Some years later, a professor at Syracuse University named Douglas Brode asked if he could include the essay in a reader that he was putting together for a course on Star Wars. Naturally, I agreed.

Some time after that, the course having been a big success, he asked whether the essay might be included, in revised form, in an anthology based on the course reader that would be published by Scarecrow Press. Once again, I agreed.

Cut to the chase: “Star Wars and the Technophobic Imagination” will be appearing this June in the first of what has turned out to be two volumes about Star Wars. Both are edited by Brode and Leah Dyneka.

Here are the tables of contents for each volume.

Volume 1: Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology

1. Douglas Brode, “Cowboys in Space“: Star Wars and the Western Film”
2. Arthur Berger, “Is Star Wars a Modernized Fairy Tale?”
3. Craig Svonkin, “From Disneyland to Modesto: George Lucas and Walt Disney”
4. Leah Deyneka, “May the Myth Be with You, Always: Archetypes, Mythic
Elements and Aspects of Joseph Campbell’s Heroic Monomyth in the Original Star Wars Trilogy”
5. Dan Rubey, “Not so long ago, not so far away: New Variations on Old Themes;
Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes”
6. John C. McDowell, “From Sky-Walking to Dark Knight of the Soul: George Lucas’
Star Wars Turns to Tragic Drama”
7. Michael Kaminski, “Under the Influence of Akira Kurosawa: The Visual Style of George Lucas”
8. Crystal Renee White, “Balancing the Force: How Media Created by Star Wars
Now Defines the Franchise”
9. Jon Hogan, “A Long Time Ago on a Newsstand Far, Far Away: The Mythic Comic Book Hero in Marvel Comics’ Star Wars”
10.  Eric Charles, “The Jedi Network: Star Wars’ Portrayal and Inspirations
on the Small Screen”
11. Seth Sommerfeld, “Gaming in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: The History of the Expanded Worlds, Canon Conflicts, and Simplified Morality of Star Wars Video Games”
12. Henry Jenkins,”Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media
Convergence, and Participatory Culture”
13. Cyrus R. K. Patell, “Star Wars and the Technophobic VoluImagination”

Volume 2: Sex, Politics, and Religion in Star Wars: An Anthology

1. Douglas Brode, “A Rocky Road to Star Wars: The Early Life and Career of George Lucas”
2. Andrew Howe, “Star Wars in Black & White:  Race and Racism in a Galaxy
Not So Far Away”
3. Julien Fielding, “Beyond Judeo-Christianity: Star Wars and the Great Eastern Religions”
4. Andrew Bank, “May the Force Be with JEW: The Jedi-Hebraic Connection”
5. Nick Desloge, “Star Wars: An Exhibition in Cold War Politics”
6. Peter Krämer, “Fighting the Evil Empire: Star Wars, the Strategic Defense
Initiative and the Politics of Science-Fiction”
7. Ray Merlock and Kathy Merlock Jackson, “Light Sabers, Political Arenas, and Marriages for Princess Leia and Queen Amidala”
8. Anne M. Boyd, “The Over-Soul of the Force: Emersonian Transcendentalism
in the Star Wars Saga”
9. Lucy Place, “George Lucas and Freud’s Anal Stage Manifestations of Excretory and Vaginal Fear in THX 1138 and Star Wars”
10. Roger Kaufman, “Homosexual Romance & Self-Realization in Star Wars”
11. Matt Singer, “The War for Star Wars”
12. Nick Jamilla, “Defining the Jedi Order: Star Wars’ Narrative and the Real World”
13. Andrew Gordon, “The Empire Strikes Back: Deeper and Darker”

Meanwhile, the Star Wars universe is very much a destination in my household. My two sons are addicted to the new MMO game Star Wars: The Old Republic and continue to watch new episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Their dad might be doing a little playing and watching too (though not nearly as much as he’d like to).

You can read more about this video, and who besides Snoop Dogg and David Beckham are in it, at starwars.com. And you can click here for an earlier mash-up of Star Wars and adidas.

The campaign, by the way, is promoting a line that adidas calls “adidas Originals.” Perhaps they’ve read Harold Bloom‘s literary criticism and adopt his view of originality as the result of a writer’s willful misappropriation of the work of a precursor!

I’ve been a fan of Burns’s work since watching The Civil War, the documentary series on which he collaborated with his brother Ken Burns, serving as co-producer and co-writer (with Geoffrey C. Ward). Ric is best known for the eight-part series New York: A Documentary Film, which offers a compelling portrait of the city and its cultural history. Burns’s New York remains a touchstone for the Writing New York lecture course that I teach every year with Bryan Waterman: it’s recommended viewing for the course and we show several clips from it in the course of the term. The film’s use of visual materials helps to make the history of New York more vivid for our students, and Burns’s stress on the city’s cosmopolitanism resonates with one of our course’s major themes. In addition, though, our use of the film clips enables the students to meditate on the documentary imperative, to think about the ways in which documentaries use devices such as music and experts to help persuade and about the ways in which fictions (whether on the page or on the screen) can also serve a documentary function.

It was great fun to meet Burns and his team, and to get a glimpse of how Burns puts films like New York and Into the Deep together. And now the film is set to premiere. It’ll be shown on PBS stations  on May 10 as part of the American Experience series. You can learn more about the film by visiting its page on the PBS website and by reading this press release. The website is itself an excellent education resource, with a photo gallery, historical timeline, and bibliography. The film is centered on two events in the history of American whaling: the famous sinking of the whaleship Essex by a whale and the attempt by its crew to reach the western coast of South America by sailing thousands of miles in their whaleboats, and the publication of Melville’s Moby-Dick.

I’ve been invited to a preview of Into the Deep next week at the Museum of Natural History next week. Stay tuned for a subsequent post about the film.

At each of the post-film discussions at which I’ve been present, when the talk turns to a discussion of which film should be named Best Picture, the two films that inevitably become the subject of discussion are James Cameron’s Avatar and (his ex-wife) Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. I’ve seen the former twice (in IMAX); the latter is on the docket for a home viewing this weekend. Almost all of the students think that The Hurt Locker should win. They find it “powerful,” “groundbreaking,” and “realistic”; they think it “speaks” to their generation. They think it’s different from other war movies, which they see as action films that romanticize war.

The Hurt Locker may be that good. I’ll write about it once I’ve seen it. But the students’ comments make me wonder what war films they’ve actually seen. At least since Apocalypse Now (1979) almost thirty years ago, American war films have tended to be brooding meditations on the futility of war. Even films that overlay a more archetypal storyline — for example, Oliver Stone’s Platoon — or make use of a more conventional narrative structure — for example, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan — have made it a point to dramatize the ugly violence of war in visceral terms that assault the audience. So I’m wondering if I will find The Hurt Locker any more “gripping” or “realistic” than, say, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001).

Is the The Hurt Locker a breakthrough film in the war film genre? Or is it simply a well-made film that forces today’s college-age kids to come to terms with a war that they’ve taken for granted and about which they have worried less than the Vietnam generation did about its war?

I understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.

As a vehicle for presenting Percy’s predicament, I have to admit, it’s not bad: the English teacher is a Fury (unbeknownst to Percy), and he does indeed have trouble understanding words when they’re written in English.

Still, I wish they’d kept her as pre-Algebra teacher. (See my previous post.)

At the end of my previous post about Rick Riordan’s novel The Lightning Thief, I wrote:

I’m hoping that my students see me more as Percy’s Latin teacher, Mr. Brunner (a.k.a. Chiron, the centaur who trained Hercules) than as temporary pre-Algebra teacher, Mrs. Dodd (who turns out to be a Fury).

I finished the novel before going with my family to see the movie today. What I liked best about the novel was the wry way in which Rick Riordan inserted Greek gods, heroes, and monsters into a twenty-first century setting. Procrustes as a waterbed salesman! Charon as a record executive! The entrance to the underworld is in Los Angeles! (On that subject, see my post over at PWHNY).

The film changes a lot of things, and I don’t mind most of them. The wryness is missing, but that’s the kind of thing that a novel can convey easily and a film has to work hard to get across. This film isn’t up to that task , but that’s okay. The kids are older, but I think that’s okay too. The plot is simplified and less episodic, but that doesn’t bother me either. I’m less crazy about Poseidon’s speaking to Percy via telepathy at various points in the film. I wouldn’t have changed the identity of the ultimate villain, but I have a feeling that if there’s a sequel (and one has been announced though the sub-$40 million opening weekend may jeopardize that), that villain can be retrospectively injected into the story.

So here’s what bugs me. Why, oh why, did they have to change the Fury in the opening sequence from a pre-Algebra teacher to an English teacher? Oh sure, it makes it’s an economical way for the film to establish Percy’s supposed dyslexia. But why not make Mrs. Dodds a history teacher or a Latin teacher? They deal with text too!

Hrmph! We English teachers get no respect.

I’m hoping, by the way, that there’s some clever subtext at work in the fact that Percy is asked by Mrs. Dodds to explicate a line from Othello. Unfortunately, I wasn’t clever enough to note down which line it was, so I can’t comment on that yet. If anyone out there knows, please enlighten me. Or I may have to plunk down another $12 just to find out.

Click here to read Bloom’s account of the photo shoot and here for a more detailed account of Bloom’s timelapse techniques (with additional material about Dubai).

NYU students who have been to Prague (or who are thinking of spending a semester there) might enjoy his tribute to the city:

Prague: Canon 1DMKIV from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

And fellow Star Wars fans might enjoy his peek at the Skywalker Ranch:

The thought of Shyamalan directing the film adaptation of what in my household is a beloved television series — “Avatar: The Last Airbender” — fills me with some trepidation. I liked The Sixth Sense fine, even though I did figure it out the moment I saw Bruce Willis’s character sitting on the park bench reading a file — and blurted it out, thereby spoiling the movie for my wife. I thought Unbreakable was rather silly, and I haven’t had the inclination to watch any of the films that followed it.

We take our Aang seriously around here: we have all the DVDs, some of us watch them repeatedly, two of us love to engage in “waterbending” in the swimming pool, and one of us has actually been Aang for Halloween:

So we will be pissed if the movie isn’t any good.

On the other hand, the Super Bowl commercial bodes well, I think.

I’ll show it to the boys tomorrow and report back.

A transcript of “Mad as a March Hare” is available at http://www.theclassictoons.com.

This morning, I discovered that The Crystal Skull has similar properties. Leaving my building, I had every intention of turning right and heading to the gym. But, like the film’s Professor Oxley (played by John Hurt), I could hear the Skull beckoning: “Return!” I found myself turning left and heading to the 11:30 showing at the AMC Loew’s 19th Street, returning there a mere nine hours after I’d left. (This is the quickest I’ve ever been back to see a movie a second time.)

Was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull worth watching a second time? For me, the answer was an emphatic, Yes! Indeed, I found myself fonder of the movie after the second time through.

In the recently released volume The Complete Making of Indiana Jones by Laurent Bouzereau and J. W. Rinzler (Ballantine Books), Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying: “I want people to come to this movie and say, ‘Oh, my old friends are back. And one of their friends will be the style in which we shot the previous films. I want audiences to come to this movie and make new friends, but rediscover that their old friends haven’t changed all that much.”

That’s exactly how I feel about this movie.