A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Pros:  Seven new segments and The Sorcerer's Apprentice, nice mix of music Cons:  Would one host have been better than many? Jury is still out on that one In the late 1930s, Walt Disney and his team of animators decided to revive interest in Mickey Mouse - whose popularity was being eroded by his fellow Disney stable mate Donald Duck - by featuring the beloved rodent in a fully animated version of the Goethe-Dukas fantasy  The Sorcerer's Apprentice . Envisioned originally as a stand-alone "upgrade" of the then-popular "Silly Symphonies" shorts, this project grew in ambition and scale once the eminent conductor Leopold Stokowski got involved (he volunteered his services as conductor for  The Sorcerer's Apprentice ); from one relatively short (nine minutes or so) cartoon to a feature-length animated film featuring eight different visual interpretations of classical music pieces from at least three different eras: Baroque, Romantic and Moder...

Before the November 2009 release of  Star Wars - The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One  Blu-ray and DVD sets, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm released two four-episode "volumes" of episodes of the Cartoon Network's animated anthology series set between  Attack of the Clones  and  Revenge of the Sith. The first volume,  A Galaxy Divided,  is a no-frills presentation of the series' first four episodes ( Ambush, Rising Malevolence, Shadow of Malevolence  and  Destroy Malevolence ); the first of these is a Yoda versus Asajj Ventress battle of wits, while the others make up a complete story arc in which Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin's Padawan Ahsoka Tano are on a seek-and-destroy mission against a Separatist superbattleship commanded by General Grievous. Because  Star Wars: The Clone Wars  (like Lucasfilm's  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles ) doesn't have a well-defined chronology, Volume Tw...

When I was a much younger  Star Wars  fan in my early teens, one of my hopes was that George Lucas would create a TV spinoff based on the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2 as they faced off against the evil Darth Vader and the legions of the Empire. Of course, I had no idea that Lucas had made the film now known as  Episode IV: A New Hope  with two other films in mind, nor did I (being naive and unschooled in the business of filmmaking) realize how expensive it would have been to adapt  Star  Wars from the big screen to the little one and make it work as well as the late Larry Gelbart had done with the TV version  of M*A*S*H. After the disastrous one-time airing of the   misbegotten  Star Wars Holiday Special  in 1978 and the somewhat lackluster live-action set-on-Endor TV movies Lucasfilm released in the early 1980s, I realized that maybe  Star Wars   w...

Star Wars: The Clone Wars – The Complete Season Four During the 2008 fall television season, the Time-Warner-owned Cartoon Network and Lucasfilm Limited returned to George Lucas’s “galaxy far, far away” with a new animated series titled Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Set during the intergalactic conflict from which its title is derived, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a 3D computer-animated follow-up to the 2003-2005 2D Cartoon Network “micro-series” Star Wars: Clone Wars, which bridges the three-year gap between the Prequel Trilogy’s Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.   (Supposedly, the two shows are intertwined, with the newer series taking place between Chapters 22 and 25 of the 2D series, even though there are always going to be some continuity issues that hopefully will be addressed as the narrative of  Star Wars: The Clone Wars evolves.) Although the feature-length film Star Wars: The Clone Wars was not warmly received by many Star Wars ...