Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a lot of firsts. It’s the first new Star Wars film since Emperor George Lucas wrapped up the canonical series three years ago. It’s the opening salvo of a wave of Expanded Universe TV series—the film launches The Clone Wars animated series, and meanwhile a live-action one set between the prequels and the original trilogy is deep in development. It’s the first animated Star Wars feature film. And most importantly, it’s the first Star Wars movie you will truly loathe.
Star Wars purists like myself are probably going to ignore everything The Clone Wars with an intensity normally reserved for busting best buddies out of their carbonite prisons, but in case you’re a geek that willingly and joyfully slurps up even the blackest dredges of George Lucas’ mega franchise, Toys R’ Us is getting ready to empty your wallets. At midnight tonight, hundreds of the toy purveyors’ stores will be opened to give fans a first shot at owning their own piece of Clone Wars memorabilia. Okay, I will admit–some of it looks pretty cool.
Being a Star Wars die-hard from back in the day, everything I’ve seen or heard about the new Clone Wars series and film has made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. I guess this Clone Trooper “laptop” is no exception–sweet case, QWERTY keyboard, but all junior will be doing is playing educational games on its monochrome calculator-LCD screen, which looks like it could have been around for the release of A New Hope. Decent framework for an Eee PC casemod, though. [Product Page via Shiny Shiny]
Psystar, the controversial company with the cojones to take on Apple (bravo), has two new fugly server computers aimed at the Xserve market, the OpenServ 1100 and 2400. They start at US$2125, which buys you a 2.5GHz Xeon QuadCore processor, 4GB RAM, 750GB HDD, 4 HDD bays and a worthless 10-client copy of OS X 10.5 Server. Both are cheaper than the authentic US$3000 Xserve, which only includes 2GB RAM and 80GB HDD. Still, these are not the Mac clones you were looking for. (Boo!)
newVideoPlayer("clonewars3d_gizmodo.flv", 475, 376,"");Feast your eyes—squinting a bit—on the leaked two-minute trailer that was briefly seen in YouTube and then pulled off just to be rescued at the last minute by a Polish Corvette, saved into an astromech droid, launched onto a desert planet, and found by us in a garage sale somewhere in Kraków. Or something like that. The trailer further shows the work of the three hundred 3D animators who have been working on this project at Lucasfilm Animation for the past three years. And except for its lousy quality it, it seems that we are in for a ride (here’s hoping Mr. Lucas didn’t write the dialog.)
We just spotted these great, life-sized Lego models of Indiana Jones, C3PO and a Clone Wars Trooper at the annual Toy Fair. We asked how many Lego bricks it took to construct each one, but were told that it was “a big secret.” We couldn’t care less, they look amazing, and we desperately need some new office furnishings to brighten up the place. Unfortunately, these are just show pieces, and those hoping for a gigantic Indiana Jones Lego pack will have to make do with these (movie spoiler) kits instead. Clone Wars fans get some smaller Lego-loving, too, but we want them so bad, we’re going to try and smuggle the life-size models out. Stay tuned for news on the covert operation. Checkout the gallery for a ton of awesome images.
The new LEGO Clone Wars sets announced at Toy Fair 2008, to be released just in time for the new Clone Wars animated movie and TV series, look nice. “Nice” as opposed to awesome giant bombers, ingenious Steam Wars, funny Indiana Jones, good old classic Star Wars or some of the best sets ever. Still, nice. All of them, plus info, prices and the new Clone Wars trailer, after the jump.
