Robots & Opera

We just went to see the movie Robots, which as you know has the Episode III trailer attached!!! I actually also went last Friday, a little over a week ago, the day it opened. We had gotten out of school at 2:10 and we were going skiing at 4:00, so I just went in, saw the trailer, and walked out. The trailer's definitely way better on the big screen!!!

So today was actually the first time I saw the movie. We saw the 2:45 showing in Cinema 5, and when it was over I walked out, walked into the neighboring Cinema 4, and saw the trailer again attached to the 4:30 showing! So I've now seen the trailer thrice in theaters, and countless more times online and on our tape of The O.C. :-)

There were actually a couple Star Wars references in the movie. At one point, one of the robots was trying out voiceboxes and put in a Darth Vader one. The final sequence was also extremely reminiscent of the Episode II conveyor belt scene, right down to when the good guys were hanging in a huge bucket about to go into a big molten firery oven and a little flying robot stopped the conveyor. That little flying robot then engaged in what looked an awful lot like a lightsaber duel with the bad guy, although they used pipes instead of lightsabers. Finally, they actually thanked Lucasfilm Ltd. during the credits, although I'm not sure why.

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Yesterday my friend and I went to a musical edition of A New Hope -- "Space Opera" -- with my uncle, who knew some of the cast and crew. This wasn't like the MIT "Star Wars Musical Edition" we went to a year (more?) ago. This was... well... interesting. It seemed like the producers weren't big enough fans to be doing something like this. The MIT production, for example, included a "Don't cry for me, Princess Leia" song starring Bail Organa.

This one, on the other hand, seemed to be trying to be too serious. They elaborated on the movie when the didn't have enough information to do so. The cantina, for example, had a neon sign that said "The Jive Hive." The opera seemed to try not to contradict the movie in general, and I suppose they thought that when the elaborated they wouldn't be stepping on anyone's toes. If they had only dug a bit deeper, though, they would have found out that the cantina is actually Chalmun's Cantina.

In addition, at the beginning they claimed that the Tantive IV couldn't escape because the hyperdrive had been damaged or something. Wrong again -- first of all, they're too close to the planet to jump, and second of all, the Imperials would probably just chase them to the next system they fled to.

Finally, Obi-Wan said that the Jedi had existed for 20,000 years. The Essential Chronology puts the figure about 5,000 years before that.