Sci-Fi Storm

Star Wars Weekends have started at Disney’s Hollywood Studios – and this year, not only is the “Carbon-Freeze Me” back, but they’ve added a new one, and this one looks even better – you can have your head scanned and be made into a Stormtrooper figurine!

Inside The Magic’s Ricky Brigante is planning on doing it again this year…can’t wait to see the results! And follow us on Twitter as we’ll be there in a few weeks, and we’ll be taking lots of pictures, and perhaps see a few friends as well!

Update: Watch as Ricky gets his face scanned! Alas, production and delivery will take until July, so we’ll follow up with the results – but they look quite detailed.
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After having closed down LucasArts, who produced a lot of the games in the Star Wars universe along with others, Disney has signed an exclusive multi-year deal with EA to produce future Star Wars games, who will farm them out to its game studios.

This follows the “licensing model” that Disney announced when it closed LucasArts. LucasArts already did some licensing – including to EA, whose BioWare division produced the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic.

From the press release:

BURBANK and REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 6, 2013 — The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) and Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced a new multi-year exclusive licensing agreement to develop and publish globally new games based on Star Wars characters and storylines.

Under the agreement, EA will develop and publish new Star Wars titles for a core gaming audience, spanning all interactive platforms and the most popular game genres, while Disney will retain certain rights to develop new titles within the mobile, social, tablet and online game categories.

“This agreement demonstrates our commitment to creating quality game experiences that drive the popularity of the Star Wars franchise for years to come,” said John Pleasants, Co-President of Disney Interactive. “Collaborating with one of the world’s premier game developers will allow us to bring an amazing portfolio of new Star Wars titles to our fans around the world.”

“Every developer dreams of creating games for the Star Wars universe,” said EA Labels President Frank Gibeau. “Three of our top studios will fulfill that dream, crafting epic adventures for Star Wars fans. DICE and Visceral will produce new games, joining the BioWare team which continues to develop for the Star Wars franchise. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.”

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

This will be a trivia question that will trip even some experts up: What science fiction series did David Tennant receive an Emmy nomination for?

Doctor Who‘s 10th Doctor, David Tennant, who will return to that role in the upcoming 50th Anniversary special episode, is now an Emmy nominee – but not for his well known role, or probably one that you’d expect at all…but for a guest stint he did on the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars!

Tennant twice voiced the role of Huyang, a droid who is also a master lightsaber builder – in fact, he seems something of a cross between a droid and Ollivander from the Harry Potter franchise, where he guides some young padawans on the art of constructing a lightsaber.

Sam Witwer, currently starring in Syfy’s Being Human, also received a nomination for his voicing of the revived Darth Maul. When we talked to Sam last December, he said of playing in the Star Wars universe:

“It’s every bit as cool as you’d think – it turns you into a bigger fan that you were before. I was already a huge Star Wars fan, and really knew my stuff, but just sort of working for these guys…it can be all consuming. It’s really, really fun. I dreamed of working on a Star Wars project since I was a kid. So to actually contribute to that mythology in my own small way is a tremendous privilege and an honor, and a great responsibility as well, because you don’t want to get it wrong. It’s a wonderful mythology. The Clone Wars have gotten so good at telling stories in that world, it’s fascinating. It’s really fascinating. Especially to be Darth Maul, to bring this really, really dark element to the show is challenging, to keep it within the confines of Star Wars, but at the same time make it psychologically messed up, interesting like that. And I’ll tell you, if people think they’ve seen dark, they haven’t yet. It gets horrifically dark in upcoming episodes this season. People will see why the first several episodes of this season, that there are lighter episodes, because they are trying to balance out some very, very dramatic stuff that happens when the dark comes.”

In addition to Tennant and Witwer being up for the Emmy for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program, Jim Cummings also received a nomination for his role of Hondo Ohnaka.

Clone Wars also received nominations for Outstanding Directing in an Animated Program (Supervising Director Dave Filoni and Kyle Dunlevy, Brian Kalin O’Connell, Steward Lee,and Bosco Ng), Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Animation (David Acord and Cameron Davis), Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction and Composition (Kevin Kiner) and Outstanding Special Class Animated Program.

As an animated program, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is part of the Daytime Emmy Awards, which will be presented June 16th.

I know we’ve all been wanted new Star Wars – quality Star Wars at least – but is Disney getting a little too crazy? Reports abound that Disney is planning to release a new Star Wars feature every year. Starting with Episode VII in 2015, and alternating with standalone efforts at least until the third trilogy is done.

Is this too aggressive? Could this flood the market, so to speak, and give too much supply for the demand?

I guess it’s better than betting everything on a single feature, and it does seem to explain how they’ve redirected pretty much every single resource available at Lucasfilm at the features at the expense of other projects like Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the games…

LucasArts, the LucasFilm division and computer game studio that brought us some classic games including many of the Star Wars titles, has been closed. New corporate parent Disney, who has shuttered some of it’s own game studios, announced the move today, canceling in-progress games like Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault and laying off all the staff.

It appears that Disney will instead concentrate on licensing properties to other game studios, which LucasArts had also done – BioWare/EA produced the current MMO game Star Wars: The Old Republic.

LucasArts produced some of my favorite games of yesteryear: I remember their very first game, Ballblazer (and programming a clone on my C-64 at the time). Star Wars: Jedi Knight – Dark Forces II was the game for which I got my first 3D video card, and the difference was amazing (and I still have the mini-lightsaber that came with it, and it still works, with the original batteries.) Secrets of Monkey Island was one of the more interesting early graphical adventures. and I loved combat flight simulators, so I was thrilled to pilot an X-Wing against the Empire…

More recently LucasArts was hit-or-miss. While scoring decent hits with some Star Wars titles like Knights of the Old Republic, Battlefront and The Force Unleashed (starring our friend Sam Witwer, currently starring in Being Human), it seemed to have issues when producing sequels to some games, in some cases forcing their releases too soon. And the release of Kinect Star Wars for the XBox 360, what seemed like it would be a slam-dunk for the Kinect motion platform to have players swinging their lightsabers in combat, turned sour as critics and players panned it…I mean, did they really need to include a “Just Dance” clone? Did Han Solo ever look less studly as when he dances to his own song??

While this doesn’t mean the end of Star Wars games, it will be interesting to see where it heads. Disney still has one game studio working – Disney Interactive – which is concentrating everything on the upcoming Disney Infinity, an expandable/collectible game that will compete directly with Skylanders. Whether 1313 or First Assault will ever be released is unknown.

The second installment of the LEGO Star Wars spoofs, The Empire Strikes Out, is [asin=B00AXFK96M]out on DVD[/asin] this Tuesday (no Blu-ray release this time, at least not yet.)

Get your lightsabers and LEGO bricks ready because your favorite characters are back in the brand new LEGO Star Wars special, LEGO Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out. Catch up on what’s happening in the galactic LEGO Empire with these tidbits about Lego Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out with a fun catch-up on its predecessor, The Padawan Menace.

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR IN THE EMPIRE STRIKES OUT
On top of all the old Star Wars characters making their debuts as LEGO characters, you will also see more references to the franchise films than ever before, so keep your eyes peeled Star Wars fans.
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It has been officially announced that Star Wars: The Clone Wars will “wind down”, and is no longer being produced for Cartoon Network. However, it isn’t quite over yet. Here is the official announcement (from www.starwars.com):

As we enter into an exciting new era focused on the next Star Wars trilogy, Lucasfilm has decided to pursue a new direction in animated programming. We are exploring a whole new Star Wars series set in a time period previously untouched in Star Wars films or television programming. You can expect more details in the months to come.

As part of this shift, we have also made some key decisions affecting Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Detours.

After five highly successful and critically acclaimed seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, we feel the time has come to wind down the series. While the studio is no longer producing new episodes for Cartoon Network, we’re continuing production on new Clone Wars story arcs that promise to be some of the most thrilling adventures ever seen. Stay tuned for more information on where fans can soon find this bonus content. In the video below, Supervising Director Dave Filoni offers a peek of what is to come in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
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Buried on the last page of an article with Businessweek about Disney’s plans for the Star Wars franchise, George Lucas was asked the billion dollar question – have the Big Three – Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford – all signed on for the next Star Wars movie.

“We had already signed Mark and Carrie and Harrison—or we were pretty much in final stages of negotiation. So I called them to say, ‘Look, this is what’s going on.’ ” he said. “Maybe I’m not supposed to say that. I think they want to announce that with some big whoop-de-do, but we were negotiating with them.”

Did he let the Jawa out of the bag? Fisher is already saying she is involved but her rep is now retracting that saying she was “joking”, so it all seems to be just waiting for the official word from Disney. (Could they be waiting for Star Wars Weekends, which start in May? Seems unlikely…)

He added, “I won’t say whether the negotiations were successful or not.” Sure, George…

It’s looking more and more like the classic trio of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo will be returning to tell the further story of Star Wars. Although there aren’t any details about plot yet, Carrie Fisher did confirm in an interview with Palm Beach Illustrated that she will return to the role of Leia.

And when asked what Princess Leia would be like today, she said, “Elderly. She’s in an intergalactic old folks’ home [laughs]. I just think she would be just like she was before, only slower and less inclined to be up for the big battle.”

She did not say for certain if it would be for Episode VII, a later episode or one of the “out of saga” movies, but presumably if they were bringing in the classic characters, even for cameos to kick off a new story, it would be in Episode VII.

Update: Seems there is a bit of premature announcement damage control going on. Fisher’s representative is now saying that Fisher was “joking”, and that no announcement has been made. Well yeah, we know no announcement has been made yet…but George Lucas himself seems to be spilling the beans too…

Sorry I didn’t report on this earlier – but yes, that is Tim Curry’s voice you will hear on tomorrow morning’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars finale as Emperor Palpatine. The Huffington Post broke the news yesterday.

Curry is taking over the role after the death last year of Ian Abercrombie. Although Abercrombie had pre-recorded ahead of time a lot of his segments, that did not apparently include the season finale, so Curry, who has done a lot of voice roles, stepped up.

Catch this little preview below – and let’s all hope that Ahsoka’s ultimate fate isn’t settled just yet…
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