The World According To Star Wars
Hardcover | Kindle Edition | Audio CD
Written by Cass R. Sunstein
Dey Street Books
Release Date: May 31st, 2016

No one can deny the power of the Force as it permeates all aspects of American society (and other societies), including education and especially pop culture. It’s amazing how a silly little science fiction movie from the 1970s became a global phenomenon, spawning bunches of movies, television shows, books, and toys for billions of dollars. I remember sitting in a college mythology class reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and the professor said, “Luke Skywalker follows the cycle of the hero,” and I perked up. He really does. I, in turn, taught mythology to high school students and used Luke Skywalker (and Neo from Matrix). I’ve also discussed it right here on Geeks of Doom, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

And that is just a drop of what Cass R. Sunstein discusses in his soon-to-be-required-for-college text, The World According To Star Wars.

More below.

Just when you think you’ve watched all the cool videos possible on YouTube, here comes Real Fake History; short history inspired mockumentaries of fictional events in movies and TV history. As a entertainment geek/history teacher, this is like a wonderful conglomeration of everything I am into! Where else to start but with the series that might have the world’s largest and most vocal fanbase, Star Wars. The first RFH – Return of the Jedi’s “Battle of Endor.”

You MUST watch the video below. You’re welcome.

The truth: I was having trouble coming up with a Star Wars Day “May the Fourth” feature that would be just as good or better than what I wrote last year. I had more time then, I do a lot of reviews now, and my brain wasn’t working. Luckily, I ran into my friends Brad and Christine who provided me with an idea. Based on the passion with which they spoke about it, it seemed like something worth talking about, especially since “Hans shot first” is obviously out of the way. The question?

Why doesn’t Darth Vader or Obi-Wan acknowledge C-3PO (or R2-D2), when the former built Threepio as a child and hung around a lot with R2, and the latter spent so much time with them?

Walt Disney Studios, Lucasfilm Ltd., and 20th Century Fox announced today that they will soon be releasing all six movies in George Lucas‘ groundbreaking space fantasy saga Star Wars on Digital HD for the first time as The Star Wars Digital Movie Collection. Each film, from The Phantom Menace to Return of the Jedi, will come packaged with fan-pleasing bonus content, including interviews, documentaries, and deleted scenes.

You can check out a promotional video and a full breakdown of extra content here below.

As fans of the Star Wars franchise the world over prepare to celebrate this year’s May the 4th, I found myself giving serious consideration to writing something for Geeks of Doom in order to commemorate the occasion. After racking my brain for several constantly interrupted hours, I drew nothing but blanks.

It’s difficult for me to get excited about anything Star Wars-related this days; I’ve written news stories about the continuing developments behind the upcoming Episode VII even though I have little interest in them, but that’s part of the reason why I’m on the writing staff of this website. The stories have to be reported even though I may not care much about them because one or more of our readers certainly will. But the staggering drop in allure regarding the dauntless heroes and dastardly villains who inhabit the expansive universe that sprang forth from George Lucas‘ euphoric imagination more than four decades ago in my view wasn’t something that happened overnight. It took many unpleasant, heartbreaking years.

However, I came not to talk about how much Star Wars has disappointed me over time. May 4th is meant to be a day of remembrance and celebration. With that in mind I will instead document in brief to the best of my abilities the role Lucas’ creation has played in inspiring me to embrace my own evolving sense of wonder and take control of my intellectual maturation.

Last week we saw the release of the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. The teaser featured zero footage from the film but gave us a slideshow of promotional stills of the cast and concept art from Ralph McQuarrie. It was an interesting look at how the film was marketed in an age without the internet – back then there were no trailers for trailers.

Now the official Star Wars YouTube page has released the teaser trailer for Return of the Jedi, or as it was known by its first title before George Lucas decided to change it: Revenge of the Jedi. You can see the teaser below.

I remember in 1994 when George Lucas announced he was making the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. The announcement opened a door to over a decade in which I was able to channel my obsession with Star Wars into hunting down any and all tidbits of filming news. It was a fascinating and exciting period, and one of the things I learned from that time was an ability and skill to filter the facts from the rumors from the horseshit.

Star Wars was somewhat breaking new ground on the internet during that time, and it was the fans that were leading the charge. Sure there were many basement-dwelling neckbeards who became elitist trolls, but on the positive tread of the tire, it was the Star Wars fans who popularized the meme phrase "spoilers" in that early internet phase – and while there are cited examples of the phrase being used pre-internet, it truly was the Star Wars addicts that pushed it from web meme to culturally recognizable phrase.

Consequently here we are in a new exciting era in which we get to follow news and rumors and speculations on what we could possibly expect from Star Wars: Episode VII and the other chapters of the Sequel Trilogy. Having said that, we are in a completely new era now, with a lot of newer and younger fans out there, so I thought I would ramble on a bit about what we can expect, and the likelihood of certain elements arising.

Permit me to preface the list below by saying that I’ve held off from doing this article for some time. I wanted to wait until we at least had a confirmed director. And now we have, in the form of J.J. Abrams. But this also emphasizes an important aspect of Star Wars fan lore when it comes to new movies: EVERYTHING is rumor or speculation until confirmed by the official Star Wars site. This is almost biblical canon or Force Holocron or karma sutra or something to the hardcore SW nuts like me, and I can almost see the Prequel era speculators nodding their heads at this.

So here we go. Bear in mind, these are early days, and there are some only basic fundamentals we can ascertain right now. But at this point, in 2013, what can we possibly expect from Star Wars: Episode VII?