A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 1980 RSO Records and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) In 1985, after buying out the disco label RSO Records, British record company Polydor acquired the entire RSO catalog, which included the original two-record soundtrack for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, which featured selections from the score composed and conducted by John Williams.  Polydor, through its PolyGram Records arm, had also acquired the rights to Williams' 1977 soundtrack from Star Wars, which had been released by the now-defunct 20th Century Records, a division of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. So when Polydor released the Star Wars soundtrack on the then-still new compact disc (CD) format from the analog recordings, the resulting album was a relatively faithful replica of its best-selling vinyl precursor. (The only differences between the long-play [LP] album and the 2-CD edition, other than format, were that the liner notes from the LP were not included and the 1977 gatefold's photos were present

On Wednesday, May 25, 1983 – six years to the day after the premiere of George Lucas’s Star Wars – 20 th Century Fox released Star Wars – Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, the third and final film of the original Star Wars trilogy. Co-written by Lucas with Lawrence Kasdan ( Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars – Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back ) and directed by Richard Marquand ( Eye of the Needle ), Jedi was the terminus of Luke Skywalker’s “hero’s journey” from naïve farm boy to mature – and hopefully wise – warrior for peace and justice, as well as the final confrontation between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire. (C) 2013 Del Rey Books/Random House and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) 30 years later, Del Rey Books, Random House’s science fiction/fantasy imprint, released J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, the third volume in a three-book cycle which coincided with the Diamond Anniversary of the premiere of each Star Wars film . Featuring an int

(C) 2007 Del Rey Books/Random House  On Wednesday, May 25, 1977, 20th Century Fox released writer-director George Lucas's third feature film, Star Wars, with little fanfare and only in 32 theaters across the U.S. The studio had such low expectations for 'that science film" that it told many theater owners that they could only exhibit Fox's alleged shoo-in for box office success, The Other Side of Midnight, if they agreed to show Lucas's space-fantasy film about "a boy, a girl, and a universe."  Now, looking back across the gap of 41 years, it's hard to remember a time when Star Wars was not a part of our culture, much less the cornerstone of a multi-media franchise that includes three Saga trilogies, two CGI-animated TV series (with a third series, Star Wars Resistance ) on the way, and a series of stand-alone Anthology films that includes 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and this year's Solo: A Star Wars Story.    But until the s

On May 25, 2018, Walt Disney Motion Pictures released director Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, the second Star Wars Anthology film produced by Lucasfilm and the 11 th feature film in the franchise set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” On the same day, Walt Disney Records dropped Solo: A Star Wars Story – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, a 20-track selection of themes and action cues from the first of what might just be a series of films that chronicle the adventures of Han Solo before his involvement with the Rebel Alliance. Since Solo: A Star Wars Story is set 13-10 years before Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope, composer John Powell doesn’t begin his score with John Williams’ Star Wars Main Title theme. He did, however, collaborate with Maestro Williams, who composed and conducted the first track on the soundtrack album, The Adventures of Han. Although this Williams theme is not the same one that music score fans fondly remember as Han Solo and

One of the best map board-based war games of all time, Milton Bradley's Axis & Allies is an interesting and very exciting World War II strategy game. In college days of yore, a friend of mine and I bought our first game, with its hundreds of game pieces, dice, rulebook and colorful world map depicting a (very stylized) view of the war situation in the spring of 1942. The original edition of Axis & Allies is -- if you can still find a copy, that is -- a beautiful board game to see and play, but its main drawback is that it's time consuming to set up. You can't place your forces at random; each of the five major powers (USSR, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan and the U.S.) has a card telling players where they must place their initial forces on color coded regions all over the world. This process alone can take up at least 15 minutes, perhaps more. Another problem was the duration of game play. Depending on one's grasp of the basic rules and analytic

(C) 2000    Carol Publishing Group  R oman soldiers, as we all know, didn't wear watches at the height of the Caesars' power. Not because they couldn't afford even an inexpensive digital watch, mind you, but simply because the watch -- heck, even the mechanical clock -- hadn't yet been invented. Yet, as Bill Givens will cheerfully point out in his extremely amusing (and for some film producers, dismaying) collection of film flubs, some ancients were way ahead of themselves. Modern watches, wedding rings and other anachronisms make their little unexpected cameos in such set-in-ancient-times epics as The Ten Commandments, The Viking Queen, and Spartacus. Givens' Roman Soldiers Don't Wear Watches: 333 Film Flubs -- Memorable Movie Mistakes is a compilation of continuity errors, slips of dialogue, film-flipping flaws, and other unexpected mistakes that often pop up during production. Some of them have been published in other volumes of his successful

Do you think the Empire in  Star Wars  was based off of the Nazis? The Galactic Empire’s resemblance to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich is neither superficial nor coincidental. It is intentional. When George Lucas made the original  Star Wars  film in the late 1970s, he and his design team (which included illustrator Ralph McQuarrie, costume designer John Mollo, and storyboard artist/model designer Joe Johnston) looked at 20th Century history and modern totalitarian states for design ideas that would fit the ethos of a ruthless and evil dictatorship in a galaxy far, far away. Nazi Germany was the most obvious font of inspiration for the designers; the Second World War, after all, had occurred only one generation earlier and Nazi uniforms, German army gear and weaponry, and other regalia still evoked the evil tyranny that was the Third Reich. It’s no accident that this Imperial soldier is called a “stormtrooper.” That’s what the brown-shirted rowdies of the Nazi SA called themse