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Star Wars Fun Fact
Surprising and little known Star Wars tidbits, usually related to today’s Force Feature.Did you know? Misinformation campaigns around Star Wars movies are nothing new. In fact, the Return of the Jedi production team filmed in the Redwood Forest in northern California under the fake film name Blue Harvest, with a tagline of “Horror beyond imagination,” to fool the press, the prying eyes of fans, and to prevent price gouging in their production expenses.
Life on “Tweet”-ooine
A featured dispatch from the Star Wars Twitterverse!#starwars Frank Oz with an early puppet of Yoda pic.twitter.com/eevbA7MgGO
— Classic Star Wars (@ClassicStarWars) August 22, 2014
Star Wars Swag Bag
So many fun, quirky, and awesome ways to bring Star Wars into your daily life!R2-D2 and R2-Q5 Salt and Pepper Shakers – click on the pic for more details!
Trivia Time!
Test your knowledge of the Star Wars universe!Yesterday’s answer: Princess Leia
Today’s question: Who suggested surrendering to the Imperials while the Falcon was attached to a Star Destroyer?
Force Feature: Star Wars Episode 7 Weekly Update
Exploring the many worlds of Star Wars, in the imagination and in real life!Welcome to this week’s roundup of news, rumors, and other tidbits about Star Wars Episode VII. Just a bit of a refresher before we get started: I’m not going to share outright spoilers on the podcast, just the teasers thereof. However, there’s a potentially new category of things to consider, and that would be…flashbacks.
It’s been rumored that Episode 7 will include flashback sequences, and if so, that wouldn’t be unusual territory for J.J. Abrams to explore. As fans of the TV show Lost will tell you, flashbacks and flash-forwards were a staple of the series, and more often than not, the particular flashback or forward in a given episode also informed the events that were happening on the island in that episode.
So, that said, as far as flashbacks go, we’ll talk about characters here, but we won’t talk about what’s rumored to happen in the flashbacks, because I figure that would bear on what the plot of Episode VII is, and I don’t want to do that to you.
Speaking of flashbacks, then, if we’ve got any WWE wrestling fans in the house, you may be excited to know that Sheamus is rumored to have been involved in the production, as he was staying near Skellig Michael, an island off the coast of Ireland, while the production was allegedly on the island. I say “allegedly” because Lucasfilm hasn’t made their own official announcement about being there. The only locations they’ve confirmed are Abu Dhabi and Pinewood Studios, leaving out the rumored locations of Iceland and the Forest of Dean as well as Ireland.
And who might Sheamus be playing? He might be playing Darth Vader in flashback. Which, when you consider that David Prowse has actually been banned from attending official Star Wars conventions by George Lucas, then they’d have to get someone else to wear the suit. Hayden Christensen wore it at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but he’s not exactly the bodybuilder that Prowse was…or that Sheamus is, and Sheamus is only an inch shorter than Prowse. Interesting, right? And considering that Carrie Fisher’s daughter has been cast, too, some folks think she might play a young Princess Leia in flashback, too.
Now then, onto the other interesting bits of note this week. The villain updates have been coming hot and heavy, so follow our breaking news Twitter feed at @SW7x7Podcast if you want to dig into those potential spoilers. And that’s “potential” because for all the rumors popping up, it’s been pointed out that some of the rumors bear an uncanny coincidence to story stuff from a Star Wars comic book, Legacy.
The official word is that this is supposed to be an entirely new story, but that doesn’t mean that characters from the Expanded Universe won’t be a part of it. Splitting hairs, perhaps, but so be it.
Daisy Ridley, whose role in the film is unknown at this point, is rumored to be on board for Episode VIII and Episode IX, and supposedly all three movies have been mapped out in terms of story, even if they haven’t been turned into scripts yet.
Speaking of that, the current Star Wars creative community of directors and writers met in London while Episode VII filming was on hiatus, and that, coupled with the talk that Lucasfilm and Disney are looking to totally redefine their long-form storytelling, informed by the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, means that we could have a new and even better Star Wars on our hands. The anticipation isn’t killing me yet, but it’s ramping up for me.
And with that, we’ll wrap up this update with a sigh of relief or panic, since Harrison Ford was recently spotted taking rides down a 2,500 foot slide near his Wyoming home. Crazy, or crazy like a fox? Let us know at Facebook.com/sw7x7!