All fellow Star Wars fans,

My name is Nicky and I’m in my 3rd year at Roehampton Univsersity in London, England. I am a huge Star Wars fan and have been lucky enough to be able to carry out some research on it. My dissertation for one of my subjects has to be based around Film, what better film than Star Wars?! I have chosen to do it on Fandom and Star Wars. I am going to concentrate on the issues surrounding gender and Star Wars fans and am looking for anyone who would like to take part in email discussions?

If anyone is interested in helping or just voicing an opinion (all names and email address will be kept confidential and/or changed for my research) please let me know.

May the Force be with you. 

Work deadlines and a trip to North Carolina have slowed my work on getting Steve’s Star Wars Timeline up and running with the new structure around here. But as a step towards that goal, I do have a shipping list of recent and upcoming titles available for preview which you can view here.

The list includes the latest comic solicitations as announced by The Official Site:

• Legacy #9: Trust Issues #1 (February 14)
• Dark Times: The Path to Nowhere #5 (February 28)
• Knights of the Old Republic #14 (February 28)
• 30th Anniversary Collection Volume 2: Jedi vs. Sith hardover collection (April 4)
• Legacy: Broken trade paperback collection (April 11)

In the more immediate future, you can look forward to the first Knights of the Old Republic trade paperback to hit shelves on Wednesday. This is a week earlier than listed on Dark Horse’s schedule, but shipping lists for comic retailers seem to indicate it’ll be arriving.

Knights of the Old Republic: Commencement collects issues 1-6 of the monthly series.

For a guy who was summarily chopped in half and dropped down a bottomless techno-pit, Ray Park has done pretty good notwithstanding. He’s managed to pick up the pieces … and resume a good career. He’s currently in Malaysia, practicing his skills and working on his next film.

“We want to come up with stuff you’ve never seen before. This time I want to be the good guy!” said Park who is more known for his villain roles as Darth Maul, the Toad in X-Men (2000) and the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow (1999). 

He added that he was confident that shooting on the delayed Iron Fist movie would begin next year. Park will act as Danny Rand, one of the characters developed by Marvel Comics, the same company which created Spider-Man, Daredevil, The Hulk and Fantastic Four.

DATELINE New York … (I’ve always wanted to start a story that way) CNN Money reports that News Corp. (dba Fox movies) is closing in on a deal with Apple to sell its films on the iTunes Store.

Personally, I don’t see this iPod video thing going too far, but Apple is trying to stretch out of the home office and into the living room with products like the iTV, and higher resolutions on their movie downloads (near DVD quality). Something tells me this is gonna catch on, and they’ll give Microsoft a run for their money (Xbox 360) for a slice of the American living room.

CNN is reporting that Apple and News Corp., the parent company of 20th Century Fox, are in talks to bring movie downloads to the iTunes Store.

Fox, of course, owns the distribution rights to the Star Wars films. Currently iTunes movie downloads are at SD resolution, so there wouldn’t be any quality advantage over a DVD. However, there has been some speculation in the Apple community that Steve Jobs might have HD downloads in the works. The “iTV” prototype that was previewed at the “It’s Showtime!” Apple event a few months back has HDMI and component video outputs, often used to connect to HDTVs. Also, Microsoft has introduced 720p HD movie downloads as part of its Xbox Live service this week.

Apple certainly doesn’t want to fall behind in this race. The Microsoft Zune media player is being released as a director competitor to the iPod. The iTV will be released in Q1 2007 and there will be much speculation about HD iTunes downloads until then. Apple has a history of being secretive with new product launches and content additions to iTunes, so we probably won’t know about any HD downloads or deals with Fox until they actually happen.