Category: Comic Books

Signs of the Future: The duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk

In so many ways the duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk is indicative of the future warfare that is the key to everything.  Here are two CEOs at the top of their game representing two different directions, and one is distinctly on the wrong side while the other is thriving.  As I say all the time, don’t judge people based on what they say, but on what they do.  And Elon Musk has been evolving slowly for a long time.  This happens to a lot of people as they get more information.  I also say a lot that it’s nearly impossible for a person to have a lot of intelligence and to remain a Democrat.  People might be born into a certain region with specific parents and have certain beliefs.  But through living life and doing things, you learn what works and what doesn’t, and it’s natural to evolve feelings.  And for Elon Musk, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that the kind of world he wants to live in, an interplanetary civilization cannot be anything less than a capitalist enterprise.  Centralized governments are too slow and sabotage their society to stay in power, which isn’t good for getting to space.  So Musk has moved in a MAGA direction without calling himself that out of pure necessity, and logic.  Then there is, of course, Bob Iger, Mr. Global Citizen, who has been the CEO of Disney, which has essentially committed suicide to accommodate woke World Economic Forum politics.  Musk has moved away from the World Economic Forum, and Bob Iger has fully embraced it, even giving it a deep French kiss to the doom of his company.  So, it was only a matter of time before these two public personalities would have a very obvious clash.

This new war that we are fighting is one where it’s easy to win against. But the way people are wired exploits them at a very personal level. It is essentially what everyone learned in public school, with the cool kids, the geeks, and the loser social groups and children knowing which one they would all be in, and how social pressure, the need to be liked, would control those behaviors into joining one of those three groups. Because Musk is one of the richest men in the world, of course, he has a lot of parasites looking to live off his efforts, so Disney thought it had leverage on him to pull advertising from the X platform to force Musk to embrace more World Economic Forum strategic goals. Musk responded with an “F You” to Bob Iger and others and made a decidedly sharp turn politically. It was a decided check mate in the chess game of these kinds of activities. Within a few days, Elon Musk facilitated a new show for Tucker Carlson and there was a massive interview with Alex Jones, which resulted in him being reinstated on X, where he had been deplatformed when it was Twitter and a series of events that would spell doom for the World Economic Forum types cascaded into irreversible damage for the big centralized global citizen types that Bob Iger represented. Musk was clearly on the side of tomorrow, whereas Iger was without question on the losing team. But the signs have been stacking up for a while now. The public results were just a matter of time. Disney used to be the center of innovation, but now it was SpaceX and what they have been doing on several technical fronts. Instead of warring with Musk, Disney should have sought to have a relationship with them. Instead, they chose politics, which, as a CEO, was a nail in the coffin for Disney that is quickly sinking the company.

Months before all this occurred, I had taken my family to Disney World for a very large vacation.  I was not crazy about the woke direction of the company, but as I have been saying for several years now, I don’t think that Disney is going to survive as a company, and I wanted my grandchildren and my kids to see it while it is still a great thing.  I love all four of their parks very much, but Epcot Center has always been something special, an optimistic city of tomorrow that showcased all the opportunities of tomorrow.  But tomorrow is today, and many of the things that are showcased at Epcot now look old and out of date.  Disney Parks have become too political; they have not adapted to the true frontier of human need and it shows.  Disney, mainly as Bob Iger has run it, is a looking-back company, not one that is embracing the future.  Bob was all about the World Economic Forum controls from centralized governments that looked to establish equity and inclusion through force and manipulation by those in charge, whereas Elon Musk was embracing the kind of technology that would free people of those methods, and he was looking at capitalism as the means to do it.  Elon Musk wasn’t precisely a Trump guy during his first term.  He wanted to give Joe Biden a chance.  But that quickly changed over the last three years, and now Musk has moved well away from the World Economic Forum view of the world, and that difference is dramatically apparent when you watch SpaceX work and perform a side-by-side analysis of their view of the world with the Epcot Center. 

The trip to Disney had the effect I wanted.  My crew had a really magnificent time at Epcot Center. We went there on two different occasions and used the monorail as our primary means of transportation to get there.  It was great for my family.  But I could see the ghost of a place I used to love, looking old and inward thinking.  It was essentially what the world was trying to do with authoritarian, centralized governments, such as China and the European Union.  That was not the future we were going to experience, and Bob Iger had gambled everything on it.  And when he went to call the bet against Musk, everything went in the opposite direction.  The result was it forced Musk to stop trying to put one foot in and one out on so many topics and go all in toward the future, which means the collapse of central government tyranny.  Putting Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson on X was the reason Musk bought Twitter in the first place.  For the same reason, Trump created his own social media platform, Truth Social.  The future requires a decentralized competition of ideas without the restraint of slow-minded authority figures.  And the results will be very similar to what happened between Musk and Bob Iger but on a truly global scale.  The peer pressure leverage Disney attempted to pull on X is the same kind of backfire that all corporations and political sentiments will experience in the years to come and on a much more ostentatious scale.  Like the Epcot Center, the World Economic Forum’s view of the future was dying and outdated.  It was SpaceX that represented all the opportunities that were coming from a future being designed by capitalism.  And now Elon Musk was fully committed.  Disney had lost that final battle toward forcing the world to become a global citizen at the cost of innovation and freedom.  And if there was any indicator of the things to come, it was that.

Rich Hoffman

‘Godzilla Minus One’: The best movie in the world

Simply stunning

Before you think to yourself, oh, there are so many things going on in the world, why do I care about a movie review for a new Godzilla movie? Well, this is something different, this Godzilla Minus One movie. It makes quite a statement, and it is currently destroying the rest of the films being produced in the world, from Bollywood to Hollywood, all places where the World Economic Forum financing has influenced movie content. I’ve been asked several times this year why I’m not out there producing and making movies, as I have wanted to most of my life. And my explanation was that the whole machine is messed up, it costs too much for unionized labor, so the budgets are wrecked. To get funding for the movies, you must have progressive messages in them. The entertainment media has been filled with more progressive political activists who set limits as to the kind of messages that get out to the public, and the theater owners’ associations are often too sensitive to all these politics to back releases. But then there are times when the market is desperate, theater owners are drowning for good content and Hollywood hasn’t given them the kind of movies that people want to see. Online streaming content is eroding the enthusiasm for in-theater distribution. So a foreign film like Godzilla Minus One gets made under the radar and gets into theaters with great passion and enthusiasm, and people get surprised. This is exactly what Godzilla Minus One is: a magnificent surprise, and what I think is the best movie in the world presently, and certainly one of the best to come along in recent memory. On a budget of only 15 million dollars, it’s everything a movie should be, and audiences are reacting to it in very positive ways, for good reason.

I wasn’t exactly planning to see the movie in theaters, I was going to catch it on Apple+ or whatever streaming service was carrying it around Christmas time.  But my grandchildren love Godzilla; it’s been a big part of their childhoods. They were talking to me about the new Godzilla/King Kong movie by Legendary Studios coming out in 2024, probably in March, and they were very excited about it.  That’s when I said, “Well, you know, kids, there is a Godzilla movie playing at Liberty Center right now.  Do you guys want to go see it?”  And I was surprised that my oldest grandson knew everything about it, and yes!  He wanted to see it right away.  So off we went to watch a movie that I thought might have some cool monsters in it.  But it would be filled with subtitles, and I didn’t know if they’d like it much.  But, being Godzilla fans, they could at least say they saw it.  Well………………what a surprise we were in for.  This wasn’t just a great movie, it was a masterpiece.  It reminded me of the many past films I have loved, particularly Yojimbo, the great Akira Kurasawa classic.  This wasn’t just a movie about Godzilla destroying Tokyo once again.  This was a very emotional film about the state of the world and the perseverance of human civilization to overcome the mistakes of governments and live their lives honorably, nobly, and without fear.  Godzilla served as the device that brought this out in people and it was Biblical in scope and magnificent in its execution.  When the movie ended, I just sat there, stunned by what I had just witnessed.  My grandchildren were thrilled, of course, but this was undoubtedly a benchmark in history that I fully realized.  Wow!

Now, I get to go to Japan, and I like to share as much of that experience with my family as possible.  I love Western culture for all its variety, but I love going to Japan because the Japanese are honorable people with self-confidence and a spirit of perseverance.  No matter how many different people I interact with from Japan, that is a foundation assumption about them.  When I need to go to the grocery store to get food and snacks while traveling, the people I deal with bow deeply when doing business and treat the meeting like it’s the most important thing they’ll ever do.  Even at the airports, everyone you deal with is highly respectful.  Walking around Tokyo or any big city, there is no crime, and everything is spotless.  The world could learn a lot from their culture, which I talk about occasionally.  Japan is a good country with good people who are persistent and honorable.  And I enjoy dealing with them on their turf.  Godzilla Minus One is a uniquely Japanese film about their culture and the value of honor as an individual.  The entire point of the movie was about living up to honorable expectations and being a good person, which has been missing so much from all modern movies filled with progressive political messages imposed by the influence of the World Economic Forum.  All that was removed entirely from Godzilla Minus One, and the film had a wonderful sense of freedom that was jaw-dropping in its relief.  I didn’t care that the entire movie was in subtitles.  It was delightful to watch. 

The main character is a Kamikaze pilot who lacked the killer instinct to fulfill his mission, so he ducked out of a fight just as the war ended.  He felt tremendous guilt about this, and it haunted him deeply.  In the aftermath of the war, he ends up moving in with a young lady and her adopted little girl, all war orphans.  None of them are related.  But the girl and the guy sleep in the same house but in separate beds.  And there is no sex.  They lived like this for over three years.  That’s not to say there wasn’t love; they grew to love each other deeply.  But no sex.  In a World Economic Forum-financed film, the girl would have left the guy after three months of no sex, which would have been the dumb plot of the entire movie.  Godzilla Minus One is about much more than sex and relationship problems.  It’s about overcoming self-doubt, becoming great, and earning the right to lead a family by conquering personal demons.  This was great stuff; people lost in the world are soaking up this message like a dry sponge.  And you know what’s best about the film?  The filmmakers had the guts to give it a happy ending, a real happy ending in every way that an audience could hope for.  The movie is undoubtedly about Godzilla, but he served almost like a godly figure, much like Job’s story from the Bible.  Without Godzilla, Job would have had no reference point.  But because of that reference, greatness had an opportunity to grow, and it brought people together as individuals to achieve beautiful things.  What a great message in a world filled with failure.  Along comes this little ray of light that is turning out to light the way for the world in ways nobody thought was possible.  Yet, there it is.  I can’t recommend it enough!

Rich Hoffman

The Failures of Globalism: Making corporations the architects of their own destruction

When I think of the Disney brand, I think of shows I grew up with, like Zorro and Davy Crockett.  Those were great family shows that reflected the values of a good and productive society.  And in many ways, this new show on Disney +, Ahsoka, the latest Star Wars television series, is excellent.  But unfortunately, and this is a theme I have been saying for over ten years, Disney is done.  It’s too little too late, and that was obvious when they started making Star Wars movies again, beginning with The Force Awakens, which wasn’t very good.  It was filled with woke garbage and expressed the main problem with Disney buying Star Wars from George Lucas in 2012.  How do you take a movie franchise made by a radically independent person, such as Lucas was, and turn it into a corporate asset filled with emerging woke politics straight out of the World Economic Forum?  The answer is you don’t.  The trouble was evident when they tried to align the production to all kinds of United Nations projects during the filming of The Force Awakens, which was globalism on steroids.  I tried to remain hopeful, but once the film came out and everything that came after, it was obvious that Lucasfilm under Disney would not be as good as Lucasfilm under George Lucas.  Ironically, the Ahsoka series is struggling with itself as part of the plot: how do you overthrow an empire and then become the next established government?  And the answer is that management of anything is hard.  Throwing rocks and having all kinds of romantic ideas about things is easy.  But it’s hard actually to run things once you capture the kingdom.  And that is what is so interesting about the excellent show Ahsoka.  As Grand Admiral Thrawn says in the show, “Make your enemies the architects of their own destruction.”  Globalism has certainly done that to Disney.  It’s an interesting commentary on itself. 

However, this is the lesson for everything that has gone woke, and I do feel sorry for Disney as a company because all corporations that bought into the woke nonsense will go through it.  It’s not just Disney, which is taking major financial hits these days, with the stock price being what it was over a decade ago, and there are no signs of recovering.  It was surreal to watch the train wreck happen, but as a corporation, they were so stupid, so collective based, yet they had all the money in the world to make success happen, yet they couldn’t.  The same could be said of the music industry, fast food, sports, everything.  Disney had a massive media empire, but now the rumors are quite true that they are looking to sell off the losers, things like ABC, ESPN, and many of these satellite companies that have been brand damaged because of woke politics.  The hard lesson is that it’s gone forever once that brand is damaged.  I’ve always been a corporation kind of person because they generate wealth and jobs for people.  I love marketing brands in partnerships, such as with McDonald’s or Coke, which has been common with Disney over the years.  I always love that about Disney World and all their brand alignments.  I love them so long as capitalism is the objective.  Under the woke rules of military implementation of communism through the policies of the World Economic Forum, the goal is to destroy American capitalism through the generators of its wealth.  Disney was one of the first companies to sign up, and it was a horrible decision for them. 

Like the rebellion in the Ahsoka series, Disney is failing to live under its own well-intended rules.  And those rules were that globalism was the future of all civilization.  They were suckered, and they bet billions of dollars on that eventuality.  They thought their brand was so powerful that they would influence the public toward their market needs.  They forgot that the marketplace decides value and that their brand was fragile.  What they thought was robust was only as strong as wet paper. It fell apart in their hands rather quickly.  And the insurgents at the World Economic Forum had planned it that way.  Plotting and scheming the CEOs of all of America’s most giant corporations right in front of their faces, and they all fell for it like a bunch of suckers.  And the public took their dollars with them elsewhere; they didn’t keep spending money on Micky Mouse as Walt Disney envisioned it.  They turned away and moved on to other entertainment options, which is why there is no recovery for Disney as a corporation.  The young people could care less about them, and a good project like Ahsoka isn’t enough to bring them back as fans.  It was too little too late.  The time to make that kind of Star Wars show was back in 2015 because Star Wars essentially became a spokesplatform for globalism, and people were put off by it.  Now, the market has changed completely; smaller media is considered much more valuable because it’s free, and when people see the Disney logo, they think of a big, woke company aligned with political philosophies dangerous to American ideas, which most of the world loves and wants for themselves.  Star Wars would have been better off just putting out the six original George Lucas movies and leaving things be.  But once they tried to expand into corporate control of the brand, they weakened it like sequels usually destroy an original movie idea.  If those ideas aren’t developed in subsequent stories, they burden the original.  And that was something Disney could never wrap their minds around.

I think all corporations that have dipped their toes in the woke rules of globalism will fail or become permanently damaged in the marketplace.  And companies that are anti-woke will see a massive level of support in the coming decades.  I always have a soft spot for Disney because I liked Uncle Walt.  Just like I will always think of George Lucas when it comes to Star Wars, anything done by corporate control might be fun and exciting at times, but it will permanently be damaged goods you can’t trust as a source of art and entertainment because of all the woke inclusions into the story that have now cheapened it forever.  I still think some of the work done at Disney World at Galaxy’s Edge is remarkable from a fan perspective.  It’s science fiction on overdrive if you like expanding ideas and potentials of technology and science, which I do.  It’s a shame that Disney listened to all the wrong people while developing Star Wars under their ownership.  They should have never listened to the wokesters at the World Economic Forum and the terrorists of global economics and their unveiled intentions for communism, China style.  The marketplace was already changing in a way that Disney would have had difficulty adjusting to, but they made it so much harder on themselves and their shareholders with a poor strategic approach that strayed away from accurate economic measures that worked.  So it’s ironic that the new Ahsoka show’s plot deals with this problem, a self-reflection of Disney itself and how good intentions become evil, and disaster always follows.  As they say about Hell, it is paved with good intentions.  And that is certainly the case with all that Disney does these days, and all who took the bait and destroyed themselves as economic, corporate powerhouses that should represent morality and justice as determined by dollars and not woke, globalist insurgents.

 

Rich Hoffman

The World Economic Scam of Yuval Harari: A cult of Death and Sacrifice of little children as advertised on 60 Minutes

My target audience here is not the masses; however, they are welcome to participate.  Rather I see this all as battlefield recon to the influencers who actually make things happen.  I put these frequent articles out as often as I do and on the variety of subjects I do for media personalities who run popular shows and podcasts, along with traditional news programs to inspire them with original content.  My management style in life, and the reason my advice holds up under tremendous pressure, is that what I do is very valuable to a lot of people in the world, and I can afford not to make a living off this kind of dialogue, otherwise, these kinds of conversations don’t happen.  And often, things happen so fast and are so interconnected that there isn’t time to write a book on the topic because, by the time you do, the issue has already come and gone.  So, I write these articles to keep these topics as close to the front of the train as possible, using the metaphor on the Metaphysics of Quality from Robert Pirsig as an example.  There isn’t time for accolades or promotion because the goal is to fight the battle faster than the caboose where our news media lives and provides information to those masses.  To win this fight, we must be faster and wiser, and we are.  This is certainly the case regarding Yuval Harari, the little gay guy philosopher and personal advisor for the World Economic Forum, which many people consider to be one of the most intelligent people in the world; people like Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and those types of influential people.  I don’t think he’s brilliant at all, and while doing my own research on him, I figured things out pretty fast. 

It’s not just because he’s a gay guy that Yuval Harari has not been someone I pay much attention to.  As a lot of Americans feel about him, Yuval is not my kind of guy, intellectually.  He’s a timid, fearful little fella.  But for the sake of understanding the mentality of the World Economic Forum types, I did read a few of Yuval’s books, especially Sapiens, and I quickly saw the same old scam perpetrated on the human race since the beginning of time.  And much of that scam was revealed in plain site when Anderson Cooper, another gay guy, this time from 60 Minutes, did a particular segment on Yuval Harari to prop him up as some great, wise master of history.  But in so doing, they filmed a significant portion of their interview at Tel Gezer, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which was the ancient Canaanite site of the mass sacrifice of children.  I covered a particular segment on Tel Gezer recently, specifically for reasons like this, where people need to connect the dots and understand what kind of religious order we are dealing with here regarding globalists and World Economic Forum types.  This is why the Bible is important, so that context to these ancient struggles can be understood and once they are, then the kind of evil we are dealing with involving these modern-day radicals are the identical precise elements that we have been fighting since the dawn of mankind, out of all the places that Yuval Harari, the progressive futurist, and professor from Israel, took Anderson Cooper to the ancient archaeological site that was dedicated to the deity Moloch, part of the pantheon of Baal worshipers that God was so mad at in the Old Testament.  It’s the spot where a young girl was found sacrificed after being cut in half, and further evidence of the mass sacrifice of children was haphazardly discovered in a pile all thrown together.  It’s a grisly site, and not precisely the kind of place anybody but anti-Christian forces would consider celebrating.

 And this is how the game works; on the 60 Minutes promotion of Yuval Harari and his utterances that a new god was in the world that needed to be worshipped were two gay guys, as if to normalize perverse sexual lifestyles while celebrating with a wink and a nod a place that sacrificed to the god Moloch, which was the devourer of children.  Canaanites used to sacrifice abundantly to Moloch, often their firstborn, because it meant more because of the value.  It was a common practice that we see very much in the efforts of the World Economic Forum, where they do believe the earth is overpopulated, and there are plans to kill off many people to preserve their pagan gods of the earth.  Worshiping the god Moloch isn’t some ancient thing; it’s very much the religion of the day for them and is behind the abortion movement.  And Covid, in many ways, is the desire to control mass civilization through medicine and to preserve the earth as if it were a deity of its own, connected to these ancient gods from historic times.  And that’s what is ultimately behind the transhumanist movement, which Yuval is trying to sell to the world, the idea that technology is the new Moloch in the world and that we must worship it with continued human sacrifice to fulfill the depopulation agenda.  When you wonder where the World Economic Forum gets a lot of its dumb ideas, many of them come from Yuval Harari and his obvious hatred for the human race, likely for lots of reasons.  He is far from a normal person, but he’s being sold to us so that we think he’s smart and should be listened to.  Yet essentially, he’s just like a high priest from Canaan who practices abundant child sacrifice to the ancient gods, which was essentially the plot of the Bible from beginning to end.  What is evil, and what do we do about it?  And who is God? Is it the old Canaanite pantheon or this new guy Yahweh who thought sacrificing children was a horrible idea?

Yuval Harari is a scam, a tool of the World Economic Forum to resurrect ancient gods and use them to take over the world, and yes, it is that crazy.  It’s every bit that crazy, and everything they touch, from arts and entertainment to finance, politics, ethics, and science, is bent toward this human-hating scam and desire to appease the spirit world of the ancient Canaanites, and other regional gods from the old world, specifically Egypt. They think, the Desecrators of Davos types, that the Bible is for idiots, that they know the old religions that predate the Christian view of the world, and that they are superior to that knowledge, which they parade in front of us with a wink and a nod.  But if you understand history well, and deal with a lot of interconnecting subjects, like I endeavor to do on this very fast-moving site, then you can catch them on it.  And then understand what they are up to and why they want to conquer the world.  But technology isn’t as scary as they’d like you to believe.  And it certainly isn’t the new god to worship with the sacrifice of little kids.  Yet that is their justification for what they do and why they do it.  And it’s what we must fight with that understanding to defeat.  Rationalizing with them will never work because they are evil and actually quite insane.  But knowing their motives is needed so that we can stop treating them and begin to see them for the enemy they are and the hostile assailants against all human activity at the core of their not-so-well-disguised religion.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What ‘Bob’s Burgers’ says about American Society: What people will do to have a good family

At face value, it would be one of those strange mysteries. But when you dig into the issue a bit, it makes a lot of sense and says a lot about what kind of society we really are as Americans. I’ll admit, I was perplexed as to why any studio would produce a Bob’s Burgers theatrical release. With so many streaming services that are out there these days, why would anybody make a movie of the somewhat popular cartoon on Fox called Bob’s Burgers, which is a version of the typical animated formula that they have made so popular over the years with other offerings like The Simpsons, and Family Guy? I’m not too fond of Bob on Bob’s Burgers; I think of him as a loser. He’s not very ambitious; as a dad, he’s perpetually broke. He runs a little New England burger place in a resort town, and he can barely rub two pennies together.

Most of the episodes are about the problems they have as a family because they never have enough money to do things. And of course, my famous saying to people complaining about not having enough money is just to work and make more. Especially in America, if you want money, you can have it. You may not make all the money you want in 8 hours of work. Forty hours a week may not be enough; you might have to work 80. When I was raising a family, I have told the stories of only having one car, and I rode a bicycle 25 miles a day, so my wife could have the car for the kids and worked two full-time jobs to make the money we needed as a family. So, I can’t relate to Bob in Bob’s Burgers, and I find it odd that young people like the show so much. But, apparently, they do. Enough so that they made a theatrical movie release this year as something they thought was justifiable. 

I also had a unique experience while attending various comic cons with my daughter, an outstanding illustrator who does exhibitions of her work at those types of events. As I have said, it’s interesting to watch people cosplay at comic cons, the kind of outfits they want to dress up in, and invest so much of their time to bring characters they enjoy to life in some way. I can understand the various Star Wars characters and those from the Marvel movies. Those are action movies that make you feel good when leaving the movie theater in some way, so it makes sense that people would want to dress up as those characters during Halloween and at comic cons. Bringing fantasy to life is a specific function of the human imagination, a conceptual vehicle that expresses inner values that manifest in mythological impressions during social exchanges. Dressing up as a favorite character is a way to vote for the kind of values that you see in pop culture. Imitation is the ultimate compliment. But while I was at these events, I was just a little shocked to see young people dressing up as characters from Bob’s Burgers, which is hard because they are all cartoons. It’s not easy to bring a cartoon character to life, yet people did, and some were really good costumes. Why? I’ve watched many episodes of Bob’s Burgers, and I just don’t enjoy the show that much. For me, it’s often filler in the background while I’m doing five or six other things. I occasionally watch it because I like the colors of cartoons. But I can’t relate to the characters much at all. 

Oddly enough, my wife likes Bob’s Burgers a lot. I’d say it’s her favorite show, so this problem has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Yet, in working to understand the current political sentiment of our mass society, I felt something was going on with Bob’s Burgers that was worth noticing, significantly if film executives believed that a theatrical release of a subpar cartoon series on Fox justified its own movie. So the one thing that really jumps out about Bob’s Burgers that is likable is that all the family members like each other. Bob, his wife, and his three children all live in a little dump of an apartment, yet they don’t act like a bunch of losers who are waiting in line with a bottle of booze to buy lottery tickets. They work hard for the money they make and love each other as a family while running the family burger business. Bob is always a few cents short of whatever the family needs, but his wife never talks about leaving him for a better life with a more ambitious lover. The kids are just happy to have mom and dad together in the house. The brothers and sisters aren’t out to kill each other; they go on many neighborhood adventures and solve problems like rational people. They are a very “traditional” family. 

And that’s what it is with Bob’s Burgers; like many of the other Fox primetime cartoons, they all have in common a mom and a dad in the home who love each other. That is certainly the case with Family Guy, a very progressive show that features a family that stays together. There aren’t step-parents and step-children in these cartoons. They are all very traditional. Other animated shows have tried to make it with more progressive storylines, but they always fail. The ones that stick around over the years are the cartoons that feature traditional family settings. The Simpsons have been on for decades now, a very long time. And yet, with many hundreds of storylines, Homer and his wife Marge still love each other and work through marital problems together in a way that never ends in divorce or a family breakup.   And that was the key to this Bob’s Burgers mystery. Here was a family on an animated show with many problems, and they seemed limited in their ability to solve those problems. But, they enjoy each other as a family. You don’t see Bob running around on the town to cheat on his wife. Or running away from the attention that the kids obviously want from him. He’s a good dad, even if he’s unambitious socially. And his family loves him for it. Obviously, the audiences who can’t say the same about their own families have found a reliable father figure in Bob’s Burgers. In Bob’s Burgers, they see the family they always wanted and never had in the fictional settings. And it has such an impact on them that they even dress up as the characters in cosplay. It says a lot about the true state of our society when those types of fictional stories indicate what people really feel inside. Their vote for the type of entertainment they wish to enjoy says what all people really crave outside of political theater. Most people would give up a lot to have a family like Bob’s Burgers, where at least mom and dad loved each other, and their siblings worked together to help make the family a family. In a world full of disappointments, at least Bob and his animated television family were willing to fight through disappointments for the key ingredient to all happy societies, a good family that might not have a lot of money, but at least they had what all humans crave, a genuine love for each other. And that is worth noting and something that should give us all hope for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Elephant in the Room: Why the new ‘Top Gun’ movie is so successful and what it means to ESG scores in corporate America

I have always looked at box office results as a kind of vote for what the temperature of the political world truly is. As we know now, elections are often rigged, especially regarding the digital machines and ballot stuffing efforts that have been common in big American cities for years. So political votes don’t often reflect what people really desire culturally. But when a person is willing to get out of their chair and go out into a darkened theater and share a movie experience with perfect strangers, which is a discomfort of its own, the kinds of choices people make reflect a lot about their true character. So I have always looked toward box office numbers to understand what’s happening worldwide and the kinds of mythologies the human race responds to. Knowing all that, I was not surprised that Top Gun: Maverick did well at the box office; it looks like it will come in over 1.2 billion dollars for the summer of 2022. It has been remarkably strong for what I consider a typical 80s movie. I grew up in the 80s, so I remember when there was a movie like Top Gun coming out every weekend, and then when you got back in the car to drive home, there was a new top 40 hit on the radio. We had a thriving culture back then mainly because Ronald Reagan, as an actor, knew how to sell America to America, and people felt good about their country. Hollywood rushed to make movies that appealed to them, which was reflected in the movie-making industry. 

Obviously, I loved the new Top Gun movie, but as I said, I don’t think the film is a technological masterpiece. It will likely win some awards because the kind of people who pursued careers in movie making are happy that finally there is a movie out there that reflects why they got into the business in the first place, the way Hollywood used to make movies before all the woke ESG rules took over and ruined everything for everybody. While Top Gun has been doing well, another film franchise from Disney, Thor: Love and Thunder, came out over a similar summer season release. It died on the vine by the second weekend because it embraced all the woke ESG garbage injected into corporate America, and the voting movie audience decided they didn’t want any of it. For a film with big intentions to gain a billion dollars at the box office from a global audience, Thor: Love and Thunder quickly fell out of favor, while Top Gun: Maverick continued to be in the top 10 even after two months in theaters. Because of this behavior, there is a massive elephant in the room to talk about that I have heard nobody in the commentary business from entertainment or politics nail down, which is worth discussing because of what it means. What we see with movie audiences is a total rejection of the globalist push for ESG values that will undoubtedly be reflected in society in general, and what has been happening in the movie business will ultimately be reflected in society in general, with restaurants, business commerce, and populist politics. The only way the ESG system was ever going to work was to take away all people’s options for what they really wanted. Top Gun: Maverick shows just how successful breaking the ESG formula can be for anybody who dares to, and now that people have seen the benefits, the ESG attempts will fail miserably.

Considering that Top Gun: Maverick was entirely filmed before Covid came along to destroy its original release date for the summer of 2020, the film was not a conscious effort to push back against the globalist trends toward ESG. It was able to get funding because it had been in the works for many years and had Tom Cruise attached to it, so the movie got made. But the global sabotage with Covid, as I said in the beginning, was more of an attack against American culture in every way and the intent was to destroy American capitalism. Small businesses were meant to be destroyed. Amusement parks bankrupted. And the American film industry was targeted to be choked off, even though the political lefties in Hollywood were kissing the ring of the globalists most aggressively. Those market sectors were intended to be destroyed before the year of 2020 ran out, which was the goal of the World Economic Forum members behind the Covid virus, using China to be the face of the disruption. The world was going to have a Great Reset, and America would come out of it under the fold of global socialism run by health agencies controlled by the United Nations, and that was the end of the story. Paramount Pictures was shrewd to wait out the storm and hold Top Gun: Maverick for another two years to hope the American movie industry would survive and that theater owners would not all go bankrupt. Along the way, Paramount listened to its potential audience, and they decided to tweak the film toward a domestic market and ignore China completely, which many considered to be suicidal. But once the movie was released and movie theaters finally opened into something resembling normal, great things happened, and people were hungry for a non-woke movie without ESG goal posts that told a pro-American story that people could feel good about. And the rest is history.

It’s not that Top Gun: Maverick is a great movie. But it offers a non-ESG story that people are starving for, and they have voted with their feet. There are so many other options now with streaming services that people could easily have just stayed home and watched hundreds of other options. So it says something any time people are willing to go to the theater to see a movie of any kind. But what we are seeing happening with this particular movie is that people are voting against the ESG world that is being imposed on them, and the first real offering of American patriotism since President Trump was removed from office through political upheavals is the true sentiment of the voting public. You can’t fake personal choice. Ballot stuffing and other forms of fraud can manipulate results to look like more people than really do support progressive causes. But the tickets bought for a darkened theater in direct competition with other offerings, like Thor: Love and Thunder, show the true sentiment of the public when choice is the deciding factor. With most movies these days being produced for a global audience, especially from Disney, it had been considered suicide to focus on a domestic release, which is what Top Gun: Maverick boldly did. And the result was that the world came to the doorstep of the movie because they wanted to experience American life with their movie purchase. Not to see the same old ESG political nonsense that all the other films were offering, the same homosexual propaganda, the soft stories without defined heroes, and the noticeable lack of patriotism that was clearly part of the plan for a post-Covid world. Top Gun: Maverick broke all the rules and returned to what worked for years. And because of that success, many other industries and political movements will follow. 

Rich Hoffman

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Don’t Play Nice With Democrats, They are At War With Us: Say NO to more funding

Shut Down The Government

Here’s a news flash, we are at war!  We are not in a situation where we, as Republicans, are required to play nice with Democrats.  No matter what you think about election fraud.  No matter what you think about the border.  No matter what you think about the cover-up of our political machine helping China develop a bioweapon in coronavirus at the Wuhan lab with NIH funding by Dr. Fauci.  We are under attack.  Democrats are trying to collapse our system of government, of our country, and we have the means to stop them. It’s not with elections during the midterms.  It’s not with the reinstitution of President Trump.  It’s actually upon us now, with the vote on the Hill to raise the debt ceiling and refund the government at the end of September.  We are already terribly in debt because we’ve played too nice.  We let the United Nations sucker us with Covid and trillions of dollars of new debt.  What is happening is a classic Cloward and Piven strategy meant to crush the American dollar and America as a sovereign nation.  We have domestic enemies who are helping bring it about.  Yet, we still have the power in our hands to stop it.  We still control the flow of money.  We can say no to raising the debt limit, and we can refuse to fund the government past the September deadline.  What are you afraid of happening?  What could be worse than losing your country?

Look, already, the government has taught people to live without the government. What will the media do when the government shuts down and people can’t go to the National Parks?  We already shut down the government during Covid.  I went to six National Parks this past year, and most of them had just reopened.  At Yellowstone in June 2021, they had only been open a few weeks after the government shutdown over Covid, and honestly, life still went on. Suppose they shut down over a lack of funding. Who is going to care?  People will rearrange their plans and get on with their lives.  This isn’t how it used to be where Republicans were the first to blink in such shutdowns; they would accept the blame for the whole fiasco.  No, we’re in a real new world now.  These days, if you stand up to Democrats by throwing all this in their face, you will be rewarded by voters; even illegal immigrants will vote Republican.  Because everyone likes a fighter, and everyone wants to see people in power defending the underdog.  This is the first time we could have a government shutdown where the Democrats would get the blame.  The public won’t care a bit.  By taking this leverage away from Democrats now, you will take it from them forever. 

And to put an end to the trillions that Democrats want to spend with that communist infrastructure plan they want to pass.  Just take away their ability to borrow money.  The number one extortion piece that China has over the United States is our debt.  Democrats want to feed that power for an overthrow of America. That’s why they are against the Pledge of Allegiance; that’s why they want people to protest the American flag.  Do they hate America, isn’t that obvious yet?  Who doubts that now?  They have virtually come out and stamped their hatred of us right on our foreheads.   So why play nice with them?  Why shake hands?  Why pretend that the Senate is a country club of legislators who all want what’s best for America because they aren’t.   Many of them are domestic enemies to our Constitution, and they say it in the open.  Why not take them at their word?  Why play nice with them?  Would you want history to remember you opening the door and letting in the Trojan Horse that destroyed the war?

Many would argue that the Trojan Horse has already been unleashed, that the battle has already been launched, and that the globalists are already marking the war won.  That it’s too late.  Well, for that to happen, suckers must give them the money like the robbers they are.  Like Jesse James holding up a train promising to let all the women and children live if only the train’s occupants would hand over all their money, the Democrats are doing the same with our country.  Remember, Jesse James was a staunch slave-owning Democrat, and he was and is just like these modern Democrats.  Thieves, radicals, and political insurgents.  They do not want to work together for a better country.  They want to hold us up, steal our money and our lives, and turn over our country to the globe for a reward in an upcoming insurgent government.  So, the robbery is taking place for the naysayers and negative barnacles who think the fight isn’t worth having, but the goods have not left our hands.  Raising the debt ceiling and renewing the federal government’s funding is when that takes place, and Republicans would do well to hold tight, even shoot it out with the bandits.  But don’t hand it over.

Republicans are talking tough about the upcoming vote.  Democrats are threatening to do it all without them, which would be fine.  Never put your name next to a loser.  The Democrats, through election fraud, have managed to take the House, the Senate, and the Presidency.  Let them choke on it.  Let them be the ones to fund all these ridiculous projects.  Let them be on the hook for it.  Let them hang on to it and make them pay later.  There will be a later if Republicans hold tight.  Burn the horse with all the troops in it. Don’t let them in the gate, then go to bed only to slaughter you in the night.  Kill it before it gets to you under hidden schemes and actions of aggression intent for other nations, not those of America.  It’s all very simple; without the shared guilt of a broken economy, of an outright insurrection, Democrats will be left alone and afraid.  They will have nobody but themselves to blame, and when it all comes crashing down, it will be their party that will feel it most.

Then and only then can we talk about reforms.   They can’t steal the votes of the Republicans in our republic.   They can override the votes, but they cannot steal them from a live person voting on the House floor and talking to the media after.  Do not give them the leverage of your acceptance.  Leave them alone on this, and ultimately to blame.  Americans will back a fighter.  They will not support an accomplice who helped rob them of their wealth and country.  The power is truly in our hands.  Democrats only win if we surrender.  At least make them fight for it.  Fire back for a change and play chicken with the intent to crash headlong into their ranks.  Be willing to take damage from the action.  But don’t play nice with them.  Playing nice will be a sure way to lose this game, and in losing, we lose our country to the forces obviously against it.  And even though it may be scary now, remember, history has a long memory.  Finding a little bravery today and standing up to these bandits and insurgents will be worth the memory tomorrow.  Yet yielding to them will only pay embarrassment for the rest of your lives and the memory of it in the centuries to come.

Rich Hoffman

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Solo: A Star Wars Story Box office discussion–what it means to everyone–and nobody cares about China

Box office numbers are often a good thermometer into what the world is thinking, and I pay attention to them closely, and sadly the new Star Wars movie Solo: A Star Wars Story is falling well short of the kind of numbers its going to need to make. I found it interesting to see how many news outlets were already writing stories on Friday about how dismal the box office numbers were for the new Star Wars movie, like The Hollywood Reporter for instance. Their story was that Solo was bombing big time in China. Well, since when was China the market decider for films, they are communists, more aligned with the villains in these stories? Solo: A Star Wars Story is all about freedom and I’m sure the “state” wasn’t all that happy with the film, and that whether or not people saw the film or even advertised it so that their billion people had access to it is probably a big factor. Asians especially in China are not big on the Star Wars films, but that’s OK, they haven’t been a big part of the box office numbers all this time—who really needs them now? Solo isn’t any different, yet The Hollywood Reporter was almost as happy as a kid on Christmas Day to learn that China was not supporting the new Star Wars picture. There’s a lot going on with this one which justifies a good long discussion.  (CLICK HERE FOR MY REVIEW OF THE FILM)

First of all, I don’t think the poor box office numbers so far reflect that Solo: A Star Wars Story is a bad movie. If you took the box office numbers of Infinity War and Deadpool 2 and released Solo: A Star Wars Story on a light release month, such as April I think this Star Wars movie would be on track easily to achieve a billion dollars at the box office, but with some competition out there, it would appear there is only so much money on the table to divide up between all the movies, and that’s not a bad thing for theater owners. I often say that Hollywood has let down all the personal investments that theater owners have to shoulder with less than stout productions that drive their concessions. That certainly isn’t the problem currently, there are a lot of movies released right now, and coming up as the summer unfolds which should help theater owners sell lots of popcorn. Hollywood owes them for always being available to display the Hollywood product to the public. That same public has a lot to do on Memorial Day weekend, that’s when the pools open in the states and people typically have things to do outside. In America Memorial Day weekend was pretty nice except for some flash flooding in the eastern part of the country. Everywhere else it was sunny and hot—and people spent time outside. May 25th may have been a traditional release date for Star Wars, but it’s no longer a great weekend for opening a movie because it’s the gateway to summer and people are often doing a lot of things that involve going outside.

Additionally, there are problems for Star Wars to overcome, the entertainment media is trying to do with Lucasfilm and Disney what the general media is trying to do with President Trump, and that is torpedo anything that they do that’s good, because everyone else is struggling to compete. Disney is going to make a lot of money this summer between the Marvel films and Pixar’s Incredibles 2—many in the entertainment business are very happy to see a Star Wars movie get bad press, because it’s a shot at Disney as a media company they are competing with. It’s like how the rest of the NFL teams around the country enjoy it when the New England Patriots lose a game, or Tom Brady throws an occasional interception. The trade media rushes out to talk about how Tom Brady is too old and is losing it. But the very next week Brady will throw for 400 yards and have a quarterback rating over 100 and the Patriots will win by 24 points over whoever they are playing. Disney and its tent pole of Star Wars is a big presence in the marketplace and the second handers love to see trouble happening in the Star Wars universe.

But then there is the very legitimate problem that I have talked about before and that is the mistake that Kathleen Kennedy and her story group at Lucasfilm has made in throwing out the extended universe of Star Wars and pushing very progressive themes in these new Star Wars movies cramming PC culture down the throats of the fans who clearly don’t want those elements in these movies. To me the Lucasfilm efforts with Solo: A Star Wars Story went a long way to fixing those problems with the fan base where some still want to enjoy new instalments, while others want to boycott the films in hopes that Disney will fire Kathleen Kennedy for messing with the elements that made Star Wars great to begin with. Nobody cared that Princess Leia was a bit of a feminist in the original A New Hope. George Lucas tried to make people happy by putting a black guy in the stories with the character of Lando. But in general, the heroes were white people, especially men and Kennedy has been very active to change that. But while doing so she literally destroyed two of the most popular female characters that fans loved, Jaina Solo, Han’s very strong daughter, and the wife of Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade. Fans who read the books went on a lot of journeys with those characters over two decades and suddenly fans were told that those people didn’t exist in Star Wars anymore, and that has caused a lot of consternation. When The Last Jedi failed to reveal who the parents of Rey were—many people were hoping that she was actually Jaina which would at least explain why she is flying around in Han Solo’s precious Millennium Falcon—a lot of fans stepped away from Star Wars at that point and now this second film in only a year has hit theaters and people are ambivalent about it. The Last Jedi was a very progressive movie that really split the fanbase, from not revealing the parentage of Rey, to the killing of Luke and the obvious progressive messages of feminism and sacrifice where everyone was blowing themselves up instead of taking the fight to the enemy, it’s that which made it so the fans stepped away from Solo: A Star Wars Story.

I have been enjoying the new Star Wars stuff the best I could. I have not been a fan of what Lucasfilm has done. I was a big fan of the Star Wars EU and I think Lucasfilm could have easily have just picked up these stories where the books left off and would have done something really special. However, I think the value of the movies and all the merchandise that is coming from the franchise does far more good than bad. I think Lucasfilm and Disney made a major mistake with Star Wars and that they are trying to remedy that now. For me Solo: A Star Wars Story was a huge step in that direction—of making things right with the fans. But its obvious that the fans are going to make Disney and ultimately Lucasfilm earn back that respect which is where things are today. There was a boycott of this latest Han Solo movie and it had an impact on the final ticket sales. As the word is getting out, because Solo: A Star Wars Story is pretty good—I think its one of the best and is certainly on par with the original films somewhere in quality of story telling between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. But the film is more fun like A New Hope was. I like the prequel films but can admit that Solo: A Star Wars Story is better than those films and it is certainly better than The Force Awakens. But these new young actors are making a name for themselves, the young Alden Ehrenreich is earning his respect from the fans little by little. Many fans have been sitting on the fence with Solo: A Star Wars Story because they weren’t sure how to feel about a new actor taking over for the legendary Harrison Ford. If this latest Star Wars film does anything it shows fans that its possible to have a younger actor playing an old favorite, and because of that I think Solo: A Star Wars Story will have good legs into the future of the franchise, and people will come back to the films and forgive Lucasfilm and Disney for their mistakes with the first three films made since the acquisition in 2012.

Alden Ehrenreich is a smart young actor with a good head on his shoulders, and he likes playing Han Solo in Star Wars. He’s good for the franchise and understands that taking less money for the opportunity to do more films like this makes good business sense because it could place him in Hollywood as the next big demand actor—like Harrison Ford was. With all that under consideration I think Disney certainly put the cards down on the table with this one holding nothing back promotionally. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they spent $500 million on the movie and are worried at this point of making that money back, which I think they will. But they spent the money expecting a billion in return and that could cool them on launching the other projects that are in the pipeline. Hopefully they let Lucasfilm go forward with the budgets on those new films, the Kenobi film, the Boba Fett film, the Rian series, and of course at least two more movies about the young Han Solo—as well as a whole bunch of other films not yet released. It’s not too late to make these films into the kind of successes that were experienced with Marvel—but getting the fan base back on board is the key.

To win back the audience, and this is just my advice, do with it whatever you want Lucasfilm, you have to get Mara Jade and Jaina Solo into Episode Nine as its being directed now with J.J. Abrams. Everyone gets what they want if that happens, Kennedy gets her strong female leads, Luke has a reason for being so distressed in The Last Jedi, and Rey gets a name and a reason for having the Falcon with Chewie as her co-pilot. A new trilogy featuring Jaina could even take things further 30 years after Episode Nine—the possibilities are endless. It took Marvel ten films to build up the kind of anticipation that was seen in Infinity War, Star Wars could do something very similar, but they’ll have to earn back the fans, and Solo: A Star Wars Story was a big first step. Hopefully Disney doesn’t get cold feet after they study these box office results and consider whether fans will support two Star Wars movies in the same year. They will, and they will support three or four a year if Disney will make them and be very profitable with $200 million budgets. But it will take more movies like Solo: A Star Wars Story to earn back that fan trust, not more movies like The Last Jedi or even The Force Awakens. The nostalgia wore off and now reality is there for Star Wars films, going forward, people want to see new ground that pays respect to what they know from the original EU—and fans don’t want to be preached to with gay characters, or black characters, or women. They just want to see a story set in a galaxy far, far away that will endure for centuries—and not fall out of favor with whatever new political movements come in the next few decades. Star Wars fans want their traditions, and they want the long view—and its their money that Disney wants, so it’s up to the giant entertainment company to give it to them.

I think I’ve listened to the new Han Solo theme from the John Powell soundtrack back to back for a solid four days now and I love it, it’s so full of optimism. It reminds me of how it was when Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night series started back in 2008, with a movie that many people didn’t think was needed because at that point Batman had been done so many times. The Nolan trilogy built up a nice audience and earned a reputation by the fans that they trusted and supported. Those films each went on to make over a billion dollars each. Iron Man the first Avenger film also came out that year with a fantastic performance by Robert Downey Jr. The film only grossed around $500 million globally much like I think this new Han Solo movie will make, but it became the glue that built up those next nine Marvel films. Disney purchased Marvel shortly after that film’s release and the rest is now history, and has been very successful. It has allowed Disney to make obscure films like The Black Panther, which I thought was pretty good—which would have never been made unless there was a need for the ever-expanding universe. Star Wars could do better, but the fan base will have to be built and listening to that soundtrack of Solo: A Star Wars Story that new Han Solo theme could serve as a nice light in the darkness for all the Disney executives timid about the next stage of the adventure. The best thing to do would be to support the effort and not panic, there is a lot of good that came out of Solo, and it hints at how things truly could be now that it looks like Lucasfilm is starting to figure out how to make these Star Wars movies without the guidance of George Lucas. The John Williams contribution is absolutely brilliant and I hope that everyone involved can use it to launch something really special, because the opportunity is certainly there.

Rich Hoffman
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An Authentic Han Solo Costume: The miracle of Amazon.com amid changing industries–and people

IMG_5037

Everyone knows I’m a huge Star Wars fan—which I view differently from the geeky other types of entertainment exhibitions of public support.  When I see the name Star Wars and participate in its products in whatever form, it evokes in me an optimism that is very specific to it that I am very fond of.  That’s why my favorite character within Star Wars is Han Solo, because he is the most optimistic character perhaps ever created for film.  Nothing is impossible for Han Solo—he’ll try anything under any circumstances because his personality is such that he figures his confidence and sheer will can get him through anything.  He is the Donald Trump of science fiction and I’ve felt that way about that character for more than forty years now.  On more than a few occasions I’ve dressed up as Han Solo for Halloween events, or other science fiction endeavors, conventions, watch parties, literary events at book stores—just various festive gatherings that celebrate costuming and character reverence—but I’ve never had any kind of official Han Solo clothing. I would just piece together whatever I could find that sort of looked like the popular smuggler from the Star Wars series and go from there. But my five-year old grandson is about to have a big birthday party marking that invisible line of being a toddler to a genuine little boy fully aware of the world around him with the memories that now matter—and my daughters are fashioning it to Star Wars.  As I’ve reported before also, these parties my kids do for their kids are not just little events—they go all out in creating a very mythic experience that is almost a theme park occurrence and due to their passion for Star Wars they are going all out.  That meant that of course I had to dress up as Han Solo—but this time I wanted to do it for real—as real as possible because of the effort my kids were putting into this party and the eventual impact it would have on the youth in my family attending this thing.  So I turned to Amazon.com to see what was out there and was stunned by a world I discovered.

My mom made me a little vest like Han Solo’s when I was in the fifth grade and I sort of kept it all these years even though it was way too small for me.  But even a few years ago if you wanted something that looked like a Star Wars character and bought a costume from a place like Party City it always came out looking far from authentic.  If you wanted something that looked like the clothing in the movie you had to make it.  Back when my kids were little we went to a Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis and my wife made Jedi robes for my girls and their friends so they could dress up at that convention which occurred right before the movie Revenge of the SIth.  The internet at that time had some support—you could get directions from people who built their own costumes but there weren’t suppliers carrying things like that on the shelf.  Even though Star Wars was popular there just wasn’t any money in it for costumers to make costumes of all those characters in the movies  for a public of all shapes and sizes.  The scope of that work was unrealistic. For Han Solo specifically his outfit looks pretty simple yet is really quite complex.  For instance, his vest from A New Hope has a series of very complicated pockets positioned just right—and there is nothing like that off the rack at Wal-Mart or Kholes.  Han Solo’s pants don’t have pockets and have a very specific pin stripe down the side of them which disappears into knee-high boots that are meant to put the swash in the buckle for the very dashing character. The shirt under the vest isn’t just a white button-up but has a very unique collar and v-nick style that has to fit just right through the shoulders to give the correct effect.  Then there is the gun belt which is a thing all its own.  So I went looking for these things and I started with the Star Wars Costume exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center—which has been running all summer and will end around the beginning of October before moving on to the next city.  It’s a good exhibit, most of which I’ve seen before at the Smithsonian, but for my quest it served its purpose.  I was able to get right up to the Han Solo costume and look at things up close so that I could duplicate it authentically.  If I couldn’t find the items online, my wife was willing to build them from scratch so we went and took lots of pictures.

To my shook as I started looking now, in 2017 for these very specific Han Solo costume pieces for this epic party my kids were having I discovered that I was able to buy everything at Amazon.com relatively inexpensively.  For instance the great Han Solo vest that I figured was the most important part of the costume was just under forty dollars from an outfit in China.  I skeptically ordered it expecting it to arrive in a very flawed condition.  I expected something that looked like a typical Party City costume that smelled like plastic and rubber.  But what came to my front door was an exact replica of the Han Solo vest from A New Hope made out of material that was like that of tactical gear for a SWAT team.   It was a very good garment that was legitimate and it fit well the moment I put it on.  I was stunned by the quality of it.  I then proceeded to order the official shirt, the pants, the boots and the gun belt which as of this writing hasn’t yet arrived, but everything else has and again I was stunned by the authenticity of each item.

At different points in my life I had looked for these things and nobody carried them—as I said, everything had to be made by hand.  What’s unique about now from then—and by then I mean like six months ago—is that due to all the COSPLAY that goes on at these Comic Con conventions and now that Disney World is building these amusement parks with Star Wars lands within them there is this big COSPLAY movement that has emerged—where people dress up as characters from their favorite movies to delve into the mythology of these various sci-fi events—and out of nowhere there are all these suppliers who are making these costumes to meet the growing demand.  It’s a whole industry of itself that has virtually arrived out of nowhere.  I am aware of some of it because I find Comic Cons interesting as well as Gen Cons and other conventions.  I also noticed that the plans for the new Star Wars resort coming to Disney World is seeking to tap into this emerging market with a Fantasy Island style of Star Wars experience where they encourage people to show up dressed for the part.   Obviously Disney knew all about this culture and were building their business plans around it.  I only discovered it because of my grandson’s birthday party—but this was big business!

As I had ordered everything from my home computer and each item arrived one by one to my doorstep without having to go anywhere to search for it I became more and more impressed.  Even more shocking was that everything fit nicely, I didn’t have to send anything back.  Just by reading some of the reviews I was able to size myself accordingly with no trouble at all.  I figured that the risk was low because if the stuff showed up and was junky I figured my five-year old grandson would forgive me.  He’d appreciate the effort and wouldn’t get hung up on the details—even though he is a very smart little kid.  He surprises me what he notices.  He’s already playing the video game Battlefront very well which is about two years before I thought he would.  He plays online against other people who are very good—and he’s effective.  He knows all the different types of weapons that can be used, how to outfit each character and how to manage the Star Cards which give unique abilities to tactical engagements.  So if something wasn’t right, he’d notice. But after getting the parts of my Han Solo costume together it was obvious that I had nothing to worry about.  As far as this party was concerned, except for my hairline, the outfit looks just like it would if it was on the actual movie set.  That’s pretty stunning for something that was so easily ordered on Amazon.com.

This is all just another example of how imagination is fueling an entirely new industry and due to the excessive and efficient reach of Amazon.com they were able to connect me to suppliers around the world where I could get a very specific items from a forty-year old movie to my doorstep within two weeks.  And the quality wasn’t junky but meant to impress even under the scrutiny of the most ardent film geek.   In some cases my outfit is better than the movie original on display at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  Those costumes were meant for just a few months of filming, these for purchase were meant to last much longer and under the judgment of live audiences.  Needless to say, which I have before, we are seeing something new and hopeful from these modern movie enthusiasts which starts with a mythology in the movie theater and extends into real life—what Disney is doing down at their theme parks is tapping into the public need to play out their fantasies and is an expansion of imagination that is very specific to our species as human beings.  The need to personify a fantasy experience has deep psychological roots that go far beyond primal necessity.   I think the end result is a very positive one that is headed toward an unknown climax.  I know I love to see the imaginations of so many people at work to make something like all this possible—but it surprised even me at the extent of it all. And the entity most responsible for the success of this new industry was Amazon.com.  They were the middle ground players that connected need with supply and allowed both to get what they wanted at the best price and quality.  If they can do that with a simple costume from Star Wars, just think what they can do with real necessities.  We are living in a whole new world.

Rich Hoffman

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I am Han Solo: The ‘Star Wars’ personality test

I’m Han Solo—at least that’s what the new Star Wars personality test told me when I took it.  A friend of mine told me that The Blaze did a story on a new Star Wars personality test by www.Zimbio.com which was actually more sophisticated than I thought it would be.  The questions are involved and pretty good about bringing to the surface the raw nature of a person’s personality as related to the Star Wars film series.  For instance, while taking the test I thought I’d come out as Obi-Wan Kenobi—whom I personally admire for his love of wisdom and the philosophic chess matches he tends to play on a galactic scale.  But Han Solo has always been my favorite character and that trait emerged during the test even though I was consciously aware of avoiding it.  So it was a pretty neat test.  At the end of The Blaze article linked below it was revealed that most of the staff at The Blaze including Glenn Beck, Doc Thompson and Skip LeCombe had taken the test and were enthusiastic about their results which they promised to cover on air.  I thought this remarkable because it provides insight to all that I have been saying lately about the cultural impact of Star Wars and the future of our society.  There are few things which can unite minds quicker than Star Wars does in discussions with other people and it’s not just nerds anymore—but mainstream acceptance.  NFL football used to be that topic item breaker that anybody could discuss with any other person in business or other affairs, but quickly Star Wars is overtaking it.  It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t know about Star Wars who is under 55 years old and doesn’t have an opinion about the film series.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/18/are-you-a-yoda-luke-skywalker-or-maybe-a-princess-leia-take-the-star-wars-personality-test/

I took the test while on the road at my sister-in-law’s house with many family members present so we all took the test and had a good time with the results.  I was surprised how many of them came back as Yoda, and the young men who took it mostly came back as Boba Fett—which was remarkably accurate.  There were no Darth Vader’s in our group which says a lot about the quality of our family.  That much didn’t surprise me—but the number of Yodas did—my wife included.  It could not be ignored how many of our family members instantly understood what the test was and the intent which reflected the response of The Blaze staff.  Star Wars is something that touches just about everyone as good memories of their childhoods flood back to them upon the mention of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia.

I remember what it was like to be a kid in the late 70s and early 80s.  Star Wars was everywhere—it was on the radio, it was at the stores, it was on television, it was in comics, magazines—it defined popular culture from about 1977 to 1985 when it began to subside just a bit.  Even popular films like Back to the Future and ET the Extra Terrestrial made frequent Star Wars references—so it was a huge part of that 8 year period and anybody who was a child during that period knows what I’m talking about.  That doesn’t mean that everyone was an open Star Wars fan.  Many of the kids in my school made fun of kids who openly loved Star Wars—kids like me who had Star Wars notebooks, wore Star Wars t-shirts, and drew pictures on my homework papers of Star Wars space ships.  I didn’t care what other kids said, once I got past the 7th grade, I was never picked on for Star Wars again because I had so many fights at school that kids stopped trying.  The more they made fun of me the more I rubbed it in their face.  I had a Star Wars shirt for every day of the week—my favorite was a Han Solo shirt that I never got tired of wearing.  I wore it so much that it fell apart.  I developed a rivalry with another kid in Junior High school at Lakota who was a Star Trek fan and hated Star Wars.  We actually had fist fights over Star Wars and which movie was better.  It got so bad that I shoved the kid right into the principles office as he was trying to escape me after I was waiting outside his bus in the morning to catch him with a confrontation before class started.  He had previously declared during lunch period that Captain Kirk would beat Han Solo any day of the week—so I was going to teach him otherwise. I’d give him some real life Han Solo through me—and as he was running away from he thought he’d get safety inside the principles office—which he didn’t.  I took the fight straight there shocking all the other kids in the hallway and the adults alike when I grabbed hold of the Star Trek lover by the back of his shirt and threw him right into the front door with the principle and secretary standing right there.  Nobody had been so audacious before—and nobody knew what to make of it.  Nobody understood that I loved Han Solo that much because the character represented everything I wanted to become when I grew up—and calling him names was the same as calling me names—and I wasn’t going to stand for it.

My brother and I had so many Star Wars figures that we set up our basement with elaborate hand-made models featuring Star Wars toys. Every Christmas and birthday was an opportunity to increase our holdings for these gigantic Star Wars set-ups.  On Friday and Saturday nights our friends would come over and we’d build new Star Wars buildings and ships late into the night staying up until 3 and 4 AM in a world of our own making inspired by Star Wars.  My parents couldn’t afford to give me a Millennium Falcon like many of my friends had, so I built my own out of a cardboard box.  That creation was destroyed during my late teens—and I never got over it.  During the Christmas of 1995 my wife finally bought me a Millennium Falcon when Kenner re-released the old toys with minor updates in anticipation of the Special Editions to the films which occurred in 1997.  The world we created in that basement had so much reverence for me that I wanted to do little else but create my own world in the context of that one.  We had entire areas around our set-ups in the basement sectioned off with black felt to simulate the darkness of space and on the ceiling was white felt to simulate clouds.  We had our own power supply, there were floating asteroids, and epic worlds re-created to model scale.  It was the happiest place for me on earth.

I was never shy about my admissions.  Star Wars represented limitless possibilities and an escape from oppression and Han Solo was the kind of guy who was full of confidence and a never say die attitude.  He was the model of a man who I would grow up and become.  Many other kids one-on-one loved my enthusiasm, but would never admit it in the light of day.  But privately most of them felt as strongly as I did, they just didn’t show it publicly.  I carried this love into my adulthood and it never really subsided.  With my children I raised them on Star Wars, and now with the Disney acquisition of Star Wars, my grand children will benefit—and with everything I just described, the cultural impact under Disney’s guidance will far eclipse my experience.  There will be more toys, more clothing, more music, video games, posters, magazine articles-virtually everything in our society will be touched by Star Wars and a whole new generation will find solace within the story lines.  Unlike me—who had good parents who really cared and behaved in a traditional sense–kids today have broken families, step parents and lack structure as a result of progressive social engineering policies.  The strongest thing to a real family a lot of modern kids will have is the characters of Star Wars—which as sad as that may sound—is absolutely true.

The character of Han Solo was never intended to be a hero in the way he turned out.  Fans of the films were supposed to yearn for Luke Skywalker, not Han Solo, but I could never relate to Luke’s naïveté.  I wanted to grow up and become the space pirate Solo who is more like a character out of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged than any other creation ever put on-screen.  A lot of people thought this was destructive, but it has made me into an interesting adult—one who thought I’d be more like Obi-Wan Kenobi than Han Solo as more mature years are now upon me. But upon seeing the test results I was actually relieved to see that many of my core values are still intact after all these years and I can honestly say that I’ve lived my own Han Solo type of life and behaved in a very similar way when pressed.  The difference between being a young person and an old person is the experience.  People are drawn to certain types of things based on their core personality—something this Star Wars test is attempting to uncover.  When I was a kid I hoped that when faced with perilous situations that I would behave with the same valor and skill that Han Solo did in Star Wars.  Now as an adult, I no longer have any doubt.  With a string of car chases, crashes, narrow escapes, and perilous follies of virtually every type now behind me, I can rest easily now knowing I measure up to the highest hopes I had as a child.

It is for that reason that this Star Wars test is flooding office buildings and places of business with a fury.  Most of the adult population had similar hopes for themselves, and they want to know how they measure up after all these years.  Now with some of the social stigma of fandom removed, people want to know how far they have fallen from their childhood dreams.  For me—not far at all.  I would have considered Obi-Wan Kenobi to be a concession—an honorable one—but a concession.  Han Solo, out of all the characters in Star Wars was my target, and now as a grown man who has grandchildren of his own—I have hit the bull’s-eye, and for that I am very, very proud.  Setting those high standards actually made me a better grown-up than Han Solo—considerably.  But under pressure—and when it really counts—it is good to know I’m still more like Han Solo than Obi-Wan Kenobi.

And I was there……………….Han shot first!

Take the Star Wars Test for yourself and see who you are most like.  CLICK THE LINK BELOW.

http://www.zimbio.com/quiz/Ukldm8Pi5Ub/Star+Wars+Character

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com