Tag: Star Wars

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

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North and South Korea Hug at the 38th Parallel: What educations should be and why the NKU Millennium Falcon Expereince was the most important thing

I had a lot of thoughts while waiting in line at the BB&T Arena at NKU University just across the river from downtown Cincinnati to witness the promotional exhibit for Solo: A Star Wars Story which comes out on May 25th. Among those thoughts were how nice and well-educated all the fans were who showed up early to get a ticket to essentially sit in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, which was in so many ways very, very cool. From my perspective as a super fan of not only Star Wars, but of the functions of world mythology in the greater sense I noticed some very special things going on that were worth a deeper analysis. Because of my conservative political positions, my stance against large salary requirements for teachers and college professors, it is often asked of me what I want in public education offerings that are reasonable, and to be quite honest, I want our education system to produce the type of people who were in line for that Solo exhibit—and the type of people who have used the Star Wars mythology to bring meaning to their lives where the regular social offerings have failed our entire civilization.

What made this NKU exhibit from Lucasfilm and Disney unique was that it was free, and there was no merchandising on hand to clutter up the motivations of people. All they wanted to do was see the props of the Millennium Falcon from the movies up close and satisfy some longing for that reality to become their reality. Because reality as we have all come to know it is something very disappointing. Star Wars for many people offers an alternative to that boring reality and that was quite clear to the thousands who showed up to see the Millennium Falcon Experience at NKU over the first weekend of a four-city tour which will take place all through the rest of May 2018. I’ve traveled the world, eaten in the very best restaurants in places like Japan and London, I associate with people at the very top of the food chain both politically and economically. If I’m not a mover and shaker in the world, I don’t know who would be—so I’m hardly a couch potato geek who is hiding from reality behind the fantasy characters of a space movie. Yet I’ll say that one of the most thrilling things that I have ever done in my half of a century of life was to sit in that cockpit of the Millennium Falcon with my grandson, wife, and granddaughter and play with the buttons, handle the flight yoke and just sit there for many minutes in private to consider how everything could work in real life—how to make that delicate transition from fantasy into reality—which is where everything is headed.

Even better than all that though was the people in line with me, who from what I could tell were some of the smartest people I’ve seen in one place in many years. If I had been waiting in line for tickets to a Miley Cyrus concert, the collection of intellect presented would have been much less. Most of the children present were reading books while in line, mostly Star Wars books. Most of the adults had already read them and were certainly higher than the average intelligence that is functioning in the world and I would attribute that to the fact that Star Wars has given people something positive to think about, so even though what they were thinking about was a fantasy entertainment offering, the process of thinking about something had better prepared them for functioning in the world than the average person experienced, who didn’t have such advantages. The exhibit itself took a long time to get through because of all the thousands of people in line, only five people at a time could go through that Falcon cockpit, so people were very motivated to wait their turn which I thought was astonishing. Nobody in line was angry with the people ahead of them making them wait, it was one of the most remarkable things I had witnessed in a long time from a large collection of people. Given that the campus of NKU was in the background I couldn’t help but think that every college in America should aim to have this type of experience for everything they try to instill in an educational format to the participants of their classrooms. The goal of all education should be to turn on minds, not to turn them off, and often that is what we are doing at all levels of our education. The people who have become Star Wars fans over the years have rejected that premise. When their schools have told them to turn off their minds and to stop daydreaming, to put their hyperactive kids on Ritalin, the people at the Millennium Falcon Experience who were there with me on that first day, the people who Channel 19 called “super fans” with just a bit of contempt to make sure the viewer didn’t associate her with them—the Star Wars fans rebelled and turned inward rejecting social norms and invested their intellects to the fantasy world of a galaxy of a long time ago far, far way.

While all this was going on I was checking on the latest NFL picks from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, watching Kenya West get criticized by the liberal entertainment guild for defending President Trump, and North Korea and South Korea were hugging at the 38th parallel, an astonishing feat all by itself, and contemporary society mistakenly thought that those events were more important than this Millennium Falcon Experience—but I don’t think so. In many ways it is those events that are the fiction and it is the mythology of Star Wars that has more truth in it than anything else going on outside of that NKU campus that day. Specifically, the Kenya West situation where just because he’s a black rapper married to Kim Kardashian he’s supposed to fit some liberal presentation of what a “black person thinks”—which was taught to all of us in our public-school experience. Those same public-school personalities don’t teach kids that Republicans ended slavery, and that Fredrick Douglas the great black crusader was a Republican. The emphasis on what we learn in our K-12 educations is not to read and perform math, its to fit into a segment of society for which our political philosophies at the administrative level can deal with when everyone grows up. The purpose of public education is to create demographic groups, not individualized thought and Kenya West was pushing back against that system which had all the proponents of that reality very upset. Many of the Star Wars fans at NKU to see the Millennium Falcon Experience had gone through the same type of rigor and had made very conscious decisions to reject those offered demographic categories created by the politically driven public-school systems, and they were looking for things to think about elsewhere.

Education is supposed to ignite the thinking process, not to turn it off, and for most of our civilization that is exactly what is happening in our government sponsored schools. They destroy minds, not meaning to, but that is what ends up happening. Later that day after the Millennium Falcon Experience I watched the coverage of the NFL Draft on Fox and I’ll have to say that it wasn’t nearly as rooted in reality as Star Wars was. The people drinking too much beer and spending most of their free time thinking about the statistics of the various players offered were participating in a fantasy much less real than seeing the Millennium Falcon up close. Star Wars fans have evolved as a rebellious rejection of that static public education offerings. The NFL draft was just a big reality television show that promoted the schools the athletes came from advertising those universities for millions of young people who might be inspired to spend $100K on an education to get a decent job at the places that produced these gladiators of the NFL. But honestly, the Millennium Falcon as presented at NKU to promote a new movie coming out soon was a lot more real, and much more positive for the intellects of the participants—and that should say a lot about the world we are living in.

We’ve made a tremendous mistake as a human civilization in establishing to people through their educations that they should give up the ideas of youth and to accept the limited offerings established by our governments through their education systems. We have tried it so many different ways and they all end in failures—in most cases middle class earners who makes six figures in household income who drink too much on NFL draft night over a grill cooking hamburgers in the back yard and think that is the definition of success. Star Wars and other pop culture entertainments have simply done a better job in creating foundation mythologies that the human intellect truly craves for the unending yearning for adventure and exploration. Those adventurous desires are what fuel all invention and take it from me, I just received a patent that I had led a team to realize just last week, so I understand what I’m saying in scope of human endeavor. It all starts with imagination and adventure which is specific to human minds and it is in our fantasies that we do a better job than our official educations in harnessing those powers. But it shouldn’t be that way. I bought three things over the past two weeks that made me very happy, one was a new gun that cost well over $2000. Then I bought a little Hot Wheels Millennium Falcon and a new Han Solo landspeeder for about $5 each—and they equally made me very happy. One is notably a very “adult” thing to buy, the other two are associated with the desires of children. But I can say that I enjoyed those purchases equally, and I think that is an essential need that any active intellect has—it wants to be fed stimuli—not junk food, or alcohol, but intellectual stimulation that provokes thought. Regarding education moving into the rest of this century and into the next, all over the world, we need to end this nonsense about “growing up.” What public education means when they encourage people to “grow up,” is that they intend to turn off minds, not to turn them on. And until that happens, I will be against our government endorsed education systems, both K-12 and the college experience, because they are not adequate in their objectives into preparing human beings for the kind of world we all want. Fortunately, and unfortunately, the Millennium Falcon Experience did a much better job.

Rich Hoffman
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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
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Han Solo’s New Landspeeder: The reason young men have for racing, risking their lives, and proving themselves

Institutionalism has been on my mind a lot lately. It has always bees something I was concerned with—it’s a huge part of culture building and there is need for some of it to keep an orderly society organized and effective. But all too often it is a destructive device that robs individuality from the human race which limits the output of potential available to mankind. Obviously the Comey situation with the current FBI is the most clear-cut case of institutional failure at so many levels and that is exactly what was on my mind as I went to Target as a 50-year-old man and bought the new Han Solo Landspeeder toy from Hasbro that I have been looking forward to being released. As I write often my favorite Star Wars character is Han Solo and I continue to think that the entire franchise under Disney ownership will depend on the quality of this new Solo: A Star Wars Story movie coming up on May 25th. For the movie to work, it has to tell the story of a young man who is so rebellious against institutionalism that he drives that inner need for the audience to yearn for individual freedom. It’s a tough game for Disney because they are an institution all on their own, and it has been a real challenge for the filmmakers to capture that proper “Han Solo” spirit produced by such an institutionalized production company. But they have worked hard at it and I think the selection of Ron Howard to be the final director was crucial to making this upcoming film positioned to be the best product possible. To get Han Solo right, the filmmakers must understand that he is a person fighting the mundane clutches of institutionalism which is the key to understanding what makes Star Wars different from other science fiction, and additionally makes it one of the most valuable elements for shaping modern society. It’s a very delicate balance and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on that toy car so I could get up and close to it to get some questions answered.

Much to my delight it exceeded my expectations. Most young men—not girls—but boys, desire to obtain a car, customize it to some degree to represent their personalities and to apply that effort to the world so that they might come out on top. Girls typically think of wedding dresses, getting invited to prom and play with toys that lead them to domestic lives as young married women. No matter how much we tamper with that basic human yearning, those fundamental differences between boys and girls are obvious. Boys have that pressure to rebel from what they’ve known so that they can launch themselves into a position to acquire a wife, build a family, and live life on their own terms for that family—and a car is that first big step. So in a movie that deals with a younger version of Han Solo, a guy who has to acquire all the things that led him to a marriage to Princess Leia, The Millennium Falcon, his DL-44 gun, his years of experience at getting out of dangerous situations, what would his very first car look like? Getting that right would go a long way to telling me that these modern filmmakers understood the character of Han Solo well enough to not screw up the movie.

Ever since I saw the footage from the filming of the Solo movie I have been curious about this car. It’s square in design and looks pretty junkie for what you might expect from Han Solo. But then the Millennium Falcon was pretty beat up by the time the original movies were made—so this is a theme for Han Solo. He is a character not limited to the designs of the original manufacturer of his vehicles, some institutional engineer who works for a big company and rigidly gets all their drawings approved for production. Han Solo as a young man would acquire a speeder like this vehicle probably used because that’s all he could afford and he’d make it into something of his own design—to imprint his character on it. He would then use that vehicle to make a name for himself out in the world. This is very important to young men—really important. So getting Han Solo’s car right in a design tells me that they would also get it right in the movie and that this thing was going to be good.

When I was a young guy, 16 to 20 years of age I raced everyone everywhere. I seldom ever drove at speeds less than 100 MPH and I was in trouble with the police most of the time. I think it is safe to say that I was the fastest driver in the city of Cincinnati during that time frame who lived to talk about it. I know a lot of people I knew back then who died in car wrecks or ended up in jail for the rest of their lives so I can understand the background of a young Han Solo who was addicted to speed and competition. Young men must have some way to prove themselves because only the best have access to the best females. The way we all work biologically is that the most attractive females usually like the guys who are the most daring and ambitious acquiring the most wealth. Of course, the reason is so that a young female can build a family using the guy to give her children and financial resources. Having young men run around racing each other for the opportunity to make a lot of money so they can have access to the best females is a very primal sentiment. It’s not the way political progressives want things to be, and Disney has become a very progressive company so that makes the stakes of this Solo Star Wars film very high. Progressives would like to erase masculinity from the face of the earth yet Han Solo is a very masculine figure which makes him very popular among young males looking to make their mark in the world. I’ve been very skeptical especially the way The Last Jedi embraced so many progressive values. I didn’t think it hurt the value of Star Wars culturally, but it was noticeable. The same kind of anti-male sentiment won’t work in a movie starring Han Solo. I am happy to say from what I have seen by reading the latest Han Solo book Last Shot and going through some of the toy releases, I think they have nailed Han Solo in this new film. We’ll have to see how it is, but so far, the hot rod speeders are there, the souped-up star ships, the guns and the attitude are all there, so I am excited, more so than I was even a month ago.

I was in England for a good part of the Han Solo filming at Pinewood and I read all the news I could from the set as it was happening. It was exciting for me to be that close to the movie. One of my methods of stress management is to play a lot, whether it is video games, toys with my grandkids, or just roaming around at the store looking at new toys coming out. I particularly like the Star Wars section and the Lego sections of toy stores. Playing with ideas and massaging my imagination helps me solve complicated problems in real life, so there is a method I use to make those experiences productive in the real world. The Han Solo Landspeeder was very exciting for me personally because it has a lot of design in it that reflects the Han Solo character in all the ways that I enjoy. While everyone doesn’t get as excited about toys and Star Wars that as I do, the people who do are often those who advance human civilization in positive ways, engineers, creative people, and authors. Star Wars is such a major contributor to modern literature and the sciences that I get excited with each new film because of the cultural impacts that naturally spawn off them. Solo: A Star Wars Story however has more pressure on it than any movie yet has. How this one goes will determine the future of Star Wars forever, so there is a lot on the table. From what I have seen so far, I don’t think anybody will be disappointed.

Rich Hoffman
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Thoughts on the Nature and Value of Geeks: The last hope of a rare few who have not given up on intellect

There are plenty of negative news stories out there but what they all have in common is that most of the participants of those stories, both on the end of generation, and on the receipt, all share crippled minds created for them by institutional restrictions socially mandated on previous historical context. Most of the problems of our society can be traced back to this essential problem. With that in mind I have been exploring over these last couple of weeks the incidents of society where positives are emerging, and I identified the Star Wars franchise as one of those things that create new, imaginative context to a new way at looking at old problems. While I agree that most of our human species is mired in dank, miserable thinking, I would say that roughly 5% are not. I meet a few here and there who are operating outside of the modern limits, who don’t care about baseball statistics and the NBA playoffs, or what’s going on in modern politics. They are seeking to fill their active minds any way possible. Most of the time their net results are that of social misfits whom nobody will ever listen to, and they will have no impact on the social circumstances around them, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any merit in trying, which they appear to be doing.

I was at the Barnes & Noble in West Chester at 9 AM sharp the day that James Comey’s tell nothing book came out. Actually, it told a lot—it said that in the Comey household James does what his wife tells him to do, and she was a Hillary Clinton supporter. So he broke the law to make her happy—its pretty much as simple as that. But I was there to get another book as well, the new Star Wars book Last Shot that was all about Han Solo, which I had been very eager to read. While I was in line at the checkout there were three other people there with me and they all had the Last Shot book in their hands—but none of them had the James Comey book. That told me a lot about the state of the world. I’m sure Comey’s book will sell, but the real interest was in fantasy alternatives to the present reality, and for people daring enough to ask, Star Wars was offering something to think about. All the people holding that book looked to be under 35, two of them were male, one was a female and they reminded me that there are people out there in the cracks of life who haven’t given up on a potential future—and I found that encouraging.

For my birthday last week my kids gave me a little Millennium Falcon Lego set to build with my grandson. While he was over during the weekend we took the time to build it and once we completed it he was very impressed with our work. He wanted to display it prominently on a book cabinet that I have which has a lot of models and trophies on top of it, because to him it meant a lot. As I’ve said before, the Lego Company has been doing some great work for years—both in video games and in toys. Every time I do a model kit of theirs I am always impressed with they way they engineer their products. This particular Millennium Falcon is a simple ten-dollar toy kit that you can get at Target, but I found it remarkably sophisticated in how it went together. After seeing my grandson’s reaction, I immediately considered getting the new Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon set. It has 7500 pieces and costs about $1,200. He probably needs a few years before working on that one, but it did spark my imagination on how productive such an experience could be. That’s when I found this video from the Tested guys, who are part of the Myth Busters television series.

All of the adults in that Tested group reminded me of the kind of people who were with me at Barnes & Nobel at 9 AM sharp to buy the latest Han Solo book. Society from the outside looks at people like these people and thinks they are wasting their time on fantasy, but what I see and have experienced with them is that they are in acts of rebellion against the status quo—they are standing against the tide of lackluster thinking that is so prevalent in modern society. Yes they are geeks, but that is to say that they are people who have not yet surrendered their minds to the apathy of modern society. They can’t find what they need in society to fill their minds, so they have turned to fantasy to satisfy their hungry intellects. It makes me very happy to see all those grown adults sit down and tackle that Millennium Falcon Lego build with such unbridled enthusiasm. I would say that there are more people like that in the world now than there were 30 years ago, or even 60, which is important to note.

People don’t spend $1,200 on a Millennium Falcon 1500-piece puzzle essentially because they don’t like to think. As I mentioned earlier this week about the opioid crises, the main cause of drug abuse is an intellect in conflict with their environment. I would dare say that those people in the Tested group probably don’t go out and get drunk very much, and they probably don’t do drugs because their minds are in harmony with their existence. It’s a shame that they had to turn to fantasy to get that harmony, but at least it’s a mechanism they have discovered which allows for such a positive relationship with themselves. And when you visit the toy aisle at Wal-Mart and Target, they have entire sections dedicated to Lego and puzzle games because they obviously are selling. Just as people don’t show up at 9 AM to buy the latest Han Solo book because they want to go out and smoke crack—to turn off their minds. Reading, no matter what it is turns on a mind and is a very positive experience.

Most of what drives our world to evil is the vacancy left when people have surrendered thought to the lazy whims of groupthink. Sports in many ways is a groupthink activity and is very popular with modern civilization. But more and more I am seeing the influence of fantasy elements like Star Wars creating in people a desire to sit down and build Millennium Falcon models and read books about that ship in stories that mean something to those who participate in the task of discovery. I saw in those three-other people in the bookstore line with me that day hope in their eyes. The world around them was letting them down in many ways and they were thoughtful enough to contemplate the issues. But their minds were hungry, and society wasn’t feeding them, so they turned out with me at 9 AM to buy a book they couldn’t wait to get their hands on. And I’m noticing more of these people year by year, and that gives me a lot of hope for tomorrow. They are still in the extreme minority, but maybe, just maybe, they will become the majority in a few hundred years—and that would be a great thing for the human race!

Last Shot was the first Star Wars book that I have read since 2013/14 and I admit I only did it because it featured Han Solo as the primary character. I wanted to see how they were going to deal with Solo ahead of the movie coming out on May 25th. I have said many nice things over the past years about how important I think Star Wars books are to the next generation for all the reasons outlined in this article. But I have been very skeptical about the direction the Disney ownership has taken their acquired Star Wars franchise from a person I greatly admire in George Lucas. I am not happy about the more progressive direction that Star Wars has taken, but I am very happy that it is fueling the imaginations of people like those great Tested guys. I can say that after reading Last Shot I enjoyed it enormously and I will probably go and read the long list of new books that have been published since 2012. There is plenty of good value in those stories that justify the investment and all the fun that a grandpa can have with his grandkids for the next thirty years. And that all by itself is a wonderful attribute. It was a good book, and it made me very happy to have the opportunity to read it—which I did voraciously!

Rich Hoffman

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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

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As Conservatives, We Should Make our Own Movies, Music, and Social Media Platforms: I’m thinking seriously of becoming a movie producer

After this week I am seriously thinking of becoming a movie producer for my next big project. After considering the astonishing success of Rosanne’s return to television, the box office take of Tomb Raider overseas—especially in China, the controversy of Facebook data theft and the general liberalism of all the tech companies from Microsoft to Twitter—I am thinking that there is a serious need for a conservative voice in the world filling these entertainment markets. That is the ultimate solution after all. I have all these scripts sitting around from my Hollywood pitch days which went on from roughly 1995 to 2006 that I have sat on for a long time because only liberals were putting money into films. It was obvious to all of them that they wanted to go in this liberal direction and I didn’t fit at the time. But it hasn’t worked out for Hollywood and there are a lot of lost opportunities to make a lot of money and to make people in the world generally very happy. It really hit home for me this week while Steven Spielberg was doing press for his upcoming Ready Player One movie. He is well aware that he has lost his touch, because essentially epistemologically he has change. Spielberg directed some of the greatest gunfights in cinema history in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he never has since as he found friends in Hollywood that he didn’t want to piss off. He is now one of those people who put $500,000 behind the March for Our Lives anti-gun march which was an excessively liberal crusade. As conservatives feel vindicated somewhat that Disney put Rosanne back on television as a “Trump supporter” there is an obvious starvation out there for the kind of movies that Hollywood used to make, to be made again, and rather than complain about it, some of us should just get together and fill that market void.

As a Star Wars fan I had to get The Last Jedi Blu-Ray when it came out this past Tuesday. I liked the movie and I thought Rian Johnson did some really good work as the writer and director. But, it has epistemological problems with its foundation philosophy. These new filmmakers are just so San Francisco liberal that it gets in the way of their stories. George Lucas when he made the original Star Wars movies was not a liberal. He might have spent all his time around liberals, but he had enough small-town conservative in him to detest Hollywood. When he took a big chance and went to the bank to fund The Empire Strikes Back with his own money—that was not a Hollywood communist doing the work, it was a passionate filmmaker and that effort showed up on the screen. Lucas may have had liberalism on his mind as a Vietnam protestor, but he like his friend Steven Spielberg grew up on classic westerns that were about good guys against bad guys and he wanted to tell a modern story about those ideas—so they followed the well stated philosophy to great box office success. But George Lucas is obviously missing from The Last Jedi and it was excessively noticeable in the bonus footage this time as opposed to The Force Awakens by J.J. Abrams. Abrams at least is something of a protégé of Lucas and Spielberg so he was able to recapture some of that on-set magic. Rian Johnson was simply a fanboy of Star Wars who was a modern Hollywood Trump hating liberal that was taking the foundations of Star Wars and making a progressive film on top of that foundation.

With all the attempts to show women empowerment and to put Asian actors in various roles in The Last Jedi the film was rejected by Chinese audiences, which Disney and Lucasfilm were obviously trying to cater to. All the female roles in The Last Jedi were liberal embodiments of what the political left thinks feminism is all about, and it comes across uncomfortably political, and it certainly hurt the film. Yet Tomb Raider is all about the magnificent empowerment of Lara Croft and she has guns in her movie, and she kills people and enjoys it—and the Chinese went crazy over it rewarding it surprising in oversea sales. I listened to the bonus footage of The Last Jedi and carefully noted that Rian Johnson thinks the Force is all about altruism and sacrifice, and that his good guys in this movie were all about blowing themselves up for a greater cause—he obviously missed the point of what heroics are classically about in movies. Han Solo is one of the most powerful characters in Star Wars, and he’s all about possession, he loves his ship, he loves his friend Chewbacca, and he loves his friends and would do just about anything for them. Even though in a pinch he is a giving character he is still portrayed as someone who has personal value for things and people due to his selfish need to be attached to them. But the Jedi as Lucas and many other filmmakers struggled with are supposed to get rid of attachments otherwise they become like Darth Vader and this is where their epistemological liberalism destroys their concepts. Those things aren’t at odds with one another, they are connected—personal value and heroics. If the Chinese wanted to hear a bunch of liberal propaganda they’ll just turn on the state-run television—so they weren’t excited for this latest Star Wars movie. But with Tomb Raider, now that is something they can’t get in China and they soaked it up like there was no tomorrow.

Like I said, I think Rian Johnson did a good job with The Last Jedi. It’s good science fiction. It’s no instant classic that people will love way into the future. But its better to have a world with Star Wars in it than not to have it at all. I know Rian Johnson is a Joseph Campbell fan—as I am. But I want to remind everyone that deep down inside, Joseph Campbell was a conservative—and very much an individualist. He would often say, “are you the light or are you the bulb” which liberals immediately associate with values of collectivism. Without the bulb, the light doesn’t come into the world, so the value in story telling is and should always be on the nature of the bulbs. When a light bulb goes out, the liberal thinking is that you just unscrew the old one and put in a new bulb and the light continues. But in reality, the bulbs of our lives are missed. At the end of The Last Jedi you can see the struggle the filmmakers have on this very subject—they are missing the light of Han Solo not just in the story, but in the Star Wars franchise itself. You can’t just unscrew Han Solo and screw in Poe Dameron–then have him get thrown around the room by a bunch of girls and expect audiences to go along with things. It doesn’t work, as liberalism doesn’t work in the world because of the epistemological failures of the basic concepts of the story telling process.

I will continue to cheer on the efforts of filmmakers like Rian Johnson and Lucasfilm in general. And hopefully Disney learns something from their production of Rosanne on television. But I think we as conservatives could make better movies, better music, and even better social media platforms. I certainly know I could. That’s why I’m thinking of doing just that for my next big thing. I’m in the middle of one of those big multimillion dollar projects now, but I’m coming up on a time where I want to do the next big thing in my life, and by the looks of things, I may just start producing some movies. Not from Hollywood mind you, I’d do it from Cincinnati. Back ten and twenty years ago that was an impossible idea, but these days, the rules have all changed. So why not?

Rich Hoffman

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A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: The new toy Millennium Falcon, Star Wars land in Orlando, Trump, and resolving cognitive dissidence

I understand why President Trump is frustrated with the negative slant of all media coverage, the kind of America he is trying to resurrect is a lot like the one I used to watch on The Wonderful World of Disney shows that came on every Sunday night when I was a kid, of which my favorites were the World of Tomorrow episodes. I am an extremely positive person—the world could literally be on fire and the demons of hell decapitating people in the streets with no hope for anyone anywhere and I’d find something positive to attribute to it. And I would attribute that to Walt Disney and how open I was to his message very early in my life. But when it comes to dealing with other people, I am quick to get rid of people in my life who are not positive people—who drag on a culture and I think Trump is a person of the same type of mind—a very positive person who wants to share with America that same sentiment. Yet when you are a president of everyone, even those who hate you, it can be a real challenge.

I see hope everywhere I look however, as dire as things may seem at the time. For instance, I don’t see in people’s addictions to cell phones as being a major problem. I see an education system that is not aligned with the needs of modern people—which because of that villain John Dewey attempted to instruct children into the merits of collectivism instead of individualism. Technology, especially phone apps and computer games are all about re-centering the individual needs to its consumers and that puts most people into a schizophrenic relationship with themselves. They have this very negative self that is against their individual tastes which measures everything against the values of the group, then there are the natural needs of the individual that are always crying for attention. I most recently saw this in the movie reviews of the new Tomb Raider film where reviews where pretty negative but the film itself was quite a crowd pleaser. The duality that we see in the media and in politics is a short-term aspect of a society reclaiming itself and the world of tomorrow is shaping up to be quite extraordinary. To that observation I have to turn once again to what we are seeing from Disney’s Star Wars franchise. I’m not talking about the progressive board of directors’ approach of appeasing all their gay creative talent with left winged sentiment, but the old hooks into ancient mythology and the most creative aspects of human achievement that comes out in each new project.

I’ll admit that I am very excited about the new movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story which comes out in May of 2018. I’ve long talked about my love of The Millennium Falcon as a movie icon that I relate a lot with. In this new movie The Millennium Falcon is a much younger ship than the one from the classic series and it has a new design to the front of it that I find very interesting. Recently at the New York Toy Fair Hasbro released a lot of the new toys for the new Solo film and I found myself enchanted with the new Millennium Falcon toy, which I will surely get the moment I can get my hands on it. I just recently spent the weekend playing Star Wars figures with my grandkids and we had a great time. They love playing with my collection of Star Wars toys and I enjoy sharing that experience with them. And with each new movie is a chance to communicate with those kids something new and exciting, so I really enjoy the positive energy of Star Wars products because they are very classical in how Wal Disney thought of things. I really think the love of the Millennium Falcon that people have for it will greatly influence real spaceship design over the next several decades and these toys are creating in the minds of so many people young and old alike new engineers that aren’t nearly as stuffy as the older generation. The same day that I was watching footage of the New York toy show I had hired a really sharp engineer for a project I have been working on. The kid had a master’s and was wanting to go further but he had no pretentious aspect to himself. He was just sharp and in love with engineering. He is very much a product of these modern Star Wars influences. He loves to solve problems and young kids like him are the kind of geeks that have Millennium Falcons all over their work cubicles. They are the kind of kids who wear t-shirts saying, “My other vehicle is The Millennium Falcon,” as they show up to work in a piece of junk car. Even though they are paid well and could afford a Corvette, they could care less about impressing members of the opposite sex, the way people did thirty years ago. They save all their money for Jabba’s Sail Barge, also shown at the same toy fair. And to be honest, I may buy one myself—because its pretty damn cool.

I see people of today accelerating in the kinds of things they want to learn much, much faster—much faster than the media can keep up with. In some ways people are dumber—socially, and politically. But individually, they are asking questions of the world around them that has never before occurred, and a lot of it has to do with the astonishing exposure they are getting from their movies, home streamed video content, personal communication devices, the Internet and of course movies. The motion picture industry as a whole is collapsing, and it really can’t be saved at this point. The future is very much what Disney is doing where a two-hour movie introduces content that plays out over multiple platforms, books, comics, television shows, and video games—toys, etc. But the real product is in generating imaginative cognitive essence—the ability to think creatively, like children do but were taught against over the last four decades of public education.

Right after the New York Toy Fair Disney released drone footage of their new Star Wars lands in Orlando and California. To have a place like that where people can go and play out a fantasy of thought against the illusion of reality is really a work of art for cognitive dissidence. The negativism that the Trump administration is at war with will work itself out I think over the next ten years and things like the opening of that Star Wars land in the Disney parks will take giant steps in launching humanity toward a new phase of development. Playing with Star Wars toys for me was very important when I was a kid—it really launched my imagination into a place that helps me every single day of my current life. Having a great attitude about life and always finding something positive about it combined with a boundless imagination has given me a great life and lets me share that with other people. But playing with my grandkids with all the tools I’ve had combined with the ones they have which are new, and I see something really special happening. What a simple toy can do to the imagination can’t be understated, and the desire to play with that toy as a young person comes from these movies and video games. But also, to walk around and interact in those actual environments is bound to unlock potential that we never thought possible as human beings.

The conflicts of today will not be the conflicts of tomorrow. The bra-burning feminists, the gay rights cries to make everyone into a rainbow, and the fights between liberalism and conservatism will fall away to this next age. Our thoughts and imaginations are inventing tomorrow right before our eyes and the story of our species is being written fast. So fast that no newspaper or television company in the world has managed to get their arms around the true potential. But I see that glimmer of hope and potential in the simplest things, like that new Millennium Falcon toy shown at the Hasbro booth. In the methods of play, even as adults, we work out complicated problems, and the most intelligent people I have come to know in some of the advanced technical fields are the types of people who would much rather watch footage from the New York Toy Fair than to watch video porn of some people having sex. The toys are much more exciting and in that realizing, there is great hope for our future—if we can just last long enough to get there.

Rich Hoffman

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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
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Solo: A Star Wars Story preview revealed

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

Rich Hoffman’

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