It was impossible to get anything done this weekend because there was a Star Wars marathon, (and on two channels!) I put it on a few times to see how the Little Ditchman would respond. She knows the dialogue ("Luke, I am your father!" -followed by familiar dark, heavy breathing sounds) but what good is it without context? It's time for her galactic education -you have to start the jedi out very young, you know. Mrs. Ditchman didn't much approve, thinking the stuff would be too scary, but it didn't seem to bother the kid -which was odd. Ratatouille gets swiftboated down a sewer and she breaks into a crying fit of fear lasting through a sleepless night, but Jabba sends an ugly to his gruesome death in the Sarlacc pit (where he will be digested slowly over a thousand years) and there is no reaction. Mrs. Ditchman drew the line of concern when the Emperor does the finger-lightning death zap to Darth in the end of Jedi, so I changed the channel. The real concern, though, was the fact that the original trilogy was being aired on SpikeTV with it's sickening fight cage commercials every ten minutes. I would change the channel, and the two-year-old learned what a commercial break was this past weekend.
Watching Star Wars for the billionth time was kinda fun for me, actually, and I got into it -mostly because SpikeTV was airing it in HD which Lucas has steadfastly refused to do on disc yet (greedy rotten bastard -he raped my childhood!) On HD you can really see all the eye shadow they put on space princesses and it gives you a sense of some of the risks they were taking with those prehistoric (uh, pre-digital) special effects. For example, there is this nice composite matte of Han and Lando standing in front of the Millennium Falcon:
But in HD it looks like Han and Lando standing in front of a government building's cafeteria mural of the Millennium Falcon, instead of the real thing.
Anyway, it was geeky sweet to watch on our 42" tv, even though it was obvious that though Lucas gave up an HD print to SpikeTV, he didn't give them the 70mm version, the jerk. All the same, I noticed several things I'd never caught before, like this one-second insert of a stormtrooper just tossing an Ewok aside:
Yes, it's amazing that the Empire was defeated in this, the decisive battle with the lovable Ewoks. (If they had put that particular stormtrooper in command of the galactic armies, the fate of the known universe would have been altogether different.)
Anyway, this is the month it all gets finished up for the year! I've got some planting to do, photo files to archive, home movies to edit for posterity, and all the rest of the 2008 business files and receipts to log and pack away, ready for tax accounting. And Christmas lights to hang! (I started this yesterday, but got some dead strings. Now I'll have to go a-hunting at every store for similarly colored strings that have lights with matching twinkle patterns.)
And then there's the small matter of the tree.
~
