Over the past ten years or so, George Lucas has seemed to go out of his way to alienate his own fan base. There were, of course, the Special Edition re-edits of the classic Star Wars trilogy, the myriad disappointments that accompanied the prequel trilogy, and the milking of our wallets with multiple home-video releases of the original films that still, somehow, never quite deliver what we actually want. But he’s also said a lot of offensive things, like his recent comment that he considers The Empire Strikes Back — generally seen by the fans as the best of the six Star Wars movies — to be the worst of the series. (I personally think this was probably not worth the uproar it provoked. I suspect it was a failed attempt at a joke, or something taken way out of context. Or maybe he just wanted to screw with our heads and he knew exactly which button to push.) The impression he often gives is that he’d be a lot happier if the whole Star Wars thing had never happened and he didn’t have any fans.

That’s why it was so surprising to read that he has offered official Lucasfilm support for the upcoming indie movie Fanboys, which follows the adventures of a group of Star Wars fans driving cross-country to steal a print of The Phantom Menace from Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. George has also lent his approval and Lucasfilm’s assistance to a 30-minute Star Wars spoof for the animated cable series Robot Chicken (don’t feel bad, I’ve never heard of it either), going so far as to lend his voice to his own stop-motion likeness.

Could it be that Uncle George is finally gaining a sense of humor about this whole crazy thing? And that maybe, just maybe, now that the pressure of making the prequels is off, he’s even learning to appreciate his fans again? Anything’s possible… although I’ll be more inclined to believe it when I’m holding a DVD of the unrevised Star Wars in my clammy little fanboy hands…

(Incidentally, the trailer for Fanboys is online here. It looks pretty damn funny… and, in a show of cross-franchise solidarity, it even includes The Shat!)

Cranky Robert just sent me this:

Oh, if only I’d kept up on my Sith lessons. I could totally use that Force-choke thing just about everytime I’m out in public…

I don’t have much to say about the following, except that I thought it was funny and it never fails to amaze and amuse me how thoroughly my favorite movie has infiltrated the general public’s consciousness:

Original source here.

The Digital Bits is reporting that the rumored 30th Anniversary Ultimate Star Wars Saga box set that was supposed to come out this year may get pushed back because the suits at Lucasfilm were disappointed by the poor sales of last year’s original trilogy release. You know, the one whose only real selling point was the inclusion of the unaltered theatrical cuts, which, to no one’s surprise, turned out to be of less-than-stellar quality. Hey, Uncle George, here’s a tip: those who are interested in owning your revisionist CGI’d Special Edition versions already do, probably two or three times over. You want to make a few more bucks off your fan base? Then reconsider your attitude about those theatrical cuts and give us what we really want: the unf***ed-with editions in clean, anamorphic transfers that will look good on our new-fangled HDTVs. It really is that easy. Just give us these movies the way they were when we fell in love with them. Don’t worry about impressing today’s FX-jaded kids; don’t worry about trying to make them match up with the prequel trilogy. Just give a little gift to those of us who’ve been there for you since the beginning. We’ll be happy to open our wallets again for a product we actually want.

Someday, somebody is going to do a master’s thesis about Internet content in the early 21st century and attempt to explain how and why so much of it was regurgitated nuggets of 1970s and ’80s pop culture. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course:

Via the indomitable Brian Greenberg, here’s a bizarre YouTube clip of the Death Star battle from the original Star Wars, re-enacted entirely by hands:

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Just when I think I’ve seen every Star Wars-inspired bit of lunacy there is out there in the vast, vast Internet, I run across a barbershop quartet singing the Ewok celebration song from Return of the Jedi…