Uncle Jesse vs Uncle Jesse

I ran into this phenomenon first hand over Father's Day weekend.

It appears the younger generation has the wrong idea about who Uncle Jesse really is...

The highly-anticipated upgrade for JediDefender?

This is the reason I love Chris Berry and want to have his children...










...come over for dinner some time.

I enjoy their diorama section. A lot of nice (not to mention talented) fellows in there.

Otherwise, meh...I like the atmosphere here.

I don’t believe there can be any argument that the novelization of A New Hope is hopelessly out-of-date.

I’d like to see a revamped novelization of the story, utilizing thirty years of hindsight and reams of backstory (EU or otherwise).

The kicker this time is to make it the exhaustive story of the “first” movie. Interesting asides like Kyle Katarn’s first stealing of the Death Star plans, to the Tantive IV’s story, to Biggs’s story (as touched upon in recent Empire comics) could be included to really develop the themes of war and rebellion and what these people were sacrificing. Give us sidestories for some characters from the EU—Mara Jade as a prime example.  A truly galaxy-spanning story, over a thousand pages easily, with the movie’s events only really occupying half of it.

The movie follows Luke’s story, but let’s expand the new novel to multiple POVs that we can truly appreciate after the prequels. Let’s have chapters told from Vader’s perspective, or Obi-Wan’s…maybe even Owen and Beru.

A New Hope ought to be your favorite Star Wars novel, but I’ll bet it’s not. This could change that.

What do you think? What would you like an expanded version of the classic story to contain?

This is the first I've heard of someone yearning for the POTF2 facial sculpt days.  
 

Don't misunderstand. I have no desire to move backward. Some of those POTF2 Monkey-faced, He-Mannish heads are worse even than the simpler vintage style.

I guess I just prefer the more cartoony detour to the realism, especially for how it works at this scale. It's sort of like a manga comic, with hyper-realistic backgrounds and objects but alongside faces that are more glyph than human.

To illustrate, I prefer:


to



I wish I had a larger picture of Screen Scene Han's head, it really does look a million times cleaner than the images of Endor Han I've seen.

(In the meantime, I have seen images of a production VOTC Han, and I'm ready to take back my earlier comments. If quality control is maintained on these things, thet really might be the best versions ever.)

I was at the bookstore today and happened to see a display  of the "novelization" of Will Smith's latest action/adventure flick, "I, Robot."

I was intrigued. I read the Asimov book (really a collection of robot-centered short stories) many years ago, and after having seen the movie's trailer last year (and snorting loudly in the theater, to my fiance's dismay) I figured the two were only marginally related.

But here was the new novelization, with the by-line of Issac Asimov himself. WTF? I thought. it's gotta be some one ghost-writing...

So I grabbed a copy and sat down with it for a few seconds. It's the stories from the 50's, alright, exactly as I remembered them. More importantly, nothing like the film I've seen advertised.

It brought to mind authors rolling in their graves and whatnot. Especially considering there was a very good script written by Harlan Ellison for a very faithful "I, Robot" movie that Asimov actually signed off on back in the 80's.

The mind, it truly boggles

At this point, I barely even care. I've seen enough special repacks to know I don't want 'em. I do give them some credit for finally reusing the beautifully sculpted Bespin Capture Han Solo, but I guess I take the credit immediately away by seeing they're trying to reuse last year's horribly botched Emperor.

As for OTC repeating the mistakes of the FreezeFrame year, I've been worried about that since I first saw the line-up.

I keep thinking hopefully Wal*Mart/Target/TRU will set up large sections for the figures again this fall (they'd almost have to, what with the vehicles.) I also keep hoping the figure space gets divided equally between the vOTC  and OTC figures. At least then we'll have a sporting chance to find the 15 or so hits among the 50 or so clunkers. If not, well, history tells me I can always wait till 2006 when these all float back out at a dollar each clearance.

In the end, do I buy the premise that more kids will be looking for the toys based on the DVDs? No, I think the only time that has panned out was the original 1995 figures coming out at the time of the "new" VHS versions, and then it only worked because no one had sold Star Wars toys for ten years prior.