This Labor Day Weekend is going to be your last chance to complete your McDonald’s Clone Wars collection. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on most of it, and I have posted a picture gallery of them. The only one missing is Asajj Ventress, so I’ll be running out to McD’s sometime soon. As you can see, some of these are pretty good. But for the most part, they are great for the kiddies … much like the Clone Wars movie.

For the record, I really wanted an Admiral Ackbar bobblehead with “It’s a trap!” sound effects. That would have been awesome. But for now this is good enough.

So here are pictures. Enjoy!

[Show as slideshow]

By now you should know that we like Star Wars here at JediNet. We also like cake. So if you feature a Star Wars cake, you’re sure to get mention from us.

The folks over at Boingboing recently featured Han Solo frozen in a carbonite cake. Nice. My guess: it was probably planned for Jabba’s birthday bash. They think of everything.

Links

• Boingboing: Han Solo in Cakeonite

More Star Wars Cakes

• Prepare for ground assault. And cake.
• That’s no moon, that’s a Death Star birthday cake

photo credit: Yogi

With Clone Wars transitioning from its run in the theaters to the TV screen, many fans are left with mixed feelings about the state of the Star Wars franchise. Some, undoubtedly, enjoyed the films and look forward to the series on Cartoon Network. Others, understandably, were unimpressed with Clone Wars but reserve hope for the upcoming live-action series, which promises to provide a darker, more adult take on Star Wars.

Still others, like James Strocel, have given up on Star Wars entirely. He has an interesting viewpoint as he analyzes exactly where Star Wars jumped the shark. His conclusion? It can all be traced back to Return of the Jedi when it was revealed that Leia was Luke’s sister, shattering the love triangle that had developed between Han, Leia, and Luke up till that time.

When you consider that the biggest character driven plot-line of the trilogy was resolved essentially by default, subsequent creative decisions about the films suddenly make sense. We could see through the prequel trilogy that Lucas abhors ambiguity about all things. There’s either a dark side or a light side of the force, people either love each other or they don’t. The lack of ambiguity works for Star Wars. When a bad guy dies, you want feel good about it. However, ambiguity shouldn’t be confused with facing a hard choice, which is what happened here.

Whether or not you agree with him, he makes some incredibly good points in his article. Definitely worth a read.

Link

• Star Wars: What Went Wrong?

photo credit: maggie loves hopey

You ask anyone in the Star Wars Universe, and they’ll say the Force is what surrounds them. It penetrates them. It binds their Galaxy together.

Yes, my friends, the Force is good. And the Force has a name: Leland Chee. According to the upcoming September issue of WIRED Magazine, he’s the dude that says what’s what in the Star Wars ‘verse. Officially, his title is Continuity Database Administrator, but we all know that’s corporate-speak for “the Force itself.”

Meet Leland Chee, the keeper of the truth for the entire Star Wars franchise. The continuity database administrator for Lucas Licensing, Chee maintains a massive 30,000-entry FileMaker system that tracks almost every film, book, action figure, and videogame in the Star Wars galaxy. As WIRED senior editor Chris Baker reports, it’s Chee’s job to rule on what’s official and what’s not. “Someone has to be able to say ‘Luke Skywalker would not have that color of lightsaber,” Chee says.

Thanks to Christina for the heads up!

Check it out on Wired.com:

• Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop

If you’re still on the fence about going to see Clone Wars, here’s another review found on Youtube by the very well-spoken LazyCritic08. He gives his perspective on the film. Warning: contains some spoilers!

Links

• Star Wars: the Clone Wars Movie Review (Youtube)