Three words: Holy frelling dren!
Alternate review: “Boom. Boom boom boom. Boom boom. Boom! Have a nice day!”
Category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Gondor Found!
After four drive-bys, I finally managed to get a picture of the Gondor street sign. It was far enough away that it’s barely readable (this is the native resolution on a 5 megapixel image — it’s not shrunk, it’s just cropped). Eventually I ought to turn onto a side street, park the car, and walk to a nice vantage point instead of just holding the camera with one hand while zooming by and hoping I get an image.
I’ve updated Living in Middle Earth.
Sci-Firewire
You know how you see some numbers in one context so often that you think of that meaning when you see them somewhere else? Seriously: If you’ve spent a lot of time on the web and you notice the clock reading 4:04, or a price coming up as $4.04, etc., chances are you find it funny, right? It’s like realizing that someone’s initials are A.T.M.
Well, I was looking at the Star Wars Trilogy on Amazon and noticed it had 1394 reviews:
I saw that number, and my mind instantly thought “Firewire.”
(Yes, the question of the day is, “How can I make a post about Star Wars even more geeky?”)
Revise and Rewrite
Yes, Star Wars has changed again [archive.org].
Looking at the comparisons, it seems most of the changes really have just been cleanup. They finally fixed the compositing in the Rancor pit, for instance. And some of the Special Edition bits that didn’t work quite right, like the Jabba scene in A New Hope, have been redone. (He now looks closer to the Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace versions.) They’ve also cleared up some continuity glitches. Nothing wrong with that — I’m all for fixing things that are genuinely broken.
Then there’s the annoying stuff:
- Han and Greedo shooting simultaneously is better than the Special Edition… but really, there was no reason to change it in the first place. Han’s a smuggler, and he was in an obvious shoot-or-be-shot situation. Why not just restore it?
- Inserting Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker. Again, not necessary.
First of all, under the helmet he’s so smashed up you can’t even tell it’s him in the new version.(Edit: Oops — it turns out it isn’t him in that first scene. They just erased the original actor’s eyebrows.) Secondly, what was wrong with the shot of his ghost? I suppose they appealed to continuity, but if they really cared that much they’d have waited until Jake Lloyd grew up so they could use him in Episode II. (It also doesn’t help that he looks younger than Mark Hamill.) - Since the Hayden Christensen rumor turned out to be true, I really hope they haven’t decided to insert a gratuitous Natalie Portman flashback to the “Do you remember your mother?” scene (as has also been rumored). Nothing against Natalie Portman, I just don’t see how it will add anything. More likely it would break the scene up.
Anyway, for those who want to skip the commentary, here’s the USA Today article and here’s the side-by-side comparisons.
Update 9/10: Here’s another writeup that goes into more detail on the changes and reviews the DVD set as a whole.
Effective Oxymorons
On the way to work this morning, Katie noticed one of those ubiquitous catering trucks and remarked, “With a name like ‘Superior Coffee,’ you know it probably isn’t.” It’s a useful guideline: if a company has to tell you something is gourmet, for instance, that means it can’t count on its reputation alone.
That reminded me of a story David Weber told at a convention about the first Honor Harrington book. They were almost ready to go to press when he got a call from his editor.
“I’ve been thinking. Your viewpoint characters are in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The villains are the Republic of Haven. Isn’t that backwards? Shouldn’t the monarchy be the bad guys?”
They went back and forth a bit, until one of them said, “What if it’s the People’s Republic of Haven?”
They agreed that was a good solution, and then proceeded to look through the proofs for a place where they could insert the word without moving the page breaks around. As I recall, he said they only found one spot, and possibly the map, but he used the full name in the rest of the series.
Living in Middle Earth
A few years ago I lived in the city of Lake Forest (formerly El Toro) for a bit. One of the interesting things about Lake Forest is its collection of streets named after characters and places in Lord of the Rings. (And yes, these were around long before the movies were made.)
I still drive past Gondor Drive on my way back from the comic store, and I’ve been meaning to get a picture of the street sign for a while. It turned out to be too hard to shoot without actually aiming, so I turned onto a smaller street where I knew I could catch Elrond Lane:
Other Tolkien-inspired streets include: Buckland Lane, Bywater Road (and it is at least near water), Rivendell Drive, Shadowfax Drive and Brandywine Lane.
While checking the Thomas Guide for some of the ones I missed, I just discovered a neighborhood with Sesame Street, Muppet Lane, Big Bird, Oscar, Grover, and Cookie Monster. And Kurmit [sic], though I suppose that could be a typo.
And then there’s Dana Point, which has the Street of the Green Lantern. Of course, it has about 20 named Street of the fill-in-the-blank Lantern — Blue, Amber, Golden, Silver, Violet, etc. [Update: Here are some Green Lantern Street photos.]
Update Sep. 24: Here’s a blurry picture of the Gondor street sign:
One door closes…
Since we’ve started showing Babylon 5 to a new group, I’ve been surfing the Lurker’s Guide and other sites. I came across an interesting tidbit about the spinoff series Crusade that I had forgotten.
At the point that TNT cancelled Crusade (13 episodes into filming, and months before it aired), Warner Bros. tried to sell it to the Sci Fi Channel. SciFi was interested in picking it up — and they actually did buy the rights to show reruns of B5 — but they had already committed their original-programming budget to several new shows. No mention of what shows they were, but…
Something jogged my memory. “What year was this?” I checked; it was 1999. “What year did Farscape start?” Sure enough, 1999.