Star Wars Universe Thread: May The 4th Be With You

[ronaldo nazario]

There's a Thrawn 3.75 figure coming out, I pray a Black Series one follows.

I saw that, not too into the 3.75 figures cause I don't like the whack extra stuff they typically come with but the Trawn will be purchased.

 

[ronaldo nazario]

Announcement on online release dates and times for SDCC Black Series exclusives coming tomorrow according to yakface.

 

[rollout]

 
http://makingstarwars.net/2016/07/m...ng-in-development-live-action-star-wars-show/

You have to know that Disney wouldn't have bought the franchise for $4bn if they didn't think they could make their investment back many times over. Just like the Avengers, they have a very long-term strategy to milk the franchise for every dollar they can. That may sound bad, but we the fans really benefit from it as long as they continue to look at the long term and continue to give us long, interconnected story arcs, which are the most satisfying to consume.

I don't follow the lightsaber releases, but what's different about this ROTJ Luke saber vs previous releases... or is this the first release?! 

I believe this is the third time it's been re-released but the first time since 2009(?). They problem is they're never released in great numbers so people are always going crazy for them.

Hopefully, these will be easier this time around for everyone. It's one of the best looking lightsabers, IMO and I'm sure the hype for it will go through the roof once Luke busts it out in Ep. VIII

Luke's green lightsaber is the best-sounding lightsaber of the saga, IMO:

 

 

[ronaldo nazario]

jaypesoz I saw you got that Rey & BB-8...Pics coming soon? I'm now torn between this one and the one coming out later this year

 

[noblekane]

Has anybody watched that Lego free maker show?

 

[jaypesoz]

jaypesoz I saw you got that Rey & BB-8...Pics coming soon? I'm now torn between this one and the one coming out later this year

Yezzir. Crazy weekend with the Guns n' Roses concert and my daughter's first bday yesterday, so I haven't been able to pop the lid off yet. I hope to start taking pics either tonight or tomorrow or may just wait for my SDCC stuff to come in mid-week and just spend a couple hours taking pics of everything.

As of right now, my intention is to sell off this Rey. I really only wanted BB-8 and even though her Resistance outfit only got like 30 seconds of screen-time, I just prefer that version more.

 

[hennessy]

I copped the Obi and Kylo SDCC on eBay this past weekend. I needed the table w/ Leia hologram and FO banner/Vader helmet Still need Ahoska and Kanan

 

[ronaldo nazario]

I copped the Obi and Kylo SDCC on eBay this past weekend. I needed the table w/ Leia hologram and FO banner/Vader helmet Still need Ahoska and Kanan

Did you get a good price? Hasbro is supposedly announcing the online release times for the exclusives tomorrow. I'm gonna try to get them their before going and overpaying on ebay.

Also, I'm pretty sure Kanan and Ahsoka are both on Hasbro if you can find a free shipping deal or dont mind paying for shipping.

Yezzir. Crazy weekend with the Guns n' Roses concert and my daughter's first bday yesterday, so I haven't been able to pop the lid off yet. I hope to start taking pics either tonight or tomorrow or may just wait for my SDCC stuff to come in mid-week and just spend a couple hours taking pics of everything.

As of right now, my intention is to sell off this Rey. I really only wanted BB-8 and even though her Resistance outfit only got like 30 seconds of screen-time, I just prefer that version more.

Awesome, looking forward to it, I think I'm gonna end up getting the resistance one as well, but do let me know what you decide to do with the Rey you have.

 

[hennessy]

Ahsoka is OOS on Hasbro I already looked this morning. I paid $80 shipped for Kylo and $90 shipped for Obi. Saves me the headache of the online release which I'll probably miss out on any way. $44.99+$5 Tax+$10 Shipping for Obi comes out to $60 any way. Then Kylo would be about $50. Guess I paid $30 premium each but not bad considering it's SDCC and I've gotten pretty much all my other figures for retail. Still holding out to get Ahsoka and Kanan for retail. I think it's do able.

 

[ronaldo nazario]

Ahsoka is OOS on Hasbro I already looked this morning. I paid $80 shipped for Kylo and $90 shipped for Obi. Saves me the headache of the online release which I'll probably miss out on any way. $44.99+$5 Tax+$10 Shipping for Obi comes out to $60 any way. Then Kylo would be about $50. Guess I paid $30 premium each but not bad considering it's SDCC and I've gotten pretty much all my other figures for retail. Still holding out to get Ahsoka and Kanan for retail. I think it's do able.

Not bad, the only one I think I really want w/the extras is Obi-Wan, so if I strike out on that then I'll pay that premium. Kanan has been available on Amazon for a while now, if you have prime you get that free 2-day shipping.

 

[9th Wonder]

Do we know when the SDCC stuff will be on Hasbro's site?

 

[hennessy]

Do we know when the SDCC stuff will be on Hasbro's site?

http://www.hasbro.com/en-us/product...obi-pack:234F2E9E-5056-9047-F5E9-1E873EB3CFF0

UPDATE: Although subject to change, HasbroToyShop is planning on having the Convention Exclusives available to order on Tuesday, August 9th. The product will be located in the “EXCLUSIVES” category. No phone orders will be accepted. All Convention Exclusives are excluded from any promotions and discounts.

 

[CP1708]

View media item 2113243
Star Wars watchers have long wondered whether Obi-Wan oversold the benefits of being struck down.

Darth Vader, after all, was apprenticed to an emperor who’d already promised him unlimited power; what more might there be to imagine? And after becoming a bundle of laundry, Obi-Wan’s powers seemed like small-time stuff: interrupting interior monologues, visiting Hoth without wearing a parka, going to Dagobah without stepping in swamp. More like Obi-wah-wah-wah-waaah.

But the power Kenobi acquired wasn’t the kind that could flow from his fingertips; this was more of a martyrdom deal. By sacrificing himself, he helped Luke escape, which led to three triumphs he couldn’t accomplish in life: redeeming Anakin, defeating the Emperor, and power posing with his Force-hands hooked into his Force-belt (an influential look).

The same was true of Disney’s 2014 decision to strike down the Star Wars Expanded Universe. By wiping Star Wars’ slate clean, Disney de-canonized countless characters who’d been beloved by fans. But it also set the stage for The Force Awakens’ fresh concepts, such as Han and Leia’s son being swayed by the dark side, Luke being a bad teacher, the recovery of Luke’s lightsaber, and a Stormtrooper turning into a good guy. Wait — actually, all of those things were old EU ideas that J.J. Abrams recycled. (Paging James Cameron.) Future films remap more EU territory, including the Death Star–plans heist at the heart of Rogue One. Losing the previous (and in some cases conflicting) accounts is a small price to pay to see Ben Mendelsohn wear a white cape.

But there was one EU cast-off whom Star Wars fans still pined for, still speculated about, still thought they saw lurking in every plot outline and casting call. Their wishes went unanswered until last weekend, when presenters at Star Wars Celebration teased the third season of the Disney XD cartoon Star Wars Rebels. And two minutes into the trailer, the crowd knew it to be true: Good gawd, that’s Grand Admiral Thrawn’s music!

Grand Admiral Thrawn — that red-eyed, blue-skinned villain wearing a white uni much like Mendelsohn’s — was the single greatest casualty of the Star Wars Expanded Universe purge. It’s no stretch to say that Thrawn’s appeal to fans made most of the EU possible, and perhaps even inspired Lucas’s prequels. (We’ll forgive him for that.) Now Rebels is bringing him into the new canon his success helped create. EVERYBODY UP.

With Star Wars again minting money following The Force Awakens’ historic success, it’s hard to believe there was ever an era when no one was milking that lucrative license. But there was a dark time for the fan base. From the end of the original trilogy to the early 1990s, thirsty fans got their fix feeding quarters to aging arcade games, collecting failed action figures, catching short-lived cartoons, and subscribing to Bantha Tracks and The Lucasfilm Fan Club (sample feature: “Willow: Forget All You Know, or Think You Know”). No one was nudging Star Wars in different directions or proving that the franchise could lead a fulfilling life away from the screen. Like our own universe, whose expansion slowed and subsequently sped up again, the Star Wars universe needed another push after its initial eruption died down.

We can pinpoint the moment when that push was applied. This graph shows the number of Star Wars novels published by year:

View media item 2113241
See that tiny nub bravely poking out of the x-axis at 1991, ending an eight-year drought and beginning an unending deluge? That’s Heir to the Empire, the novel that introduced Thrawn. The explosion in Star Wars material that followed his debut might still have happened without him — at some point, someone was bound to make more — but Thrawn proved that EU-only characters could be just as memorable as the movies’, and that Star Wars side projects could sell. And the fan affection for him hasn’t ebbed over time: On the list of Wookieepedia’s longest pages (by byte size), Thrawn’s ranks 31st, directly between Leia’s and Han’s.

“You couldn’t have grown up a Star Wars fan without encountering Thrawn and Heir to the Empire,” Rebels executive producer Dave Filoni said at the trailer’s unveiling. “There weren’t new movies, and we were looking for new material, and all of a sudden there’s a trilogy of books called Heir to the Empire. Blew our minds. Like, ‘How could there be more?’ That was significant.”

Thrawn — and his creator, the author Timothy Zahn — pulled off the unprecedented by breaking the mold. Onscreen Star Wars had many iconic characters, but few complex characters. There were good guys and bad guys, and occasionally someone switched sides (looking at you, Lando), but in any given scene there was rarely any doubt about where our loyalties lay. Most Imperials were colorless, incompetent, or pure evil, wan white guys who adhered to regulations and spoke with clipped Coruscanti (a.k.a. English) accents. Thrawn, whose race slowed his rise through the ranks, was an alien among human supremacists, a pragmatist among tyrants, a tactical genius and fiercely loved leader who came by his brilliance without flashing any Force powers. (In fact, he defused them.) He was Khan crossed with Sherlock Holmes, deducing his enemies’ weaknesses by studying their species’ art. His Empire, reeling from in-fighting five years after Endor, was almost an underdog.

Heir to the Empire and its two sequels had the signifiers of Star Wars — the movie-poster-style covers, the opening scenes of Star Destroyers slicing through space, the presence of Lucas’s characters — but they felt more like cerebral sci-fi than Flash Gordon. Star Trek had thought-provoking plotlines and quiet, internal turmoil; Star Wars had swashbuckling blaster fights and a Joseph Campbell copycat. Each was a winning formula, and the Thrawn books combined both, like a mind meld of Han Solo with Spock. Like Spock, Thrawn had an unpronounceable, apostrophe-filled first name, a rational mind, and emotional quirks that made him too “human” for comfort among his own kind. Cultured, controlled, and not needlessly cruel, he fought for the bad guys but was so hard to hate that his EU cotillion came to be known as “the Thrawn trilogy,” no small feat for a series that also starred Han, Leia, and Luke.

The trilogy’s rep was undoubtedly burnished by the Star Wars wasteland that preceded it; subsequent Zahn-Thrawn efforts, while well regarded, didn’t cause quite the same stir. But there was no way they could have, because the first three Thrawn books had already broken the seal, reportedly selling more than 15 million copies combined by 2002. The wormhole was open, and the EU poured through.

Like the Thrawn trilogy, Rebels has carved out its own corner of the galaxy far, far away, creating its own original roster and appealing to viewers across the key demos in that distinctively Star Wars way. When Rebels returns in the fall, Thrawn (voiced by Lars Mikkelsen, adding to the Mikkelsen family’s Lucasfilm fortune) will be joining a series that was fun from the start and got even stronger in its second season. A new book by Zahn will rewrite Thrawn’s origin story next spring. After that, he’ll come off the bench for future appearances — video games, movies, bar mitzvahs — leaving another Heir to the Empire original, Mara Jade, as many fans’ most-missed EU exile.

Conflict over the fates of old properties — whether to resurrect them or let them be part of the past — extends beyond Star Wars. It’s sad to see the plug pulled on any virtual world, but as our culture cranks out new content, it sometimes plunders the old, even if the “old” isn’t over. A few weeks ago, Daybreak Games shut off the PlanetSide server after a 13-year run. As meteors fell from the sky in a programmed extinction event, thousands of players cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. When I watched its death throes, I felt a disturbance, but Daybreak’s decision was logical. Deadheading a drooping franchise might make it bloom, and it was probably time for the faithful to try a new game. (Possibly PlanetSide 2.)

Sequels and reboots can bring the best of the old worlds with them, but there’s danger in saving something just to send a fan-servicey signal that the creators and consumers are on the same side. Sitting onstage at a Star Wars Con and delivering an applause line like Filoni’s “I know you guys wanted it, and we wanted it too” is seductive, but the decision also has to serve the story. As Filoni added, “Thrawn was always on the list, and we were just trying to figure out what’s the right moment and how big a deal do we make out of that. I think the biggest thing is, you get a character like that that everybody likes that’s a really great villain, you are cautious on a weekly series to put them into a ‘Oh, he lost again,’ and ‘Darn, those crazy rebels got away from me.’ And you can’t play him that way. He’s way too smart.”

Midway through Heir to the Empire, Thrawn explains the difference between an error and a mistake. “Anyone can make an error,” he says. “But that error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” It was an error to deprive Star Wars fans of the figure who helped fan the flames of the franchise. Fortunately, Lucasfilm didn’t make a mistake.

 

[9th Wonder]

http://www.hasbro.com/en-us/product...obi-pack:234F2E9E-5056-9047-F5E9-1E873EB3CFF0

Thank you sir! Repped

 

[...So]

.

 

[big j 33]

I had to stop that lightsaber video... it was freaking me out hearing that over and over again 

 

[rollout]

 
I had to stop that lightsaber video... it was freaking me out hearing that over and over again 

 

[CP1708]

Star Wars Books
‏@swbooks Star Wars Books Retweeted Jedi-Bibliothek
Original #Thrawn Trilogy to be re-released in US on 27th Sept. with new covers, full details tba

 

[...So]

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[rollout]

No doubt with the Legends label slapped on it. Shame on them for passing it around again to make money off of it without giving it the respect (it deserves) of being considered "Canon" 

 

 

[jays25]

A lot of EU stories deserve to be considered canon.

 

[CP1708]

I'm just thinking out loud, I don't really expect it to come to fruition, but they KNOW the popularity of Thrawn. They saw people like me screaming when they dismissed the EU as Legends. I get why they did it, but they also KNOW there is stuff in there they really should use.

What if.....

They bring Thrawn in, Rebels first, a book next year, get him in the Canonized universe, let him simmer, movies come and go, maybe he makes an appearance somewhere, a Fett spinoff, or Han, or another one we haven't even heard of yet, etc.

Then, down the line, 7-8-9 are done, we're on spin offs only, Old Republic movies, other projects, yada yada yada, and here we are, 2024, they say oh hey, we're going to do the Heir to the Empire trilogy after all, recast young Luke, the new "young" Han Solo, new Leia, and here's Mara Jade, Talon Karrde, C'Baoth, Nogirhi, and so on.

Not sayin it's likely. But I wonder if they have a way they can pull it off, and if they do.......all the money. ALL, of the money. ALL OF IT. Thrawn trilogy on the big screen would decimate wallets globally. Even people that would be pissed off about newer, younger Luke's Leia's etc would still be there opening day.


Eh, maybe it's nothin. But they brought Thrawn back for a reason. They know what he means to the universe. ****, even if they only did Outbound Flight I'd be down with it.

 

[...So]

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[...So]

.

 

[Sinner]

Went to a toy show today... 

Han looks good...

So does Luke...

And GONK!!!