The mighty mass mind of Tribune. I think I dealt with the one sane exec there, and he was halfway to batshit heaven himself.

Not to worry, this is Hollywood - a rewrite or two will fix that "too good" thing.

The most hilarious part of this? Not actually written by Patterson himself.

We told you that gum you liked was coming back into style.

I'm making it a habit to ungrey as many comments as I can on a daily basis. Still not enough, alas, and I myself remain greyed on much of Gawker.

One of the issues with the Stormtrooper extras is that they were expensive to clothe — those plastic outfits might have been vacu-formed, but the pieces still cost rather a lot.

It was kind of a tradition at Lucasfilm to use real-world items and mod them, rather than building everything from scratch. Seriously, the amount of thrown-away crap they used in the first film alone in 1977 was astounding.

There was a considerable amount of model work, actually; it wasn't all CGI. In fact, the model work caused some conniptions among the VFX crew because of the increasingly digital approach to things (this got worse with ep2, which went all-digital on the filming end.)

Especially as Italian Spiderman is actually Australian.

Actually, they were invented to let Lucas have his big battle in the woods. It was originally supposed to be Wookiees. When they decided to use the battle in Jedi, Lucas decided on the angry teddybears. A second type of creature was originally going to be included as well, but got dropped.

Star Wars was always aimed at kids. The trouble with ROTJ was that it was aimed squarely at licensees.

Repeatedly, post New Hope. Several instances from the period are documented in J.W. Rinzler's books on the trilogy. Lucas does change direction or approach a lot, which helped make the first three films be more difficult to get done (bigger demands on everyone) but he seems to have been consistent with the twenty…

Looks like she done shit a Bricken!

Making the first one nearly killed him. Seriously. Waiting to do the prequels was a matter of waiting for technology to develop and mature to make production easier. It was also on the schedule he'd set in 1977 - he said several times that he'd go back to directing them after twenty years. Not that he'd expected the…

Going out of print under the DH masthead. The rights simply transferred, and Marvel would have been given the production files. Which, amusingly, include those for the omnibus collections of the comics Marvel originally released.

And all of the Dark Horse credits excised. Which is a scum move, I think, as it cuts out even the Lucasfilm staff credits.

Funny. Although snarking Fox News is like kicking a one-legged dog....

It appears that the sarcastic humour went by you at T3 speed....

I'd imagine this is a discard as the Falcon seems to have been slightly redesigned — rectangular sensor dish rather than the old round one.

Around $2 million, although you have to keep in mind that the budget was averaged and post-pilot per-episode would be slightly less. The reason for that is that they were amortizing the cost of the pilot, and the standing sets. The pilot for DS9 was around $15 million iirc.