Celebration IV: More artists and Robot Chicken

[lazypadawan]

starwars.com announced the last batch of artists selling prints at CIV. You've got Adam Hughes with a cheesecake Leia piece. Randy Martinez has an absolutely hilarious Sith rock band piece featuring Darth Maul, Darth Vader, Count Dooku, Palpatine, and General Grievous on drums. The backup singers are Mara Jade, Asajj Ventriss, and Aurra Sing. Matt Busch has a tribute to Impies and one guy is doing a piece featuring Padmé in all 38 of her costumes! With prints averaging about 50 bucks apiece and many with very limited runs, I don't know how I'm going to choose!

starwars.com also announced that Seth Green and the rest of the Robot Chicken crew will be at Celebration IV. I have mixed feelings about this. I suppose it's all right if the emphasis is on the SW special they are creating for Cartoon Network, set to air in June. Ditto for the "Family Guy" and "Fanboys" panels. Yes I know that without a new film to promote they need to fill up time with other things. But what sets Celebration apart from every other convention, including DragonCon or Comic Con, is that it's our party, not a generic sci-fi or pop culture convention. Once Celebration starts to be about other things, it's not as special anymore. There used to be many Star Trek-only cons in the late '80s/early '90s but by the mid '90s many of them became generic media fandom cons. The annual Grand Slam show in Pasadena for example. There's another annual Trek only show in Las Vegas now but the Grand Slam is now about every high concept t.v. show and movie franchise. It's great for those fans but if I were a Trekker, I'd be annoyed. Just sayin'.

Whatever the case may be, there's a trailer for the Robot Chicken SW special up now on starwars.com. I didn't know that Mark Hamill is voicing Luke! It looks pretty funny.

Comments

[may-child.livejournal.com]

The backup singers are Mara Jade

Boooooooooo, ssssssssssssssssss! ;-P

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I can see the media guests as having been invited because they "comment" to some small extent on Star Wars, not just because they might perhaps also market themselves to Star Wars fans... although I can see your point about diluting the experience.

I'm not quite sure about my own feelings on the Robot Chicken special, though. My sense of humour towards Star Wars seems to have become somewhat ground down over the years; what some people seem to mean as funny digs I just wince at and can only think of as savage yet overused attacks... Maybe, too, it doesn't help that quite soon after I saw the segment where the Emperor is reacting to Darth Vader's call, I saw (right where I wasn't expecting it, off-topic in the middle of a discussion I had been interested in up to that point) one of the stereotypical comments that it was "the only good thing to result from the prequels," apparently reminding them of the conviction that because Anakin was a "feeb," Darth Vader was "destroyed as a character..."

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

That's the unfortunate thing about fandom over the past 10 years...it's harder I think for us to laugh about SW. I had no problem with "Spaceballs." I used to write a lot of comedy fan fic. There's nothing wrong with having fun with SW. But a lot of us have been on the defensive for so long and with a lot of the more recent "satire" about SW denigrating the movies or the fans, we tend to look at comedy with a more cautious eye than we used to. It's unfortunate.

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I know about being cautious about comedy... in the process of searching out old MSTings to make them (a little more) available again, I found MSTings of the Star Wars movie scripts from around 1997... and glanced through them, decided they were too full of "weenie Luke" cracks for my liking, and didn't add them to my link pages.

Still, I think it's important to point out that, regardless of what I might think, George Lucas and Mark Hamill adding their own voices to the Robot Chicken special suggests they still have senses of humour about things.

[ladyaeryn.livejournal.com]

Hmmm - that discussion wasn't by chance at Slacktivist's blog, was it? (I know you've mentioned you visit there occasionally.) I was reading through the replies on one of his older entries the other day and saw comments that almost word-for-word match the ones you're mentioning.

I get what you mean, though, and I basically agree - aside from matril's RotS spoof (which is fine with me because I know she's definitely no basher) I don't remember the last time I've looked at a SW satire. I've come across one too many seeming 'satires' that were yet another thinly-veiled backhand at everything in SW that came after 1997. And LP's right, it is a shame we've felt the need to be so gun-shy.

As far as the Robot Chicken panel - if the friend I'm coming with wasn't a huge Buffy/Austin Powers/Robot Chicken fan, I have to question whether I'd be going. I did love Seth Green's turn as Oz on Buffy, but this isn't a Buffy con.

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

It was on slacktivist, yes... although I thought the fatal comment was a pretty recent one.

Given that that's as off-topic as the fatal comment itself, though, I've done a bit of thinking about the "destruction of Vader's character" accusations. Some people, I'm sure, were offended by Anakin's turn to the Dark Side not being the result of some calm, reasoned debate establishing just how terrific it would be... but I'm also wondering if some people also prefer villians who are monstrous because we don't know anything about their motivations. Palpatine's star seems to have been in the ascendency lately, and he's still very much an enigma... although if James Luceno's book about him ever materialises, for all I know that might change. (In any case, I had been worrying that a "calm, reasoned debate" couldn't be made to work out well on screen, and what really happened had a strong impact on me. As well, you could argue that Return of the Jedi started setting up that Vader turned back from the Dark Side because of issues involving individuals, not grand sweeping vagueness... although I suppose there are those who are still annoyed the new movies weren't out to somehow try and make RotJ an irrelevant appendix to the saga.)

[ladyaeryn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it was a fairly recent entry (the abortion one?); I just use "older" as a catch-all for all the ones I've missed.

I suppose there are those who are still annoyed the new movies weren't out to somehow try and make RotJ an irrelevant appendix to the saga.

I'd bet money on that. The prequels may have ran with the ball of developing Vader as a tragic human character instead of a purely evil iron-fisted badass, but it was RotJ that first threw that ball. No doubt many out there wish the PT had dropped it.

(Which does kind of remind me of one other bit of SW satire I have enjoyed... in Chasing Amy, the black guy ranting at a sci-fi convention about how racist the OT was against blacks, and that the gravest insult of all was RotJ removing the beautiful Nubian visage of Vader to reveal a "feeble, crusty, old white man." ;))