Category: Simple Tricks

Rest in Peace, Aaron Allston

Posted on February 28, 2014by Feature Articles

AaronAllstonAs you’ve likely heard by now, longtime Star Wars author Aaron Allston passed away suddenly yesterday after collapsing at VisionCon in Branson, Missouri. The news came late last night and threw us all for a bit of a loop, so we’ll be taking an extra day off to collect our thoughts, and we’ll be back with those on Monday.

Our thoughts are with Aaron’s friends and family, including the seemingly limitless number of fans who had the pleasure of getting to know him at a convention or three. Aaron wasn’t just one of our franchise’s best writers, he was one of us.

Yub yub, Aaron. And frothing disease to your enemies.

Rebels, Kanan Jarrus, and the Race Factor

Posted on February 24, 2014by Feature Articles

As the last episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars find their way into the light of day, one era of televised Star Wars comes to a close and a new one dawns. The Clone Wars are over, the Empire has risen, and the dark times are upon us as Star Wars: Rebels prepares to premiere this fall. Slowly but surely, we’re learning what Rebels has to offer the Star Wars universe, including a cast of characters that appears as diverse in origin and personality as they are of ethnicity.

While the creative team behind the new series first tempted fans with images of the new villain—an Imperial Inquisitor, a chalk-white and black armored member of the Pau’an race—and showed off the cantankerous little astromech droid named Chopper, our first real look at the flesh-and-blood heroes of Rebels came in the form of the Jedi-in-hiding Kanan Jarrus. Kanan’s story is a familiar one to fans of the Star Wars Expanded Universe: a Jedi who escaped Order 66 flees into the unknown, growing distant from the life he’d led in order to evade the dangers of the Galactic Empire’s Jedi purge. What separates Kanan from the likes of Dark Times’ Dass Jennir or Coruscant Nights’ Jax Pavan, is that Kanan, whom early reports posit as the unofficial head of Rebels’ group of protagonists, appears to be a leading man of color.
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Rebels, Greg Weisman, and the Disney Factor

Posted on February 21, 2014by Feature Articles, Sidelong Glance

Ghost_crew_shenanigans

As more and more information has been revealed about the upcoming TV show Star Wars: Rebels, including a couple of recent teaser trailers, a fissure has opened in the fandom. Just like The Clone Wars before it, the prospect of an animated series oriented toward a younger audience has a polarizing effect on most fans. A sampling of YouTube comments on the recently released teasers (not usually a healthy practice) shows a clear divide, with some voices praising the return of beloved elements like TIE fighters and stormtroopers, while others complain about the prospect of a teenaged character in one of the lead roles, already decrying the show as looking worse than TCW.

Of course, all of this is speculative and uninformed, since as of the writing of this article, the show is still several months away from airing. We know almost nothing about what the plot or arc of the show will be, and nothing about any of the cast aside from three character profiles and leaked pictures of toys. All we know for sure is who will be working on the show behind the scenes: Dave Filoni, who headed up The Clone Wars after Henry Gilroy departed in season 2, Simon Kinberg, writer of X-Men: First Class who is involved with the story of both Rebels and (according to rumors) the live-action movies looming on the horizon, and Greg Weisman, writer and producer of numerous lauded and praised cartoons over the years.
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Take No Prisoners

Posted on February 14, 2014by Feature Articles

There’s a theory that Star Wars is a simple story of good guys and bad guys, in which the heroic, idealistic Rebels, overthrow the evil, oppressive Empire.

But come on. We all know that a lot more complicated than that.

No?

Does the phrase “Death Star Daycare” mean anything to you?

No, it’s not one of those quirky little comic strips in Star Wars Tales. It’s the observation that Grand Moff Tarkin’s technological terror is so darn big that it probably contains an awful lot of ordinary people in its massive crew. Military families. Imperial Army brats. Ordinary enlistees from the Mid Rim who just joined up to see the galaxy.

And Luke Skywalker blew them all up.
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Star Travel and You – Why It Probably Shouldn’t Look Like That

Posted on February 10, 2014by Feature Articles, Guest Editorials

Star Wars is perhaps the most iconic mythology of the last century. Even if someone has never watched one of the movies, they know what a stormtrooper looks like. They can recognize a lightsaber. And moon-sized superweapons and the Force pervade every-day references. And yet, despite the impact of this great science-fiction epic, Star Wars has made a lot of mistakes in the “science” part of “science fiction”.

In fact, many of the trappings that we know and love are more for visual effect rather than practicality. And this is not limited to the generic details of the world, but the entire way that we perceive the culture of Star Wars functioning.

Some parts are far more obvious than others. Any Star Wars fan is used to great armies traversing the galaxy on a whim, fighting battles on planets halfway across the galaxy from each other in the same week, or even the same day. And yet, real space travel is prohibitively expensive. Like any technology, the price will eventually become more affordable the more advanced a society becomes, but that barrier will never be totally removed.
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