it like that. I want people to like me when they come to this blog. So from the WORST of Star Wars, we come to some of the BEST of Star Wars:

RALPH MCQUARRIE'S WEBSITE!!!

I jsut discovered this website last week. It has a whole lot of his concept designs from Star Wars and many other movies. I happen to love Mr. McQuarrie's concept designs, some of them moreso than what actually ended up on film. My local comic shop has some action figure sets based on his character designs, and I almost bought them and used them as models for my 24 Hour Comic. The main problem with that being I didn't have the $90 for the two sets and I can't draw people worth two cents.

So, in this blog post we get a glimpse at the best and worst of what Star Wars can do when it captures your imagination.

I don't know what this means. I'm sure some sort of spiritual application could be made . . . but truthfully, my brain hurts too much after wartching Donnie and Marie to really put that much thought into things.

~ Ben