First of all.. WOW!  This is by far, the most awesome item ever covered from the desk of Awesome.

What you are looking at is a 5 foot by 10 foot lego recreation of the battle at Hoth, from Empire Strikes Back. Created by the extremely taleneted  [ Mark Borlase’s ], the entire display consists of nearly 60,000 pieces and has cool features such as 50 real lights and a remote controlled mechanism that deploys troops from the AT-ATs. The entire creation took over 4 years in the making and consumed about $3000 (that’s a lot of white bricks!). This creation won the recent Star Wars building challenge and was featured in the official LEGO Magazine.  Mark, you are AMAZING, and seeing this makes me teary..

Here are a couple of pics from the Mark’s flickr page, but there are a ton of SUPER cool pics, so go look at them : [ Mark's Flickr Page ]

The interior of the hoth base, complete with the Millenium Falcon, and X-Wing hanger.

The seriously awesome outside of this includes a snow speeder that is in process of taking out an AT-AT.

Another amazing aspect of this creation is the side view of the mountain that has windows into the medical bay, the command center, and even the hallway that Han strolls down…

Any lego creation is pretty cool, and something of this magnitude is especially amazing, BUT, what makes this truly awesome is the amount of detail all the way down to the footprints in the snow that Luke leaves in the snow running toward the base.  (seen in the first pic).

Mark, you are AWESOME!

On August 15th, Lucasfilm will unleash the seventh big screen Star Wars movie, this time in cartoon form.  Star Wars is quite possibly the most well-known and loved Science Fiction franchise of all time.  Just about any 30-something has a story about the first time they saw Star Wars in the theater, and can recount the confusion of seeing Episode 5 scroll across the screen when Empire Strikes Back played for the first time, and the absolute thrill every teenager got when they first saw Leia in her Jabba’s Palace outfit.

Then came the spring of 1999.  After years of anticipation, and having waited in line for ten hours for tickets we got to see the back story for the three most beloved sci fi movies in history, and they sucked!  I refuse to go into a rant about the prequels, but I think the first movie should have been edited down to this :

This was the only good part of the first movie.

Now, three years after the Revenge of the Sith, which I will admit had redeeming qualities to it, we are again forced to wonder if another attempt by George Lucas is worth our 11 dollars.

I have heard positive and negative things about this movie. One huge positive is the artwork. This will be a cartoon, but the images that have been leaked online are crazy and certainly have more of an anime flair to them. Here are a few :

Obi Wan looking awesome with his saber. Oh yeah, come and get some.

I am not sure if this is just a concept peice or an actual scene from the movie, but WOW. The artist that did this is amazing.

Here is [ Asajj Ventress ].  I am a fan of this character, and actually enjoyed her role in the Clone Wars TV series.  I liked that she considered herself a Sith, even though she was “untrained”.   I really hope her role stays strong in this film, and again the artwork is phenomenal.

Ok, so I am pretty sure we can all agree that one thing Skywalker Ranch excels at is creating amazing visuals, but plots seem to be an issue these days, and unfortunately, I think this will be the case in the upcoming movie.  Here is the “official” plot synopsis.

The Clone Wars takes place between Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The eponymous Clone Wars rage between the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Galactic Republic. When Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta the Hutt, is taken by a group of renegades, Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi depart in search of answers: where is the Hutt’s son, and who is controlling this mysterious renegade group? Yoda sends Ahsoka Tano along as Anakin’s apprentice. Count Dooku will unleash his minions, including Asajj Ventress and General Grievous, to cause havoc for the Republic and to make a three way war between the Galactic Republic, the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Hutt’s.

OK.  First of all, Rotta the Hutt… really?!? Rotta the Hutt?  Does anyone else out there remember Lumpy?  Chewbacca’s kid from the infamous Star Wars Christmas Special.  Haven’t we learned our lesson about creating random family members for the Star Wars universe? I am also trying to imagine a distraught Jabba wondering where he son his and thumbing through family photos to give to Anakin to help find little Rotta. Oh, and seriously does any one else really want to think about two Hutts mating and creating a child in the first place? Ugh.

Next, since when does Anakin get an apprentice?  He is not a master and still an apprentice himself in the third movie.  Granted, I am sure they will address this in the movie, but why add this into an established character history.

The final issue that I have with this movie is the lack of Ewen McGregor and Hayden Christensen.  As much as I hate Hayden Christensen’s portrayal of Anakin, we all must face the fact that he is Anakin now, so how are you just going to get two different actors to play the MAIN characters.  If this were a straight to DVD, or TV movie, I would not care as much, but this is a feature film, get the original actors or don’t do the freaking movie.

This movie is meant to be the precursor to a TV series, which will no doubt see a change in the voices of all the characters, which for a TV series, I am not too concerned about that, but ultimately I just think that this movie should have been a prime time special on the channel that will be airing the TV series and that’s all.  Aside from the visual elements, I just don’t see anything about this movie being worthy of big screen play, or 11 dollars of my hard earned money.

In the end, I wish I could love Star Wars as much as I did in the Spring of 1999, before seeing episode I.  The anticipation of that movie, the idea of new Star Wars content and the thought that a whole new generation of Star Wars fans being created just doesn’t exist with this movie.  It seems an after-thought and in my opinion will be the final insult to what I considered to be a defining story in my childhood.

So let me know what you think, will you see the movie?  Are you looking forward to it like you did the originals?  Leave a comment.

So I got to thinking the other day .. I love blogging about the geekiness I find online, and after reviewing the traffic that I have gotten on the site over the last few months, it would seem that at least a few of you enjoy reading about the geekiness I find online.

Blog traffic is a very sought after commodity.  It establishes credibility, let’s face it, no one at i09.com is really all that knowledgable about sciFi, and could they be anymore negative about everything they see?  So why do we put faith in what they say??? becuase they get almost a million page views per month …

Same with any of the gawker media portals.  Wired, Reuters and other sites have “genuine” journalists who make the real content that ends up disected onto other blogs, so they kind of come with their own credibilty.

This all got me thinking though … who has more credibilty then all of them … WE do…

That’s right, we have the real credibility, becuase we are the unknown masses who give these sites the traffic they need to gain thier credibility.  We are the ones who have seen every Star Wars movie 400 times. We are the ones who can quote any episode of Star Trek.  We are the ones who can tear down and rebuild a computer in less time then a Green Beret can field strip his m-16.  We are the ones who make the geek news, so why shouldn’t we be the ones to report on it.

I want to form a coalition of Geeks.  UNKNOWN geeks.  Sorry Leo Laporte ..  Sorry Tom Merritt .. Sorry Rafe Needleman… I respect you all, but your views are now tainted by the man. I want geeks who answer to no one, who will tell it like it is, and who want to be apart of what could become the largest online geek community with a voice..

If you’re a geek (computer, scifi, science, art, whatever … ) and you want to start contributing to a whole new type of online blog, let me know.

Individually we are nobody, but as a mob… we are force to be reckoned with …