Occassional Superheroine, the blog of Valerie D’Orazio, is one of my new favorite stops in the morning. Partially because she’s very funny, and partially because she gives us pictures like this:

Galley Friend M.R. sends us this link to a version of the Indiana Jones IV trailer, cut as though we were still in the ’80s.

Call me crazy, but I think I like this better than the real one.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlR6ujpB89k&rel=1]

“George came up to me on the set one day during my first ‘Star Wars’ and said something that I never fully understood until after we were done filming. He said, ‘As an actor, you have to think of yourself as a ditch digger.’… What he was implying was that on his movie, I needed to think of myself as a ditch digger, because it wasn’t the proper arena for actual creative expression. This was his thing. It was all very thought-out in his head, and I needed to show up to make his wants a reality. And so really, what he was saying to me, was: ‘Don’t let this experience discourage you from what acting can really be about, because that’s not what this is.’ I just wish I would’ve figured that out a little sooner.”

-Hayden Christensen in the Washington Post on his experiences with director George Lucas.

Remember a while back when EA Sports became the exclusive holders of the permission to make video games using the NFL? Remember how everyone thought this was an example of EA trying to big-foot smaller game makers? Turns out the whole thing was the NFL’s idea:

remember it wasn’t EA that demanded the exclusive relationship. The NFL requested it and did a research process for exclusive bids and so EA bid, as did other companies, and we were very fortunate to be able to get that exclusive arrangement. So, I want to make that very clear because I think there are some misconceptions sometimes that EA demanded the exclusive licensing for the National Football League and nothing could be further from the case.

I wonder why the NFL would want that.

Update: Incredibly astute Galley Reader J.T. sends in the following thoughts, which seem persuasive to me:

The NFL’s desire to have an exclusive game studio producing NFL titles
gives it fewer licensing agreements, in exchange for greater unity of
game play. By having one shop, the NFL can maintain more control over
the product, and should they choose to bring the game development in
house, they only have one organization that they need to absorb.

The NFL Network is a more visible effort of the same strategy. Because
television networks have more perceived control of branding than video
game studios, the effort is more protracted and necessarily slower. I
would expect the NFL to move in the direction of software development
within two to three years. They will still be transitioning to
exclusive NFL Network production of games ten years from now, but the
ultimate goal of the NFL is to get all media in house, to fully
appreciate the benefits of a vertically integrated business model.

That’s just my hunch. The NFL has always been much better at marketing
and giving exclusive control of channels to single entities seems a
smarter strategy of developing brand power and maximizing the marginal
revenue within that channel. If my eventual goal was controlling the
means by which consumers consume my product I would familiarize them
first with exclusives (like DirecTV). By requesting an exclusive
partner for game development, the league continues that trend. The
imbroglio surrounding the Pats-Giants regular season game on the NFL
Network was a setback for that strategy, but the game itself was what
the NFL is shooting for. A must see game, under their exclusive control.

I’ve been really remiss in following the HD DVD meltdown of recent weeks, which came to a spectacular close a couple days ago. I wish I had some insight into what happened, but I don’t, really. I’m like the aid to Walter Mondale who, on election night in ’84, famously turned to a friend and said, “I don’t understand–everyone I know voted for him.”

Seriously: I know maybe two-dozen people who’ve bought hi-def players. Only one of them bought a Blu-Ray. The HD DVD was superior as a set-top box, had a better set-top intalled base, had a better tie-rate with discs, was selling for half or a third of the price of Blu-Ray, and, as of early December, looked to have about equal software support. Oh, and its discs were cheaper than Blu-Ray, too. That was the state of affairs as of December 1, 2007. If I had told you then that Toshiba would be announcing their abandonment of the format 10 weeks later, you would thought I was crazy.

Heck, it really is crazy.

So what happened? Toronto’s Globe & Mail has some good reporting on the subject, including a claim that Sony paid Warner Bros. $400 million to switch sides.

(If that figure is correct, I wonder why Sony didn’t just lop $200 off the price of the PS3 to start with. That would have had the same effect of ending the format war AND it could have preserved the health of its game division. As things stand now, Sony may have sacrificed this generation of game console to win the hi-def format. I’d be interested to know, from a dollars-and-cents perspective, if that was a good trade off for them. Particularly if digital downloads like Apple TV really are both soon and next. Something I’m not convince of, btw.)

But there must be more to the story than this. The Blu-Ray shift seems to have started with the Christmas shopping season, before WB switched. And the rapidity with which Netflix and Wal-Mart jumped is also kind of startling. Particularly Wal-Mart, a mega-company that isn’t accustomed to turning on a dime like that.

I’m sad to see HD DVD go. I was fortunate not to get burned too badly–I only bought it because I needed a new player and if I had bought a Blu-Ray, it would be obsolete already anyway (another fact which amazes me). Yesterday’s USA Today carried a story which reported that the Blu-Ray camp was trying to figure out some sort of program to help HD DVD owners switch over. I can’t understand what their incentive would be to do that, unless they see the victory over HD DVD as only the first war and are already gearing up to fight digital downloads.

If you see more on this, please drop me a note or leave a comment; it’s all very interesting.

P.S.: Galley Friend B.W. says, Je ne regrette rien!

Toshiba’s deputy general manager of HD DVD Olivier Van Wynendaele stated that it “wouldn’t change anything that it did,” and continued on to say that “circumstances saw to it that [Toshiba] had to make the decision not to continue, but that doesn’t mean [the company] did anything wrong.”

Really? Something tells me that Olivier may find that the culture of Japanese business executives takes a somewhat different view.

Update: CNET has some interesting numbers on disc and player royalties, hinting at how much Sony has to gain from Blu-Ray. So that’s a fuzzy look at one side of the picture. Next we’d need some good guestimating at how much the PS3 flop has cost them.

Galley Reader D.H. sends along this excellent piece from the Onion‘s sports page:

TEMPE, AZ—Claiming he was initially excited at the prospect of playing for a legitimate championship contender, new Phoenix Suns center Shaquille O’Neal admitted Monday that, upon reading about the phenomenon of massive stellar explosions popularly known as supernovas, he is now terrified of the entire organization.

“I have emerged from my astronomical studies a much more educated man, a learned man, and yes—a frightened man. I am now a sage of the supernova,” O’Neal said during a combination press conference and PowerPoint presentation at an Arizona State University lecture hall. “If I would have known being a Sun meant being a part of a system where gravity could collapse, causing my radiant celestial body to explode in an event 10 times brighter than an ordinary Phoenix Sun—or worse, dematerialize into a neutron star or possibly a black hole—I would have never agreed to the trade.”

“I have a family to think of,” continued a visually tense O’Neal, who later stated that, because supernovas occur in our galaxy once every 40 to 50 years, the Suns, having joined the league in 1968, are “due for a big one.”

While O’Neal said that simply being a part of the Suns’ runaway-nuclear-fusion-reaction style of play would be frightening enough, he added that learning how an aging supergiant star typically ends its life cycle in a violent explosion was a profoundly terrifying experience. The 35-year-old center, who considers himself a super-giant star in the twilight of his career, has refused to go anywhere near his new teammates.

“Like Superman, I receive my energy from the Suns,” O’Neal said. “I’m scared I will not be able to flourish in an environment where there is a risk that the Suns’ supply of hydrogen could be exhausted, which would cause the core of the Suns to collapse into the center—in this case, me—and create a rise in temperature and pressure that would become great enough to ignite helium and then start a helium-to-carbon fusion cycle.”

“Not even electron degeneracy pressure is enough to stop a supernova when that happens to a Sun,” O’Neal added. “I don’t even know what that means, and I am the Big Astronomer. But it scares me.”

There’s more . . .

Galley Friends M.G. and M.C. stumbled across this link, a story (and pictures) about maybe the best collection of Star Wars toys in the world. It’s very nearly pornography.

And in the same vein, I stumbled upon a little comic called Tag & Bink over the weekend.

I can’t possibly recommend it highly enough. It’s basically Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead set in the Star Wars universe. Except, that in addition to being completely grounded in continuity and laugh-out-loud funny, it also performs the function of filling a bunch of Lucas plot holes. In fact, Tag & Bink is so perfectly conceived that I the Star Wars arc doesn’t even really make sense any more without it. Enjoy.