#studyingstarwars Thursday Blog Post

Taylor
3 min readDec 15, 2017

--

Today is class we watched George Lucas’s second film, American Graffiti. The actor were all relatively unknown to me, other than Harrison Ford. I really liked how the license plate on John’s bright yellow car was THX-138 and sort of paid tribute to Lucas’s previous film THX-1138. There were some similarities to Star Wars that I picked up on. The first was that Curt answered the Joseph Campbell’s call to adventure and went to college out of state. The second similarity was that Steve refused the call to adventure and stayed in California with Laurie. I also thought Harrison Ford’s character seemed sort of similar to Han-Solo, in that they both were rebellious and think they have the fastest vehicles. I also read that American Graffiti is considered one of the most profitable films ever, especially if you consider inflation. The budget on the film was $700,000 and it earned about $50 million!

Location from American Graffiti (Credit: Vox)

We also did some peer review on our final projects. I received some really good feedback on my project about one of my facts. I said that the Redwoods location from the third Star Wars film is no longer there due to deforestation. Although, the Redwoods are protected I read that some of the Endor locations aren’t there because of logging, which must have occurred before Redwoods became protected. Overall, I think the project is going well and I just need to reword a couple of things!

Redwoods Location Being Visited by Fans (Credit:Kyle Culver)

We also watched the Industrial Light and Magic: Creating the Impossible documentary. I thought that it was super interesting that Jurassic Park was really the turning point in the industry. When I watched the movie a few years back, I could tell that the dinosaurs were fake, which sort of threw the movie off for me. I also always thought that the prequels were really cutting edge and well done. I don’t understand why everyone hates them so much because they provided so much to the story of Star Wars in general and propelled the CGI industry forward as well. I do really hate Jar Jar Binks as a character and think that he could have been left out entirely.

Jurassic Park Logo (Credit: Desktop Screens)

In the News….

The Disney Fox deal was confirmed today. Disney will pay $54 billion to Fox to acquire their assets. Surprisingly, this is not the most expensive merger to ever have happened. It will be extremely interesting for me to see Disney’s balance sheet and how much goodwill they have on it. There are so many accounting complications that come with checking goodwill for impairment so I’m sure Disney’s accountant is also very, very happy with the deal. I also read an interesting article about how the government might investigate to see if this merger will now make Disney a monopoly in the industry.

I also read an article that NASA is going to show Star Wars: The Last Jedi on the International Space Station. Star Wars will literally be out of this world!

--

--