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?