Once upon a time, someone somewhere created a sleeping bag re-creation of the Tauntaun corpse that Luke Skywalker used for warmth in that classic scene from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. This someone was greatest online store ever created (proclaimed by I, anyway), ThinkGeek, and it was actually just a little April Fools silliness. Well, the gag was so popular, that people were called, papers were rustled, and ThinkGeek was given permission by George Lucas and Lucas Films to actually produce the sleeping bag, and you…yes, YOU can go and own one soon.

The sleeping bag (seen above, click to go large) is made of a nice, soft Tauntaun fur, and the inside is over-flowing with the natural comfort of intestinal embrace. Better yet (and my personal favorite touch) is the inclusion of a little lightsaber zipper, that allows you to cut open your desperate escape from the freezing cold winter every single time you use it!

Donald Faison, who plays Turk on the television comedy Scrubs, made an appearance last week on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon promoting his new movie Next Day Air, which is up against Star Trek this weekend.

Faison said that he was more a Star Wars fan than a Trek fan and that he’s seen The Empire Strikes Back, his favorite movie of the saga, over 300 times. He said it was his love of the film that introduced him to stop-motion animation, which he learned to do as a child and even has a stop-motion animation studio in his home now.

Faison said if he were to pitch a Star Wars story to George Lucas, it would be The Chronicles of Lando Calrissian, starring himself as the title character and taking place prior the events of Empire when Lando still had the Millennium Falcon before he lost it to Han Solo in a Sabacc game. To help his pitch, he even created a short stop-motion animated clip, which he showed on the late night talk show.

The stop-motion clip is cute and adorable and Faison’s pitch is quite honestly something I’ve LOVE to see made into a television series. You can watch the interview segment with Faison, which includes the stop-motion clip, here below.

For those of you interested, there’s already a trilogy of pre-Empire Lando Calrissian books written by L. Neil Smith called Star Wars: The Lando Calrissian Adventures, which you can get for only $7.99 — definitely worth the read.

For fans of both Star Wars and Star Trek alike (and I’m sure there’s plenty of us out there), here’s a photoshopped cross-universe mash-up of Princess Leia kissing Captain Kirk.

Click the image at right for the image in all its full geekgasm glory.

Check out the video below of the true scene from Empire Strikes Back of Princess Leia kissing Han Solo (that’d be on p. 107 for those of us with these blue paperback novelization).

Earlier this week, twelve new images from J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek XI were released online. One of them shows Chris Pine as the young James Kirk climbing out of what seems to be an escape pod from the USS Enterprise which landed within an icy crater.

At first I didn’t think anything of this scene, of which producer Damon Lindelof confirmed occurs midway through the film. Lindelof also alluded that this does not take place on Earth — not so surprising for the Trek universe.

But then pictures taken of this film set in Los Angeles appeared online, namely one that shows a cardboard stand-in of a creature (which most likely will be inserted with CGI later) that looks suspiciously like the Wampa Ice Creature. (A cropped, tiny watermarked version of the image is here at right, but you get the picture.)