Every year, Atom Films hosts an online competition for Star Wars fan films. The film above, entitled "The Unconscious Sith" is a well-directed depiction of a young boy entering a comic book and moving from panel to panel, gradually becoming a Sith. It won the George Lucas Selects Award.
I'm not sure if that'll make you more or less likely to watch it.
One emerging Internet meme is to take Justin Bieber songs and slow the tempo by 800%. soundcloud user charliejane2 did something similar with eleven theme songs, including those to Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica.
Psychologist Sharon Lamb conducted a study on the influence of superhero role models on young boys, and thinks that the current crop have a generally bad influence on children:
"There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic book superhero of yesterday," said psychologist Sharon Lamb,
PhD, distinguished professor of mental health at University of Massachusetts-Boston. "Today’s superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he’s aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity. When not in superhero costume, these men, like Ironman, exploit women, flaunt bling and convey their manhood with high-powered guns."
The comic book heroes of the past did fight criminals, she said, "but these were heroes boys could look up to and learn from because outside of their costumes, they were real people with real problems and many vulnerabilities," she said.
Susana Polo of Geekosystem wrote a lengthy response to Lamb, noting the psychologist wrongly assumes that superhero narratives are primarily aimed at children:
While the superhero genre has well established tropes and rules, any genre can accommodate tonal shifts. No one would imply that Animal Farm represents a corruption of the talking animal genre of children’s literature. Fantasy doesn’t get called out for telling morally ambiguous stories.
There are comic book superheroes for kids, yes. Captain Marvel has had a kid oriented series lately, and then there’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and others. But the majority of comic book superheroes haven’t been written for small children for twenty years now.
Precisely. It's improper to assume that while the tone has shifted, the the intended audience has remained static. Parents should shield their children from superhero comics and movies that would do them emotional harm.
A few weeks ago, I extolled the greatness of the movie Kick-Ass, and a Facebook friend asked me if she should take her kids. I told her absolutely not. It's about kids being heroes, but it's not for kids at all.
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/08/macho-stereotype-unhealthy.aspx via Geekosystem | Image: kamillyonsia
The team that brought you the knock-off The Incredible HALKa now rips off/parodies Spider-Man.
College student Cheater Parker is a college student and enthusiast of photography and footography (that means that he likes to take pictures of feet). Parker is bitten by a spider and transformed into MakraMan!
Star Wars Uncut is a crowd-sourced project which divided Episode IV into fifteen second segments and then invited people to recreate and film them. All segments have been completed and compiled, and developer Casey Pugh is working on the legal issues that are delaying its release. Anyway, many clips are available at the link, which is the project page.
Link (self-starting sound) via blastr | Screenshot: Star Wars Uncut
One of the highlights of Star Wars Celebration V was that R2D2 tied the knot. You can watch the video of the grand spectacle here (warning: self-starting). He married Bonnie Burton, the editor of StarWars.com.
Really, she's deluding herself if she thinks that he's going to be faithful.
Google Translate isn't being terribly helpful, but I gather that this is a custom bike design (not a finished product) modeled after the transformable armor from Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. This series was integrated into the American Robotech universe by the late Carl Macek.
Meredith Woerner of io9 compiled a gallery of sixteen geeky wedding invitations, including professionally-made comic books and Star Trek and Star Wars-themed invitations. The ones pictured above are more straightforward, but nonetheless awesome. They're autographed by Joss Whedon and Nathan Fillion of Firefly.
YouTube user qcotms wrote lyrics for the orchestral music that opens Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this video, he performs them. At his YouTube channel, you can also hear his lyrics for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.
Ashtar Command is either a band or a New Age religious group, or both. At any rate, here is a performance of a band by that name of "Deadman's Gun", a song from the Red Dead Redemption soundtrack. Guitars, a string set, and an accordion -- great choices for a fine song.
Zork was a text-based computer game from the late 1970s loosely based on Dungeons & Dragons. Brian Gaines, the artist responsible, wrote:
I loved Zork so much that a high school buddy and I made ourselves stained glass windows of the logo in 1983. To the best of my knowledge, they are the only such windows in existence (but I could certainly be wrong)
LA-based artist Misha does a lot of pop culture work, including paintings featuring Super Mario Bros., Star Wars, The Big Lebowski, and Donkey Kong. The above work is modeled after Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Stan Lee, of course, is God.
It's been done before, but not this well. This one is finely executed, down to the warped film and John Williams theme played on a piano. It was made by a French team in 2007 and modified this past June.
