Tag: Han Solo

‘Solo’ Gets a Standing Ovation at Cannes: Mythology and culture are on expanding in a very positive way

I can’t emphasize enough what Star Wars means to our current society—and specifically how important this next film, Solo: A Star Wars Story is to the continuation of the great mythology that is now set to take on a life well beyond anything planet earth has ever seen. As I say often the most important topic to me out of all the things that I discuss is the realm of mythology and how it captures the minds of mankind and propels it forward at each juncture of history. I am specifically thinking right now about the great legends of King Arthur, or the early works of the Iliad where Odysseus propelled modern society to its current form to the point where our civilization has outgrown those great stories. Our modern society is very complex, and we know so much about so many things that were not known at the time that the great classics were written, and we are and have been in desperate need for stories that can take us all into the future—because that’s how human beings work. They need conceptual devices in story form to put into context their observed reality—and even though Star Wars is intended for kids, it works on so many levels to get the imaginations of the human race moving that I think it’s currently the most important thing in the world happening right now, and I understand very well what is happening from North Korea to the taxation of Amazon in Seattle—to the teacher union strikes, to the corruption of our own FBI becoming weaponized against us all. Even in that context I think this new Star Wars movie is a tremendous opportunity for mythmaking to expand dramatically into the lives of all thinking beings on planet earth for the better, and it would all come down to the presentation of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in France. It’s not just because I love the character of Han Solo, but it’s why the movie was made in the first place that I think it’s so important and I was very happy to see a standing ovation for the film after its screening. This is going to be a big one.

I read the critics opinions of the film and most of them were positive, many very positive with about 23% less than enthusiastic. What those lukewarm reviews had in common was that they missed the epic scale of life and death situations that have been present in Star Wars up to this point—the save the whole galaxy or else type of storylines. If Star Wars is going to work in future, they need to become much more individualized, personal stories which we all know culminate into the three trilogies of nine films we have mostly been familiar with. And once Lucasfilm accomplished that, mythology by way of the vehicle of Star Wars will be unleased in a very dramatic way and I don’t think those people trained into their institutional professions, and are making good livings in those comfortable places, are open to these big changes. Their comments about nobody asking for a movie about Han Solo and that the movie is just capitalizing off the Star Wars name and is an entirely different kind of film altogether are missing the point. This movie was always intended to expand the Star Wars mythology in ways that I would argue it always needed to go—since the Empire Strikes Back way back in 1980 and I think everyone watching this movie is going to be in for a surprise.

I know enough about this movie to be happy with the decisions that Kathy Kennedy has made over the last two years. A lot of people do not understand how hard it is to make a movie, and to negotiate contracts with expensive actors and to hold those contacts over many films. I continue to be amazed how the Marvel team does it with all their big-name actors now and how they can put them all in a film like Infinity War. That would be an astonishing payroll to put all those stars into one movie, but Marvel has figured it out and that Disney polish is now coming to Star Wars with these Han Solo movies serving as a test bed of creative entanglement. I will be the first to say I was not happy with the Lucasfilm abandonment of the original books which they now call legends, and I was not at all happy with The Force Awakens when they killed Han Solo in that movie. Long time readers here know very well how angry I was at the way they dealt with Han Solo’s character in that film and I did several radio shows discussing the issue in detail. However, and I know I wasn’t the only one, I think Lucasfilm to a reasonable extent has listened to the fans—and they have made some adjustments with this Solo movie which is why it needed to stay on schedule even after the previous directors were fired and Ron Howard was brought on to fix things. It’s also why I believe that the last movie of the modern trilogy, Episode 9 now directed by J.J. Abrams was pushed out into 2019—because Lucasflim needed to see how audiences reacted to new story elements in this new Solo movie.

I don’t think Kathy Kennedy or Bob Iger are all that happy with the direction of Solo: A Star Wars Story, I think they’d love to have a much more progressive film with less male characters acting so strongly. That’s a very educated guess on my part, but business is business. If you are running a movie company that makes Star Wars movies and you intend for them to transcend modern politics, then they need to be timeless stories, and this new Han Solo movie needed to be more of a classic western than a modern progressive version of Guardians of the Galaxy. I watched Kathy Kennedy at the Cannes press events and I think she is breathing a bit better now—she really needs to pull in at least a billion dollars off this Han Solo movie to justify everything they’ve done with Star Wars since Disney bought it in 2012. She made serious mistakes putting top-heavy female characters into Star Wars and making really stupid comments like she did to the New York Times where she said she didn’t care about male Stars Wars fans—which traditionally have been the primary support of the franchise for over four decades now. There was always room for women in Star Wars, but they couldn’t just take everything over and get away with it. The backlash against Kathy Kennedy in general has been harsh. And Bob Iger is an anti-gun liberal, so it’s probably tough for him to see all these posters of Han Solo pointing a gun out into the horizon, but that’s the character and that’s what people want to see in movies, and putting politics aside, Lucasfilm and Disney have given fans what they want—which is a very good thing.

I will likely give a very long and detailed review on the 24th of May which will articulate many, many things that I think are superb about this new kid’s movie which I think will capture the hearts of so many people in a very positive way. It’s not just the movie that I’m happy about, but what will come out of it creatively. Mythology has always been the center of any advanced culture and when a story works—it advances everything from arts and sciences, to politics and philosophy. And after watching that standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, I am quite sure that we are all about to see something very special.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Observational Realities: What the premier of ‘Solo’ in Los Angeles tells us about the future

I am the type of person who could write a novel about the reason that a person might change the way they hold a fork. Observational changes in nonverbal communication are an obsession with me and are a constant companion. I would have to say that nothing happens that I don’t notice. I am always on the lookout for why someone might have changes to their eye movement, or the tip of a head as it’s positioned on the shoulders, does it drop more than usual, or is it cantered off to the left or right more than typical. Is there an unusual emphasis on words when somebody is speaking and if there is, what does it mean—those types of things. So I enjoy big pop culture events because of all the mass information available to the way I think. I love going to baseball games where there are lots of people, because it tells me so much about the temperature of our culture, and I love big entertainment movie premiers—especially for projects that I am excited about like this new Star Wars movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story because there are always important things that can be learned about the nature of our society. And the thing that I thought was most compelling at the Solo premier in Hollywood this past Thursday wasn’t the usual fanfare that comes from most Disney productions that they know going in will turn in big box office numbers—it was that Bob Iger wasn’t there. I would encourage you dear reader to watch the whole red-carpet coverage. It was quite impressive.

Going even further was the lack of VIP formality at the event, even after the premier. The after party mixed cosplayers and celebrity actors together in ways that were very unusual for Hollywood which is kind of a theme with this new Solo movie. Freedom from social pretension is the underlying message of this new Star Wars movie and the absence of authority figures in our lives is the goal of Han Solo, and Disney wisely embraced that during this premier. This Star Wars movie is quite different from any other in the past, and it reaches back to recapture that feeling so many people had in 1977 when the first film came out where a much younger George Lucas put out a very unusual movie he had made with his wife in what were some very happy days for the fledgling filmmaker. Not happy on the business side, or the marital side, but from the ideological position where observations made were translated into unique characters placed into the Star Wars movies, like Han Solo—maybe one of the most independent characters ever put into film. That revulsion for authority figures was actually quietly part of the Disney movie premier. There were no special speeches by anybody from Disney or Lucasfilm before the three theaters started playing Solo: A Star Wars Story—all that happened were that the lights dimmed, the movie started, people had a good time, and afterwards everyone mingled together no matter what their social standing was. If you were at the premier, you were someone and therefore welcome to interact with anybody, anywhere within the scope of the premier. It was all very unusual. The richest person in the world was at the premier, but nobody made much mention of it. At the after party mixing with fans dressed in their favorite Star Wars outfits was a bald guy introducing himself as, “HI, I’m Jeff.” No pretension what-so-ever.

What these movies about Han Solo do for the Disney franchise of what is coming in 2020 and thereafter is that they use the main character to open up the entire galaxy to new stories. Solo is the thread that is connecting the massive mythology that is being planned by Lucasfilm and that is important in many ways. Lately I have been talking a lot about the scientific changes that are coming to us in real society, like the Uber Elevate sky cars, the missions to Mars by NASA and Elon Musk’s Space X, and just yesterday The Boring Company finished digging a tunnel under Los Angeles meant to carry traffic under the busy city with car pods and Hyperloops. Currently there is a video from Boston Dynamics that is freaking people out displaying a robot running across a park and jumping over a log in much the way a human does, so we are seeing a competitive species of a living thing that humans have invented moving into our world and it is causing some anxiety. There are a lot of things changing and what I see in pop culture are ways to intellectually deal with them that are emerging in our art, like in these Star Wars movies. For many people they need science fiction and fantasy to open their minds to the explosion of new ideas that are coming to the human race in a very rapid fashion and companies like Disney are trying to embrace their role in the whole thing in a proactive way.

Humans need conceptual tools to help them navigate ideas—in much the way that Star Wars needs Han Solo to open up the context of future stories, the elements of the films—the space travel between planets, the way that space travel is conducted, the type of people who will do it, and even the tools that humans use while doing all these things—like robots, religion, and even the type of “can do” spirit that everything takes are part of movies like Solo: A Star Wars Story. The movie exists to make money for Disney and all the merchandise retailers, but of course there is a deeper meaning that people like Bob Iger may not be consciously aware of, but the greater purpose is certainly part of the overall strategy. I watched very carefully the interview with the two Kasdens who wrote this new Solo movie and just like Larry was when he wrote the great film Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, he knew what he was doing with his son on this latest film. It is just the kind of movie that people are looking for at this particular time in our lives where technology once again, as it was in 1977—is taking over and we are wondering what our place is in all of it. The original Star Wars movies told us it was OK to embrace the future and what we ended up with was the fabulous 1980s. I think the Donald Trump presidency had a lot to do with why the original Solo movie directors were fired, because Disney had planned a certain kind of Guardians of the Galaxy Star Wars film featuring Han Solo, but that wasn’t going to work in a post Donald Trump world and Kathy Kennedy wisely made the change to more of a traditional western as opposed to a color popping change that might have been a much more progressive film. I noticed that Disney has been very careful not to put Woody Harrelson on the red-carpet interviews, because he is a major pot supporter. He’s done a few interviews, but not much—he’s not even featured in the Denny’s cards from the promotional tour—and that says something.

Everything means something and there is a lot going on with Solo: A Star Wars Story. Disney is giving fans what they want in a Star Wars movie even if they don’t personally like the direction the franchise is going, because they have their eye on the bigger prize—the furtherment of human civilization as a whole, and the part they play in it as artists. While the company of Disney may not want to do a modern cowboy movie with hot rod spaceships, the fans want it, and that’s what drives merchandise sales and brings people into the parks where the real magic happens for Disney. That’s also where new technology gets its cutting-edge tests for public consumption, and directly leads to the world we are all stepping into. We are all going to space and our daily lives are changing with all this new technology. As humans we are looking for ways to process all this information into the context of stories, which is what we have always done when processing new observational realities. And it’s all very exciting!

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

It’s all about Resisting Authoritarianism: Star Wars, George Lucas, Donald Trump and what we all see in the mirrior each day

Of course, it’s an official Star Wars Holiday, May the 4th, 2018 and at the precise moment that tickets went up for sale on Fandango I bought mine for Solo: A Star Wars Story. I am more excited for this movie than any one that I have thought about for over two decades now, so it made me very happy to get my tickets. Financial projections for the movie were released yesterday and they are predicting that Solo: A Star Wars Story will make in the $150 million-dollar range on its opening weekend. I honestly think it will be higher and will surprise a lot of people and here’s the reason why. Within this interview shown below that George Lucas and James Cameron did together for an AMC series is everything that is needed to be known as to why I love Star Wars so much and why it’s so successful. I know quite a lot about George Lucas and share with him some very basic foundation ideas about life. But ironically, both he and Cameron have evolved into Hollywood liberals over time and it is there where they depart from the rest of American society and have lost touch. All that is revealed in this short 3-minute clip, it is quite fascinating to watch.

Like George Lucas for me Star Wars is the most anti-authoritarian art that I can think of displayed on a mass scale—and that is what I love about it. That’s why even as a grown man, I still get excited about new Star Wars stories. Star Wars at its best is a warning against authoritarianism. And within Star Wars there’s no character more anti-authoritarian than Han Solo—he’s a free spirit to an almost extreme and most represents that young George Lucas who used to race cars and fight movie studios to make his movies. Deep in their hearts, most people yearn to be like Han Solo—even though they won’t always admit it, they don’t like authority figures, especially now in the United States with all the trouble we are discovering with our FBI and Deep State revelations. This new Han Solo movie comes at a particularly powerful time for movie audiences and I think its going to do some big business and may set Star Wars right again after starting off the new generation in a rough way under Kathy Kennedy. All the progressive messages that Disney and Lucasfilm stationed in San Francisco have not resonated with movie fans because it steps away from the formula of what makes Star Wars so great, something that I think George Lucas himself began to forget as he got older. So did James Cameron, I don’t think his new Avatar films will do quite so well as they did back in 2009 because he is a much less anti-authoritarian director than he used to be.

Where liberals like Cameron and Lucas go wrong is in their assumption that Democrats are the anti-authoritarians and that progressive society is the vessel to hold their message into the future. It actually is quite the opposite and I find it astonishing that being smart people, that they don’t see it. I would attribute their blindness to the fact that by working in the entertainment industry they are regionally surrounded by liberal types of people so they have lost touch with the origins of their anti-authoritarian roots and mistakenly associate all Republican ideas on the Nixon administration, which was the era for which they came of age. As creative people, they can see the need for anti-authoritarian ideas, but they can’t apply them to the world around them which is why neither filmmaker has made a hit in around a decade now.

Lucas made in Han Solo that young 1950s rebel that we know from race car tracks all across the country, the main character in Grease that John Travolta played, and the character from Happy Days that was played by Henry Winkler, the Fonz. When Ron Howard was brought in to direct this Solo: A Star Wars Story I knew immediately what was happening, and I am very excited to see those results not just because it goes back to a time in cinema that I grew up watching, but because all these very unique elements were coming together to give audiences something they just weren’t getting anywhere else in any other media format. There is a tremendous need for anti-authoritarian drama, maybe more now than ever, and while many of the modern filmmakers have forgotten what it was that made them great in the first place, Ron Howard is one of those pure directors who has liberal sentiments, but at his core he understands all this anti-authoritarian stuff better than anybody.

Like George Lucas Star Wars for me was always about pushing back against authoritarian influences and hod rod space ships. I enjoy greatly the imagination that comes from Star Wars productions, but nothing more than in their various vehicle designs. I’m a huge fan of their Incredible Cross Section books published for the Star Wars movies by DK and have spent many hours looking at them and thinking about how those vehicles could be made in real life. Hot rods and anti-authority sentiments go hand in hand in American society and are very much part of our own love of car culture. We love our cars, our ability to go where we want, when we want to, and still maintain our personal space. In the 1950s up to the 1970s cruising in our fixed-up cars was very important to Americans, especially young people. I would attribute this deep love to the success of the Fast and Furious movies, which also make a lot of money even though the plots aren’t that good. They touch on that deep love of cars and how they give individuals space against the authority figures in their lives.

However, as political reality would have it, there isn’t a more authoritarian political party than what the Democrats have turned out to be. Their authority has become the influence of mob rule where they shout down anybody who doesn’t fall in line and that is where the George Lucas and James Cameron political ideology falls apart and why they struggle with films in the modern age because the world has moved in a very different direction. All these filmmakers are anti-Trump when in reality it is the new president who like the Fonz has stepped onto the world stage and spit in the face of all authority figures. Donald Trump has a lot more in common with Han Solo than George Lucas or Stephen Colbert, yet at some deep level they understand it enough to put it down on paper in script form, but they can’t apply it to the political world around them due to their regional influences. It’s quite fascinating to watch.

But I couldn’t be happier with the result—I think for this movie Solo: A Star Wars Story that all the right creative pieces came together to really make something special that audiences are deeply craving. I think this movie is going to take a lot of people by surprise and is going to really reignite what Star Wars movies mean to people, and what sets these off from other forms of science fiction. Especially in the age of Trump where all the authority which has been built by political progressives—people who used to think they were part of the counter-culture, the old hippies from the youth of George Lucas and James Cameron, the new flower children, the environmental radicalism and the green is the new red movement people who gave birth to people like James Comey, Clapper and Mueller, I think Solo: A Star Wars Story will be best served as a mirror for us all to look at and realize how far many have drifted from the original idea of what we all truly desire to be—free people able to do what we want when we want to do it and that the real tyrants in our lives sometimes are those people who look back at us in the mirror every day.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Millennium Falcon Experience was SOLD OUT: What everything tells us about what type of society we want to be

In case you hadn’t noticed dear reader, there is a lot going on out there in the world. Even as the White House Correspondents Dinner over the weekend of April 28th showed truly how much we are living in a society well declined, a large number of really big Supreme Court cases are about to have decisions made that will shape American society for the next century. Primary elections are happening in May that will have a major impact on the midterms this upcoming fall, and the Korean peninsula is uniting for the first time in over 70 years. I’ve been writing on this blog site for around a decade now and things are happening so fast that they have defied intellectual saturation, but I have noticed one thing lately that simply amazed me and the start of it came as we were having Millennium Falcon waffles at my house before leaving to visit again the Millennium Falcon Experience at NKU. The new Avengers movie called Infinity War made over $250,000 domestically breaking all kinds of box office records and that was important for a number of reasons in relation to the grand scheme of things. If Jim Cameron was hoping that superhero movies were about to fizzle out, this news would upset him greatly, and many who have tried to use the film industry as a propaganda arm of the liberal left.

The plan was always to take the larger part of my family down to see the Millennium Falcon Experience on Sunday morning at 9 AM—which is why we scouted the event on Friday to figure out how we could take a large group through it. My family was very excited to go see the reproduction of parts of the Millennium Falcon and get some good pictures. One of my daughters is a professional photographer so we wanted to get some great pictures at the Millennium Falcon Experience since we are all Star Wars fans—its seemed like a good opportunity for us. Plus, the character of Han Solo has always been my favorite and without him in a movie, Star Wars has never really been Star Wars. I have been very critical of the new Star Wars movies, except for Rogue One, so I have been nervous about what Lucasfilm and Disney would do to my favorite Star Wars character. Han Solo certainly isn’t a liberal character by any measure, so my concern was that Disney would push to water him down to make it part of their overall liberal agenda at the company these days. However, indications are that the exact opposite will be happening. It appears that Lucasfilm has been listening to their fans since the Force Awakens problems in killing off the character, and the direction they had taken him. This new movie Solo: A Star Wars Story looks like they understand what the character is supposed to be and to what impact that will have on our society as a whole.

Like I always say, my favorite topic isn’t politics, funding challenges, or even scientific endeavor, although I do talk about those things a lot—my favorite topic is mythology. I am mildly obsessed with the way cultures form and what mythologies are used to bring people together, what themes work and which ones don’t. Han Solo is the most popular character in the Star Wars series for a reason, he is a very traditional alpha male who is reckless and in pursuit of his own independence often at whatever cost. I’m sure the progressives within the Disney Company and at Lucasfilm have discussed Solo at great length, and I think much of the reason that Ron Howard was brought in to take over the directing duties was because Donald Trump was elected and wisely Lucasfilm knew they needed to change a few things that were becoming obvious about the world after President Trump moved into the White House.

I was in London while Solo: A Star Wars Story was shooting at Pinewood and I was watching the protests against Donald Trump in those opening months and I listened carefully to the two original Solo movie directors show great support for the movement against Trump. While I don’t think that Kathy Kennedy is a conservative by any measure, the tide of movies that were going to make money certainly had to accept that Trump voters were going to decide if a film succeeded or failed at the box office. So they made some adjustments on the Solo set and brought in Ron Howard who understood that this movie about Han Solo was more about American Graffiti meets A Fistful of Dollars than a space version of 21 Jump Street. Han Solo actually means something to a lot of people, not just me, and Lucasfilm recognized that and decided to make the movie that needed to be made to pay respect to Han Solo, not the movie they wanted to make about Han Solo as a bunch of social progressives, and that is a very important distinction.

This Millennium Falcon Experience was meant to tour city to city with three sections of set reproductions from the Solo movie to generate interest in the film. My wife and I along with two of our grandchildren went to the opening of the event on Friday April 27th and I was impressed with the crowd. I saw what was going on pretty fast, on the public relations side, the event had printed a limited number of tickets that they gave out for free and when they were gone, they were gone which would get people talking about the whole thing on social media, sharing pictures, and generating interest in the new Han Solo movie that would come out on May 25th. The Millennium Falcon Experience would start in Northern Kentucky at NKU, then travel the following weekend to Atlanta, then to Denver before settling in Los Angeles ahead of the premier for the movie. My scouting report, which is seldom ever wrong, which I conveyed to my two daughters was that the big Star Wars geeks would hit this event on Friday and the thing would fizzle out by Sunday after a weekend of being open. After all, there were only so many Star Wars fans out there. Our plan was to show up at 9 AM on Sunday morning when the tickets would be issued, and we’d walk onto the exhibit, get our pictures, then go somewhere nice for breakfast. That’s not what happened.

We arrived at precisely 9:07 AM and found out that all the tickets were gone. People had started lining up at 4:30 AM that morning and the line had wrapped around the building of the BB&T Arena and the whole day sold out well before the event even started. The crew hosting the event wasn’t prepared for such a large crowd, so they issued the tickets so that people could get their tour times and leave, since there were no bathroom facilities. The event was open from 9 to 5 PM and tickets were given at intervals that would allow for about ten minutes of personal touring for each ticket which was good for five people. So doing the math, a lot of people didn’t get a ticket who wanted one. If we hadn’t gone down to the exhibit on Friday, we wouldn’t have been able to see it at all, which just mesmerized me. The opposite of what I thought was going to happen, happened. The Millennium Falcon Experience had more interest in it by day 3 than it did on day one, which I thought was remarkable given the fact that it was a free exhibit for a movie about Han Solo that didn’t come out for another month. There are many in the industry who think that people are going to get Star Wars saturation given that this is the second Star Wars movie within a year, the first was The Last Jedi. But like the Avengers Infinity War, audiences were hungrier than ever for mythological products like these movies—and that said something very important.

Both films talked about here are products of the Disney Company and while the overall movie industry is declining, Disney at least has kept their ear to the ground to give audiences what they need in the characters produced in these movies. There is a theme which all these movie characters represent that speaks to the yearning people have for individualized freedom. Han Solo is certainly all about that restless lust for personal freedom and that Millennium Falcon Experience spoke to that yearning directly. People weren’t just watching it in a movie, they were able to put their hands on it and that hunger surprised even me. I pay really close attention to these kinds of things and this went well beyond the passion I thought was out there. With that in mind I think that by the time this Solo movie hits at the end of May, after Infinity War had been out for over a month, there will be some cultural influences from these movies that will percolate into our society as a whole, in the fields of science, fashion, art and entertainment—in everything, and those things will be happening at a time when the Supreme Court will make decisions on some big cases that will affect us all. I think we are in a world that is changing dramatically, and not for the worst. I think we have been there already and are on the way out of it. But more than that, I think the movies reflect more about what we want to change into than what we just want to participate in as escapist fantasy. And that is a very interesting occurrence for our modern-day experience.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

The Millennium Falcon at NKU in Cincinnati: A look into penetrating the frontier of space

A17A55B5-5A01-4ECC-9F65-FC439E915ADFThe first thought I had while touring The Millennium Falcon Experience at the Northern Kentucky University campus was that this fictional ship from the Star Wars stories would be the best way to travel from Earth to Mars, or the moon and some more distant destination within our solar system. I thought of Jules Verne’s great book From the Earth to the Moon where he conceived of the rocket design that would be used 100 years later when NASA would eventually launch people into space and land on the moon. Star Wars was much more than just geek fandom. While I had personally thought about sitting in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon from the movies most of my life, and never thought I’d ever get a chance to actually do so, when the time did come I couldn’t help but think of real space travel using the actual design of the Millennium Falcon to serve as a foundation for a fleet of ships that would take commercial space travel to the next level.

I have been enjoying all this Han Solo media ahead of the new movie coming out on May 25th. Han Solo and his Millennium Falcon are some of my favorite fictional things in entertainment so I have been looking forward to a movie dedicated just to him and his famous starship. When I was a kid and was watching these movies for the first time I’d spend a lot of hours thinking of how to build the Millennium Falcon and trying to figure out the engineering of it. Obviously, I wasn’t alone, millions of people have been so enamored. It is a wonderful thing to see imaginations sparked to life by what they see in a movie. Over the years there have been attempts to build elements of the Millennium Falcon by the legions of fans that follow the Star Wars movies and I have enjoyed their attempts. Most notably I have been very excited to learn that a full-sized Millennium Falcon will appear at the new Disney Parks called Galaxy’s Edge. I can’t help but think that the human race is on a similar trajectory as it was with the Jules Verne novels and how NASA emerged.FAF7429F-2F17-4AA5-A1D5-0F18BE3AAEDC

I was one of the first in line to see the exhibit at NKU on Friday at 11 AM. I’m a very busy person but not too busy to see the interior of the actual Millennium Falcon as it goes on a five-city tour promoting the new Solo: A Star Wars Story all through the month of May. The Millennium Falcon is after all my favorite ship in science fiction and this whole tour started in my home town, so I had to take a moment to go see it, and it was quite impressive. It was really cool to visit the cockpit that was only seen in the movies from a few points of view, which have become iconic over the years. But it didn’t take long for the nostalgia to wear off for me and to look at the display put on by Lucasfilm as a film promotion to begin to take it all very seriously.22A06ED2-4BFA-4A6E-8D7B-95B09621330C

What’s really unique about this new film set before the events of the original movies is that the Millennium Falcon is presented not as a hunk of junk, but as the best and most exquisite of ships from its era. The Millennium Falcon becomes a junkie star ship because of the rough lifestyle of Han Solo, but this new movie goes to the start of all that, before a time when the popular Star Wars character owned the ship. As presented the Millennium Falcon was well made and bright white looking like an icon of luxury. It looked like the ship I remembered from my childhood only it looked much better. When I think of the Millennium Falcon I think of a dirty interior of a couple of friends living without women flying from one end of the galaxy to the other and not carrying to clean up after themselves. But presented the way it was for this promotional tour, the Millennium Falcon looked like a realistic offering for our own modern space travel.1C6066F4-14CD-4858-A108-532E87172C9A

It is a little ironic to me that it was the year of 2018 that Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars franchise seems to start paying off. I think this new Solo movie will be one of the most popular and will ignite a fresh start for the popular films. It’s the first time that there have ever been two Star Wars films within one year of each other and the impact that has had on merchandising has been remarkable. It’s hard to go to Wal-Mart or Target these days without seeing something regarding Star Wars. And all this is happening as commercial space endeavors are literally starting to take off. Later this year Virgin Galactic will begin their commercial flights for space tourism and Space X is preparing to send people around the moon. All this is happening while a Trump presidency has thrown its weight behind a reinvigorated NASA space program and a hot economy that is redefining employment statistics. The iWatch has essentially turned us all into Dick Tracy speaking on the phone to others from our wrists, things are moving very quickly these days.

I find it all very exciting. It won’t be long before Elon Musk has a colony on Mars and commercial industry begins to move into space. The next 50 years will explode along the frontier of space much like it did in America once humans began westward expansion free of European kings for the first time in known history. Space will bring much of the same ambition for adventure and profit. But people won’t want to fly in the kind of cramped quarters that we see with ship designs so far offered. Likely we’ll resort to what we know from films and literature, and the Millennium Falcon looks to me to have solved many of those long-distance space traveling problems.

You can make a starship in really any design you want, what you’ll need for long distance space travel is something that humans are comfortable in, that can use its external surfaces to generate power and have lots of surface area for controllable thrust. The design of the Millennium Falcon presents a lot of options for hauling freight to and from places like Mars over 18-month visits one way. Sitting in the cockpit and forgetting about the hyperspace jumps we see in the movies it wasn’t hard for me to consider spinning the Falcon to produce gravity until it arrives at its destination around Mars. Hooking up to whatever cargo it needs to bring back to earth then resuming that spinning effect all the way back with the crew living in relative luxury inside the whole time. Because of Star Wars we have a whole generation of people who are intellectually ready to accept such a deep space reality.

The Millennium Falcon’s interior as it was presented at NKU was certainly something I could live in for the long back and forth journeys to Mars that are about to become quite a reality. The Millennium Falcon already has practical docking clamps as part of its design. Solar panels could easily be incorporated into the outer shell to provide power and the interior is large enough to not go crazy in over such a long voyage. It’s round and interesting taking away the boxy designs that are offered in the International Space Station which is not conducive for long periods in space where people want to gather in a common room, but also want to be able to have their personal space as well. People need to get away from each other as well as communicate in common ways. The Falcon’s interior design goes a long way to solving lots of deep space traveling problems for a functional freighter.

Looking at that exhibit at NKU I could easily see some eccentric future billionaire building a fleet of Millennium Falcon style ships to essentially become like tractor trailers hauling rare minerals from the moon and Mars to enrich life on earth then use that wealth creation to catapult mankind even deeper into space. I could live on the Millennium Falcon with the amenities that were presented in the exhibit for many months, even years on end. Normally when we see designs for space, the environment has a military look to everything which makes it so that only the most disciplined space travelers could endure the experience. But that will have to change, and it is in our science fiction designs. 22DE3546-0899-498D-BBEB-53258B13B08CTo me the most impressive thing about the Millennium Falcon Experience was that after only 50 years of film history fans of the movies have finally figured out how to make the ships that were shown in Star Wars, and now artists and craftsmen are able to actually recreate what we see in the movies in real life. The next steps become rather obvious at that point and that is truly exciting. The Millennium Falcon Experience at NKU advertising a new Han Solo movie was something I personally never thought I’d see. But after seeing it, and touching it, and soaking it all in—I have a feeling that we will all be seeing a lot more of it in the years to come. As I left that exhibit I had the strange feeling that I may just own my own Millennium Falcon in a few years that can fly to Mars and back many times over as routinely as we can now drive to Florida now in a car. And I think I would like that world very much!

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

A Trip to Denny’s For Han Solo Merchendise: Why all the fuss?

It wasn’t just this that we did for my 50th birthday this past week, my family did a lot of things for me to show how much they appreciate me. But when they asked me what I wanted to do, I said that I wanted to find a Denny’s near our home so I could get a Millennium Falcon cup from the new movie Solo: A Star Wars Story, and the new Topps collecting cards that you can only get at the promotional event that they are doing at most Denny’s restaurants. And I wasn’t kidding about it. If we were planning to do a dinner for my birthday and go out somewhere anyway, I wanted to do something fun that I’d like, and could share with my kids and grandkids. After all, we all like Star Wars. I always used it in the way it was intended, as a modern mythology that had embedded in those kid’s films an essential epistemology in regard to philosophy that is needed in this fast-moving world, so one of my daughters found a nice one about an hour and a half outside of downtown Cincinnati, just outside the city limits of Indianapolis, Indiana. Han Solo was always my favorite character from the Star Wars movies so it was fun to make the Denny’s promotion a fun birthday event that everyone could enjoy. As an added benefit Disney had released the last trailer before the new movie opens on May 25th, just over a month from this writing so it made for an interesting birthday dinner at Denny’s. We didn’t hold back on the Solo merchandise!

I think Alden Ehrenreich will do a great job playing Han Solo as a younger man, a tough job to take over from one of the most iconic film roles Harrison Ford brought to life. It’s a tough job that everyone has in their head differently, so no matter what Ehrenreich does, someone isn’t going to like it. But, from what I’ve seen, the kid gets it—and that’s all that matters. It works for me and I hope it leads to a lot more Han Solo in movies that take place before the events of episode 4. I like the new pointy nose on the Millennium Falcon, I like the idea of new Star Wars music about to be released. I love the DLCs that will be downloaded on Star Wars: Battlefront 2. I love all the toys being released for the movie, its more generational stuff to share with my grandchildren for which all this is new to them so they are having fun with it for the first time. I see it all as very positive and it generally puts a smile on my face to have a new Han Solo movie because that character represents everything I love about Star Wars.

Of course, part of what makes 50th birthday celebrations what they are is in the reflection that you have about your life up to that moment and what might be ahead. For many it’s a time when they look at their life and consider that their best days are behind them. But not me. I have had a lot of very good days and I am sure there are a lot more ahead of me, and the Denny’s meal day was surprisingly fulfilling, not just from the Han Solo gear, but I enjoyed eating Denny’s food again after not having it for over 25 years. Denny’s was one of those places I used to go because they were open all night where I’d go to read after I’d get off work from my second shift jobs. When I was young and worked two fulltime jobs to make ends meet and our house was too small to leave a light on otherwise it would wake up the whole house at night, I’d read my books at all night restaurants like Waffle House, Perkins and Denny’s to make myself tired enough to wind down for bed. After a good meal and about 10 refills of a Coke at 2 am I’d go home and sleep for three or four hours and do it all again at the crack of dawn. Somewhere over that 25-year span Denny’s left the Cincinnati area so it was fun to have it again on my birthday. It was even more fun to have a Star Wars inspired menu with the new Han Solo on the cover. I had the “Two Moons Skillet” which was Heaven on earth for me.

All this of course led me to consider how much Star Wars had evolved over time and what role it plays in a modern sense. I’ve written many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of words as to what Star Wars means culturally, but I think I’ve been leaving out the epistemological definition in referring to it. After all, I write about some pretty serious subjects most of the time, so when I switch gears and do these Star Wars articles, to some it seems out of character, but to me it all runs together. It’s relevant to the missile attacks of Syria this past weekend, the teacher strikes in Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona, the opioid epidemic—just about every topic one might consider can be traced back to the epistemological failures of modern society—and Star Wars was created, and does a good job of maintaining it for children a basic epistemology of values that are designed for modern life. The world is otherwise very confused, their religious values are all over the map, politically we have factions that want to take mankind back to a theology while others are wanting to plant flags into anarchy, democracy and those who presently have power want to keep everything in an aristocracy. We are moving to space as a species while the political powers in office want to cling to mother earth and environmental concerns because that is how their power bases were established—on earth with earthly rules. The truly wonderful thing about Star Wars is that it takes all the value of the world’s mythology and applies it into a modern context, which is why kids, and kids at heart love it so much. It’s a much different thing than other pop culture rituals. This one is actually very healthy for modern human beings. It’s meant for kids, but it works for adults too in very meaningful ways.

When I was in grade school showing a love for Star Wars was extremely taboo. I make no attempt to hide my contempt for the way public school operates—I often say that public school is like using a public restroom or a drinking fountain. Yeah, it does the basics, but not very well. In public school, too many people establish their basic epistemological essence in those public institutions because they don’t have reliable families at home to help them, or other positive influences. The school becomes the basic foundation for that while it was quite clear that George Lucas was intent to provide a competing epistemology for young people, so the pubic school system rejected the competition instead of embracing it, the way they should have. However, I was never one who backed down from a fight—never one day in my life. The more kids made fun of me for wearing my favorite Han Solo t-shirts to school, the more I did it, and my love for Star Wars actually got me into a lot of trouble. It’s not like that today, kids can show their enjoyment of such things without getting into fights over it, and that is actually some real progress. Concerning education, I see that Star Wars has given many people who missing epistemology that they should have been getting from school, or their families and the stories are keeping pace with the concerns of our modern age that is coming at us much faster than ever. It’s really the only thing that is—which to me makes it extremely important culturally.

One of my many hobbies is the study of world cultures and religions. It doesn’t pay much money otherwise I’d do that task fulltime because as I say here often, mythology is my favorite topic. I could talk about world culture all day long and what the pros and cons are. You can often read in hindsight why cultures failed if you know the details and why that’s important is so that you can prevent it in your own culture. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about the American Indian or Roman and Greek societies, you can see through the gifts of historical hindsight why they all failed, and I apply those lessons daily with the millions and millions of words I have provided for free to my readers—because I don’t want to see people fail. Professionally, I don’t have to read in a Denny’s at 2 AM anymore because the lights in the house keep everyone awake. I’m doing well at age 50, as is expected given my role in our family, and my community. So I don’t mind sharing things I love in writing and mythology if it might improve the life of one person—let alone helping many people. The human race in spite of all the faults we could list off for hours on end is actually plotting into positive uncharted territories for the first time in history and it is really only the epistemological values of Star Wars that are successfully preparing the minds of our modern age with the intellectual means to deal with everything in a positive way.

This morning I was at the Target department store near my house shopping for Han Solo toys and I couldn’t help but notice that The Last Jedi just hit the shelves from its Blue-Ray release, and here we are talking about another Star Wars movie being released in a month. The cultural values of the last Star Wars movie are still simmering, Lego hasn’t even put out their video game yet for The Last Jedi. And there are lots of beach towels and clothing out for consumers to enjoy and all this is happening as Space X and Virgin Galactic are taking over the civilian colonization of space and Amazon is delivering packages within hours of ordering from virtually anywhere in the world. Artificial intelligence is taking over as the new rudimentary task supplier in a rapidly expanding economy where there simply aren’t enough workers in the world to do all the jobs coming available. I’m not kidding when I say Alexia could take over the teaching profession. With a second Star Wars moving coming out and all that comes with it culturally, it will be interesting to see what happens. And that’s not all, there are at least eight more Star Wars movies in development right now, along with Star Wars television, video games, books, music and so many other items. What impact that has on the human race I think is a fascinating topic on the epistemological level of consciousness.

As I was paying the check at Denny’s it was a big one, and many of the Indiana farmers looked at me a little side-eyed. My oldest grandson and I were very openly showing our excitement at getting the Han Solo card in the stack I bought. I of course was hoping to get that particular entry. Those are the same kind of people who used to make fun of my Han Solo shirts on the school bus—they didn’t understand what all the fuss was about and thought I should be thinking about something more—real. But little did they know, or little did they know that day in Denny’s that what I was excited about was more real than just about anything they were considering and Han Solo has always best exemplified my excitement for it—the optimism of what is always potentially just around the corner. Han Solo is a very positive character who believes he can get out of anything he gets into under any circumstances and in so many ways, he represents the current position of mankind on planet earth in the early parts of the 21st century. That makes these movies more important than just an entertainment option. Even more than that, it made for me a really fun birthday!

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Tough Pick Between Donald Trump and Han Solo: Thoughts on the new movie and the context of historical perspective

Who could blame me, after all it has been a busy week, with a presidential visit to Cincinnati, the FBI getting caught in the biggest scandal in American history, a Super Bowl, a stock market plunge and a snow storm with frigid temperatures that have rocked North America into a perilous freeze. Not to mention a brutal week in the business world where next to nothing came easy and everything was at stake, I have taken a few days to talk about my thoughts about the new Han Solo movie which unleashed its first movie preview Monday morning on Good Morning America, just hours after a 45 second preview of the preview during the Super Bowl the night before. I was in fact on my way to meet President Trump at Lunken Airport when I watched the Solo preview while in the car waiting to get through security. My lack of comments on the movie were not because I didn’t like it, it was just due to the enormous number of other things going on.

I normally talk about lofty topics that range in subject matter but generally contain thematic elements that are more philosophical in nature. And my readers don’t typically like it when I stray away and talk about Star Wars. But as I see in it the greatest modern mythology we have as a human race even though the film series these days is largely made by progressive liberals from the San Francisco region, there is a core of tradition that sets Star Wars apart from all other forms of entertainment that makes it an important subject—and I find it very fascinating. I was even thinking about the new Solo movie as the hand of the president of the United States was right in front of me extending a greeting—and anybody who reads here often knows how much I think of President Trump and his wife—who was with him.

Han Solo is my favorite Star Wars character without a close second. Without Han Solo, there really isn’t a Star Wars in my option. I like Star Wars without Han Solo, but I don’t love it. But when Solo is part of a story, I’m much more interested—so a movie about the freedom fighting smuggler as a young man is something I am very interested in—and have been for a long time. Because of The Last Jedi, I have had low expectations for this movie called Solo: A Star Wars Story—but as the release date gets closer, I am getting more excited. And now with this preview, I am actually intrigued because this may actually be the best “western” to come out of Hollywood in decades.

Han Solo is all about living free, hot rod star ships, and guns. He is a character taken out of 1950s American values when westerns were almost all there was on television and at the movie theaters, and people drove in fixed up cars overcharged with horsepower to get to them. In the context of the saga which over the years has filled more and more with progressive political values as the franchise increased in popularity, Han Solo was the Ayn Rand contribution of the times who was living in a bad world and was just too good to be good at living life as a pirate, but too bad to join an organized effort—unless he fell in love with some girl. The values of Han Solo are essentially the values of Americana, so it is interesting that Lucasfilm made the decision to make a young Han Solo movie even as they have flooded their recent films with progressive inclusiveness even to the point of being uncomfortable because it often feels forced on the viewer—such as in The Last Jedi.

In the preview the Millennium Falcon is a new ship, which any Star Wars fan knows only as a beat-up wreck that is the fastest hung of junk in the galaxy. Only now the famous ship has a long point at the front instead of the mandibles that everyone has come to associate with it. Also the interior is a bright white instead of a grungy offering that we saw from an older Han Solo who had spent much of his life running from everyone who wanted to throw restraints on him. It is a strange thing to see how something we all know so well can be taken back in time and presented as a younger version of itself—its an interesting study about behavior. Obviously like most of us, Han Solo loves his ship and as an older man he sees only the beauty of it while everyone else sees junk. Solo obviously is hanging on to a period of his life where the ship was new and him acquiring it was one of the most important accomplishments he had undertaken. In this new movie we get to see why, which goes a long way to explaining the character.

Lucasfilm has foolishly played along with the national divide going on presently and have picked a more liberal political stance. Many of their actors are anti-Trumpers, even the original directors of Solo before Ron Howard came along to save the production a few weeks before the end of filming. I was in London while Lucasfilm was shooting Solo and I could see in the news reports there that members of the cast and crew where cheering on anti-Trump protests in the streets of the famous English city. That has led to a strong rebuke from conservatives about anything involving Star Wars—especially young people like Ben Shapiro who were pretty hard on this Han Solo proposal. But I think this film can go a long way to repairing that relationship and I sincerely hope it does. There is a lot of good that Star Wars can do in the world and I’d hate to see it wasted on partisan events that will dissipate completely 40 years from now when these stories will still have value to people.

It was just announced this week that there will be yet another Star Wars trilogy produced by Lucasfilm, this time by the makers of Game of Thrones. That is exciting news to me, and I think there really can’t be enough Star Wars for our modern culture. MANKIND—not Justin’s “peoplekind” is on the precipice of a very evolutionary period. Things are happening very fast these days, even in the context of the news announced at the start of this article, Elon Musk launched a luxury sports car into space as a display of audacious technical undertaking of excess bringing many people into a space age not built on Cold War hostilities but sheer curiosity and adventure. And to bridge that gulf we need a mythology that helps us through these times of very complicated technical innovation that needs a religious grounding not set in a Middle East desert—but in space where our future resides. For all of us Han Solo is a way to bring our traditional values into the context of anything that can happen and through that character we can project ourselves into the yet undiscovered worlds that are before us. That is a curious case indeed that eclipses the moments of our immediate consciousness placing our concerns into the ever after which is coming at us at a speed faster than light.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Solo: A Star Wars Story preview revealed

After a lot of waiting, here it is.  Hopefully they don’t screw it up.

Rich Hoffman’

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Jim Renacci and ‘The Last Jedi’: Liberals and their Resistance are more alike than they know

One thing that I really like about Jim Renacci’s run for the governorship within the state of Ohio is that he is very light on his feet. As he had a press conference early in the week for which the new Star Wars movie The Last Jedi was released I thought it was cleaver that he was active on Twitter tying the needs of his campaign to the pop culture monstrosity. It was a hip move that was reminiscent to the light on his feet nature of Donald Trump. The big news of course was that Renacci was partnering up with Cincinnati councilwoman Amy Murray which was another smart move—and for most politicians that would have been their news highlight of the week. But what is noticeable about Jim Renacci is that he’s very competitive, and determined to win whatever he does which is why I’m supporting him for his run for governor—to replace the docile, and much maligned closet liberal—John Kasich.

https://twitter.com/JimRenacci/status/940374420601876480

The candidacy of Renacci is actually very much in line with the pop culture for which Star Wars represents to our society at large. I’ve seen The Last Jedi, the most recent Star Wars film at an early screening and it was good of course in its own way. I understand now that I’m a traditional Star Wars guy and that these new movies, books and televisions shows will never touch my heart the way they once did—which is fine. They are fun movies that are dealing with a lot of very contemporary mythology, but nobody did it better than George Lucas. Disney should have followed the Lucas stories and stayed away from these much more progressive adoptions created by the San Francisco kids at Lucasfilm. I’ll give a little review of course once the dust settles—because there is a lot to think about. But one take away that is directly connected to the politics of our real world is that the Resistance in the movie is very much reflective of today’s political left.

I’m a Rebellion guy from the first Star Wars led by Han Solo. When Solo was a general the Rebellion won and destroyed the Empire and it was a very Ayn Rand type of embodiment. In these new movies it’s not the Rebellion any more it’s the Resistance and the new Han Solo type of character is Poe Dameron. Led completely by women now, the Resistance is very progressive and as a result they are losing. In fact, they are not only losing, but they are dreadfully inefficient and nobody in the galaxy seems to be rallying to their cause. That is a far different thing from the first movies where hot-shot pilots like Biggs and Wedge were defecting from the Empire to fight for the Rebels. In The Last Jedi, the defectors are from the Resistance. Given how politically charged our current entertainment culture is I thought it was very telling that Carrie Fisher and Laura Dern berated Poe for being too reckless and not following orders—which is ironically how people who win a lot do so—by not following orders. Then when he wasn’t in the room they commented on the fact that they only kept Poe around because he was a good-looking guy. So that’s how these progressive women like Kathy Kennedy who is running all these Star Wars movies these days see the way the world of tomorrow will be? Sexual harassment will now be dished out by the women because they are now empowered? Not that I care really, but it is a very interesting thing to watch—the hypocrisy is hilarious.

Leading up to this Star Wars movie many people who are anti-Trump including many of the production staff and actors in The Last Jedi made it clear that the Resistance was reflective of their political ideology. Without question given the number of scenes where members of the Resistance made really desperate sacrifices we are seeing essentially what the political left believes is their plight in life. They think like that FBI agent Peter Strzok who felt it was their plight in life to do whatever needed to be done to keep Donald Trump out of office—as if they knew better than the rest of us what was right. I’m a person who hates bad guys in movies, but there were a lot of moments whether it was intentional or not, that Kylo Ren was the star of the film. He was the one who had it all together and was able to achieve objectives—and to get things done. Even to the point where nice girl Rey was tempted by his power. I felt that the makers of this Star Wars movie wonderfully directed by Rian Johnson meant to say one thing about the state of politics in our current world, but ended up saying something completely unintentional—like we know we’re losers and understand why.

In the original stories by George Lucas it was the pirate Han Solo who shook off the rules and helped the Rebellion start winning again that served as the guiding light of the entire franchise. He made the Empire look like a bunch of bumbling fools outwitting them time and time again in a classic good guys against bad guy fashion. Yet in these new Star Wars movies it is the First Order now led by Kylo Ren who makes the Resistance look pathetic and weak. I know the metaphor for these modern Hollywood artists is that the First Order is the modern equivalent of Hitler or President Trump—but its not the Resistance they really adore as artists—it’s the power of Kylo Ren. It’s like a woman who says she hates men with long hair who play in rock bands doing drugs day and night then turn around and leave their nice husbands and children for just such reckless characters. There is a unique scene in The Last Jedi where it’s a kind of upside down world from the Stranger Things television show. The schizophrenia that I’m talking about is on full display here and I think they think they’ve concealed their insecurities, but at the end of the movie when there is literally nobody left in the Resistance I couldn’t help but feel that the inner fear that all members of the Progressive caucus are experiencing now can be summed up at the end of the movie. They know that the demands of the story will pull the natural order of things toward Kylo Ren in the end with Rey helping to tame him toward the needs of existence. But the story is not Rey’s, it is clearly about Kylo Ren—Han Solo’s son that was seduced to evil off the superstitions of a Luke Skywalker who thought about killing the young lad in his sleep—and then propelled him to the Dark Side out of self-preservation.

You might ask what any of this has to do with Jim Renacci and his run for governorship. Other than the fact that he used a cleaver Star Wars ad to show how he was different from his competition the candidacy is enough to stir the concerns of the real Resistance that exists in our very tangible political world. The progressives and establishment types who now look at these days of Trump and think of themselves as the Resistance in Star Wars are more correct than they know. They may get little moments of victory—like in the case of the Alabama senate race—but like the events of The Last Jedi, their numbers are dwindling down into nothing while all the resources of a vast galaxy are going to the other side. The insecurity they all face is the same as the one in that movie where Kylo Ren is supposed to be the villain—but is he really in the ways of the Force? Maybe it’s the idiots in the Resistance who are so prone to kill themselves for stupid reasons who are the real villains and that is a thought that I couldn’t help but conclude as the lights came on and the movie was over. Good guys and bad guys are really a matter of perspective definition. But………….only one side is right and one side is wrong and when nobody is left on the other side—the answer becomes obvious. What I learned from The Last Jedi is that the Force hates the Resistance. And that appears to be what’s going on in real life politics too.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

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

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.