A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

One of the neat things about channel surfing on a hot, hazy and unusually lazy weekend afternoon is that sometimes infrequent TV watchers such as me can sometimes find new channels which have been added to the Expanded Basic lineup. Such was the case when, a few years ago I – purely by chance, mind you – was flipping through the channels on my family room television set when I noticed that Comcast (my cable provider) had added BBC America to the channel package I subscribe to.  This was a surprise to me – I don’t often scrutinize my bill for any lineup changes, and I don’t have the time to watch as much TV as I used to –  and I was kind of pleased even though at first I didn’t think it’d be too relevant to my TV-viewing tastes. That is, until I perused the then-current issue of  TV Guide  and noticed that BBC America supplanted Spike TV (the former TNN channel) as the go-to place to watch reruns of  Star Trek: The Next Generation,  the made-for-syndication sequel series to what is

(C) 2013 Quirk Books/Lucasfilm Ltd. We three, we happy three, we band of brothers, Shall fly unto the trench with throttles full! - William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Since 1976, writer-producer-director George Lucas’s Star Wars (aka Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope ) has been adapted in various forms. Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Lucas’s screenplay was published six months before the film opened on May 25, 1977. Marvel Comics’ adaptation also preceded the movie’s premiere by a month. And in 1981, National Public Radio aired a 13-part radio drama scripted by the late science fiction novelist Brian Daley that expanded Lucas’s 124-minute space fantasy into a richer, more detailed six-and-a-half hour audio epic. Of course, Star Wars has inspired a plethora of parodies spanning a wide spectrum of of venues. Lucas’s tale of “a boy, a girl, and a galaxy” has been spoofed countless times on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, lampooned in humor magazines Crack’d and Mad, and by Me