SWTOTD SWTOTD 05 - The Crawl 8:05 PM | Zeroplate I had my first Star Wars dream since starting this Thought-of-the-Day feature last night, and I was all excited to talk about it until I checked today and the big news is that the opening crawl for Episode III is here! Usually this thing leaks out around the time the toys start showing up because there is usually something that has bits of it on a package, but this time Lucasfilm went ahead and threw it out there on the StarWars.com site to get people excited. If the first prequel was a spectacle of releasing the first new Star Wars to the world in 16 years, and if Clones was an exercise in getting people excited, but not TOO excited, then it looks like Sith is shaping up to be the round where Lucas lets it all hang out to wring the last bit of money and enthusiasm out of the theatrical franchise. I can't blame him, but we're getting shit like "Darth Tater" and a huge M&M's tie-in to lead up to the release of what is supposed to be the darkest movie in the whole saga. It's a mismatch of marketing that is making a lot of folks nervous. If the movie is really as grim and hardcore as the fans want, there's no way it's going to help sell M&M's. Then again, at this point, all of the marketing and hype and hoopla is sourrounding the return of Darth Vader much moreso than the movie itself. This is essentially just a chance for the property to get out there, oversaturate the marketplace with tie-ins and co-branded crap, and then fade off into oblivion in a couple years once the DVDs and toy sales have dried up. It'll never dry up completely, of course, but it looks like the release of the crawl and the interviews and the leaks of information are really being done by someone at LFL that knows that there is a core audience who doesn't see Darth Tater as an asset. The core audience is nothing in the world-wide scope of Star Wars, and the film will do gangbusters even if the internet faithful stay away in droves, but it's nice to see that someone is out there looking out for the fans and trying to show them a glimmer of hope that this last film is really going to make right everything that went wrong with the others. The more I look back on the prequels so far, the more I think we could have just had one single prequel dealing with Anakin's fall, and everyone would have been happy. I'm still fond of all of them, but there are long stretches of the prequels so far that feel like they are stretching. The crawl has me at least hopeful that this last one will pay off. Back to Top {0} Comments

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