The Fan-Film Menace

I linked the other day to the Machete Order for showing the Star Wars films to a newcomer, something that interests me more and more now that W. is showing an increasing interest in all things Star Wars thanks to his nursery peers. I’d rather he’s a bit older when he sees them, so I’ve been telling him we can watch them when he’s 8, or maybe 7. There’s no avoiding them, though, because he’s obsessed with Lego, and Star Wars Lego is huge with young boys. He doesn’t have any yet, but his friends do, and so does his Lego sticker book.

So he knows the names of various characters. The other day on the bus he was grilling me extensively on their relationships, which must have sounded amusing to bystanders. He said something about Anakin turning into Darth Vader, but hasn’t yet figured out the biggest reveal in movie history. The Machete Order holds out hope of preserving this spoiler-free innocence, if only his entire network of friends would play along; which they won’t, but one can hope.

At our friends’ place on the weekend, their son asked him if he would like to see a Star Wars DVD. It turned out this meant Lego Star Wars, and not Star Wars Star Wars but something called The Padawan Menace. What harm can a CGI-animated Lego spin-off do, I figured, and the short was indeed a pretty harmless hodge-podge of prequel-trilogy characters.

Then they watched the DVD extras; and before I knew it they were watching a fan-film of the original trilogy done in Lego in two minutes, with a spoiler every five seconds. <darth>Nooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!</darth>

I managed to deflect any attempts to watch that particular extra again (there was a prequel, too), but I suspect some of the key points will have stuck. So much for the Machete Order. Step one should be to take a machete to anything Star Wars-related that was released after 1983.

That said, I have finally purchased II and III on DVD for a fiver each, in anticipation of the big day (or week/s), to go with the original trilogy (with bonus disks of the original originals) that I picked up a few years back. Greater love hath no man, etc. Even if I wanted to pick up Episode I for a fiver, though, I can’t, because there are no DVD copies to be had for less than about fifteen quid. It was released just before the DVD boom, so all the cheap copies are VHS tapes. That can be my excuse, then: the events of Episode I happened such a long, long time ago that you need a VHS player to watch them, and ours is far, far away.

7 March 2012 · Film

Added by Rory on 7 March 2012.