There was a huge Star Wars convention in LA this weekend to celebrate Star Wars’ 30th Anniversary, which kicked off all sorts of news and notes and photo ops .ICv2 News has the ultimate skinny:

The upshot of all this attention? Star Wars is a more potent force now that it was when the first movie exploded onto the scene. Star Wars merchandise last year accounted for $1.5 billion in retail sales, a small fraction of the $22 billion the franchise has generated since the first movie premiered. And the masterfully created marketing events surrounding the anniversary demonstrate that Lucasfilms is very capable of continuing the popularity of the brand even without any new feature films.


The big news was the debut of the trailer for the CGI CLONE WARS cartoon. It’s set in a time when everyone is alive, so it’s kind of bittersweet, like “The Death of Speedy”, but it should also suit George Lucas since he won’t have to deal with pesky human actors any more. (Yoda: “We keep stepping in Dooku!”) Plus more General Grievous, and we love General Grievous.
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There was also a mass Slave Leia photo shoot, proving you can have six whole movies of action, and the one cheesecake moment will be the one everyone remembers. Although as Cecil points out, its the rearview that separates the great Leias from the also-rans.

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Oh yeah, and Stormtrooper Elvis got his own mini-bust from Gentle Giant, which was raffled off for charity.

11 COMMENTS

  2. check out the wacky tat on the one slave girl.

    Jabba doesn’t have tentacles does he? If he does, we might have an ISSUE!

  3. Thank you very much for directing my attention to the Slave Leia photo shoot. I very much appreciate it, although the little-girl Slave Leia kind of spoils it. If little girls can be captured and dressed up in metal bikinis, then anyone can.

  4. Christopher Moonlights says: “There’s something that’s just not right about that slave Leia shoot.”

    Maybe it’s because the comic blogosphere has been inundated with two non-stop weeks of people declaring Adam Hughes and Joe Quesada the oppressors of women in comics because of a statue that likely wouldn’t make your grandma blush and here we have a photo of dozens of women (including a very young girl) willingly dressing up as scantily-dressed slaves. Hmmmm…..

  6. The general public might have fond memories of lap dancing Leia. However, true fans consider the Compactor Scene from Episode Four to be much better. Lots of slime, making Leia’s white dress an almost wet t-shirt. A big tentacle, which grabs Luke. The four heroes pressed together as the walls compact. AND… the yells of agony/ecstasy from the heroes.
    see how genius Lucaswas? He used tentacles twenty years before everyone else! now that’s vision!
    And has anyone else noted the symbolism of a phallic spaceship shooting seminal torpedoes deep inside an oviform Deathstar?

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