Midnight Ramblings

There you go! I've got my review of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit up. You can go read it at the main site.

And, as I'm sure you know, I've been wasting a lot of time watching my brand-new Episode III DVD. I just love watching all the behind-the-scenes stuff for Star Wars. I havne't watched the huge-ass documentary Within a Minute: The Making of Episode III yet, but I have watched a huge pile of the featurettes and web documentaries, and you know what I'm getting from all this?

George Lucas reminds me a lot of Thomas Edison.

Let me explain. When the average person thinks of Thomas Edison, they think of this lone genius, sitting alone in a lab, working effortlessly to invent the light bulb. Well, that's not true. The truth is Thomas Edison had this massive, massive team of engineers working under him, and they did the core of the inventing. In fact, Thomas Edison was often chided for not sharing the credit with his team.

And that's how Lucas reminds me of Edison. I'm sure that, the average guy on the street, thinks of Star Wars and thinks that George Lucas is this lone genius, and that all of it sprung from his mind. Well, that's not true. Lucas has this massive team of artists working under, designing General Greivous, building the lightsabers, and animating the FX.

Unlike Edision, though, Lucas gives his team their due credit. And that due credit comes from the behind-the-scenes stuff.

And, all this stuff reminds me of how, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I watched the featurette all about designing General Greivous, and how all the artists would work tirelessly on their designs, and then Lucas would come in, look over the drawings and go, "That one!" And thus Greivous was born.

Well, I remember being six years old and watching a little TV special called The Making of Return of the Jedi. And you know what? In that special, I saw Lucas and his team of artists doing THE EXACT SAME THING for Jabba the Hutt.