Star Wars Prequels

I’m a Star Wars fan and I really enjoyed the prequels.

Yeah, I said it.

In fact, I really enjoyed them.

Yeah, they had flaws, the acting was awkward in places but the acting was awkward in places during the Original Trilogy too. What about the times Carrie Fisher used a British accent and then dropped it in the next scene? Anakin was “whiney” in the prequels? Go back and listen to Mark Hamill’s delivery of the “Going to Tochii Station to pick up some power converters.”

Bah. I could go on and on with commenting about the fans reaction to the Prequels. Take a trip over to the most popular Star Wars fan forum at TheForce.net… head into the prequel threads and see how insane it is. Sure there are plenty of people who love the movies, but there are some folks who act like George Lucas gave their Grandma a wedgie before kicking their puppy into traffic. The reactions are startling to me, really. There seems to be no room to take a step back and enjoy the movies...it’s just frame-by-frame, line-by-line microscopic critique of every second of these movies. I think if some of these fans just took a deep breath and watched the movies without the 20 plus years of preconceived ideas of what they think should happen, they might actually have fun.

But what’re you gonna do? I’m fighting a losing nerd-battle against other nerds making me the biggest nerd of all.

Anyway, I picked up Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days the other day and it’s the best Making of Star Wars book I’ve ever read. Written by Prequel Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll with 100’s of behind the scenes pictures that I’ve never seen before, it’s a great read. If you’re a fan of the movies, you’ll love the book.

Plus, take a look through the Prequel section of the book and you’ll be stunned by how many models were used for sets, ships, etc. A big blast on these movies is the overuse of CGI, but the model making was amazing for these movies, it was used a lot more that people realize.

On the LazyComix front, I’m about to start working on the newest NYComix. I have one more panel on a Pixelstrip page to finish up which will give me a few weeks free to work on some other stuff including a Lettering Tutorial for Pixelstrips. Which is pretty neat and I hope it’ll be an informative article that will help some web comic creators out.
I’ll keep you posted.
--Randy