Author: M. Dean Cooper

The Pitch – Rebels Bottle Episodes

Posted on September 19, 2014by , , , , and

A handful of you will find this hilarious.

While we’re only a couple of weeks away from the official premiere of Star Wars Rebels, it may be a while yet before we really know on a macro level what the show is about. The Inquisitor, after all, doesn’t even join the party until later on—and it remains to be seen just how big of a presence he’ll be in the first season as a whole, to say nothing of future seasons. The same goes for Lothal—it’s the heroes’ base of operations for now, but forever? I doubt it.

So with that in mind, I asked the others to pitch their ideas for what you might call Rebels “bottle” episodes. Colloquially, a bottle episode of a TV show is a standalone story designed to be produced entirely using existing sets and contracted actors, meaning it can be produced for a bare minimum of expense—often these will show up to allow for something particularly extravagant elsewhere in the season.

While I didn’t hold them to the “cheap” part, I did mandate that the story be entirely self-contained, so it could theoretically go anywhere in the first season without getting in the way of whatever the larger arc turns out to be. Here are their ideas. Read More

A New Dawn: The Staff Reacts

Posted on September 12, 2014by , , and

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When a book is as hotly anticipated as A New Dawn, just one review might not be good enough. Several of us at Eleven-ThirtyEight were able to make our way through it over the last couple weeks, and in order to give everyone a chance to speak their mind, myself, Ben Wahrman, Jay Shah, and Rocky Blonshine got together last weekend for some informal Aggressive Negotiations.

It’s been a while, so if you’re unfamiliar with this series, all you need to know is that it’s basically a low-key chat session with only loose moderation, and no holds barred—no censorship, no editing, no typo repair. Enjoy!

 

 

Mike: Let’s start with general impressions of the book itself. Was it pretty much what everyone was hoping for?

Ben: pretty much, yeah

Rocky: even better.

Ben: i loved Kenobi, and this was about on that level, but different

Mike: i’m not as over-the-moon about it as i was Kenobi, but it was definitely classic JJM

Jay: More or less. I wanted confirmation that EU would still be used, especially background information. And I was hoping that it would make the characters from Rebels seem interesting.

Rocky: I was so scared that this book wouldn’t feel like the EU we know and love, but it had a lot of the feel of classic EU stuff. Read More

The Minority Report: A New Dawn

Posted on September 10, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

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As you may well know, dear readers, I have always taken a special interest in the state of diversity in the Star Wars franchise, and Expanded Universe in particular. One of the first recurring series I commissioned for Eleven-ThirtyEight was Michael Lind’s Go Figure, in which he broke down and analyzed a wide range of demographic data from the Galaxy Far, Far Away, with a special focus on race and species prevalence.

After the reboot was announced, of course, Michael’s impressive pool of data was effectively useless—and so Go Figure came to an end, and I picked up the baton. Beginning with my article No Gays in Space last May, I’ve seized upon the reboot (much like the Story Group) as an opportunity to start afresh, and build a new database from the ground up. My own methodology differs quite a bit from Michael’s, though; while interesting, the exact number of Twi’leks is of less concern to me than one basic fact: how many straight white guys there are.

More thorough explanations of my personal Diversity Scoring system can be found at the above links, but as this constitutes the beginning of a new series, I’ll reiterate very briefly—a Diversity Score is the percentage of characters in a story who are anything other than straight, white, human men. Historically I’ve gone off a given story’s Dramatis Personae (the cast of characters often presented at the beginning of a SW novel), but as I’m attempting to be as thorough as possible, my new policy is to count, as best I can, all named characters. In the case of the six films, given their status as the most visible and inviolate elements of the canon, I have gone by the full casts as listed in their end credits. While I presented rough scores for the saga (as well as The Clone Wars) back in May, I’ve since had the opportunity to work straight from the films (as opposed to Wookieepedia) and I present the following as my final scores for the Star Wars Canon. Read More

Rebels Revisited: Prequel Shorts

Posted on September 5, 2014by and Feature Articles

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With just under a month to go until the official premiere of Star Wars Rebels‘ first two episodes, the franchise’s hyperdrive is pretty much locked in—the first tie-in novel is out, the merch is starting to appear on shelves, there’s some kind of weird bag thing happening at Subway, and as of last Monday, all four preview character shorts are available to the public (and below!). Brief vignettes taking place apart from the main action of the series, these four 3-minute videos serve as our introductions to the cast of Rebels in action, and even more importantly, to the show’s tone and style.

So now that they’re out, this seemed like a good opportunity to introduce our own walking, talking Rebels coverage machine—new staff writer and longtime contributor, Ben Wahrman. Ben has foolhardily (is that a word?) agreed to write a piece covering each episode of Rebels’ upcoming first season—since the premiere is two episodes, that’s fifteen pieces in total. Myself or others may weigh in here and there, but the plan is for Ben to be the backbone of Eleven-ThirtyEight’s Rebels operation. Read More

The Dark Horses of Dark Horse Comics

Posted on August 29, 2014by and Feature Articles

xwrs-wedgeSome of my earliest memories of Star Wars fandom are of searching my local comic book store for trade paperbacks of X-Wing: Rogue Squadron. Huge book stores were still in vogue back in the nineties, so odds were good that the only thing between me and whichever novel I’d decided to read next for my Great Bantam Catch-Up of ’97-’99 was a quick trip to Media Play or Borders. Catching up on the comics was another matter—something “mainstream” like Dark Empire wasn’t too hard to track down, but there were at least six trade collections of XWRS already in print by the time I got around to it, and a couple more on the way—and that’s not counting the first story arc, The Rebel Opposition, which wasn’t collected until the first XWRS Omnibus several years later.

For sixteen-year-old me, just figuring out which TPB came next was something of a challenge; actually finding the damned thing in tiny little Seeley & Kane’s a couple blocks from my house was far more uncertain. I eventually managed, of course, but if those trades hadn’t been out there, I’d have stood virtually no chance of finding the original issues, meaning I wouldn’t have had another shot at reading the series until the aforementioned Omnibus set much, much later.

All this is to say that it’s incredibly heartening to see the announcement this week of Marvel’s first Star Wars “Epic Collection” TPB, including much of Dark Horse’s post-Revenge of the Sith material, some of which is less than a couple years old. Regardless of the Legends banner on the front, Dark Horse’s Star Wars catalog includes some of—no, many of—the best SW stories ever told, and I’m thrilled to know that the comics license changing hands doesn’t mean new generations of fans will lose access to that material; at least not all of it. Read More