Premiered December 24, 2019, and it is the best Star Wars that I have seen since the original trilogy. Interesting echoes of Herod attempting to kill the Christ child, and the revolt of the Maccabees. We live in an interesting time when fan flicks are sometimes superior to big budget productions with a thousand times their budget.
Doesn’t surprise me in the least. After all, who is more likely to respect the source material instead of seeing it as something to be problematized and subverted?
Thanks for this, Don. I’ve got a playlist of fanfilms I’ve been steadily growing over the years. Some good efforts on there.
My top pick though is still this beautiful sequence animated in an 80s anime style.
A sign of Disney’s foolishness is that they don’t bother trying to tap into all this fan talent and recruit them to its properties. I mean I would rather go to a theater and watch a compilation of all these fan films than actual episode 9 right now.
I have long been flummoxed Nate by the resistance of major studios to take advantage of the fan talent on full display on the Internet.
No kidding, Don. I mean when Star Trek was at its best was when they would accept random script submissions. Some of the best talent they ever had they acquired from nobodies who submitted a random idea.
Every time I’ve inquired about this among people that kind of know about hollywood, the answer usually seems to boil down to “lawyers” or rather, lawsuits. Something about the hassle or risk or whatever makes these companies too scared to risk tapping into a free resource.
I think if you could ever crack into that vein of possibility in the law mines, you could be a very rich man, Don. 😉
The House of Mouse has really had a negative impact on copyright laws stifling creativity, not only with the ludicrous duration of copyright, but with the draconian penalties for even slight infringement.
Doesn’t the Mouse itself go out of copyright soon?
Yes and no. Copyright as to Steamboat Willie and the original Mickey Mouse character will fall out of copyright as of January 1, 2024. However, Disney will still hold copyrights as to later incarnations of the big eared rodent.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/a-whole-years-worth-of-works-just-fell-into-the-public-domain/