It’s kind of a good news/bad news situation for the new Star Wars film, Episode VII.  The bad news is that Michael Arndt is no longer writing the screenplay.  However, his work has not been for nothing, as they are merely taking over from where he left off.  It’s also likely that they’ll go back through everything he’s written, making changes whenever and wherever necessary.  We probably won’t know until the film gets closer to release whether Arndt will be credited in any way.

The good news is that J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan are the writers that are taking over the screenwriting duties.  J.J. Abrams is, of course, the creator of many of the best TV shows of the last decade.  Lawrence Kasdan is a name that, if you know Star Wars history, you’ll recognize as the screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  It’s been a while since his words have been spoken in a Star Wars film, and kind of sad that he didn’t get to take a few passes on each of the Star Wars prequels.  However, that is changing with the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII.  Kasdan is now at work on the new film, and I couldn’t be more excited about it than I am now.

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A rumor has surfaced in the past couple of days that has actor Benedict Cumberbatch potentially playing a role in the new Star Wars trilogy.  As Cumberbatch recently played a major villain in Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness, the idea of him playing a primary villain in the new Star Wars trilogy has me more excited than ever for the next three films.  The rumor is that he’ll play a Sith villain in all three of the films in the trilogy, making him the new trilogy’s Darth Vader of sorts.  If this keeps up, the Sherlock actor will have played a pretty major villain in some of the largest movies in history.  This casting, if it pans out, is absolutely a brilliant maneuver, and should happen.

Benedict Cumberbatch could add this role to a list that includes the dragon Smaug from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  The rumor is that he had to drop out of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak for this role.  It hasn’t been announced yet, however, and could turn out to be as much of a rumor as anything.  If this pans out… whoa… somehow they’re making moves on these films that are both shockingly cool and giving us a lot of hope that we’ll finally get a Star Wars film that brings the fandom back to where I have remained since I got in to the saga in the mid-90s.  Please be true.

Since the announcement that Disney bought Lucasfilm, there has been a wide range of reactions to it, from the very optimistic and positive, to the stunningly negative and outrageous.  There are many reasons to be optimistic though, and I feel there are no valid arguments against Disney at this point.  Within the few years, Disney has made some pretty smart moves with their acquisitions.  Let’s take a look at that to see why Star Wars is safe in the House of Mouse.

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If you’ve not seen Revenge of the Sith by now, this article will be spoiler filled, so avoid if you need to.  However, if you’ve read my other articles, you already know all of the stuff here anyway, so read on.

There is one pretty big inconsistency in the Star Wars films that I don’t know the answer to.

How does Leia remember her mother?

It seems there are many theories about why, in Return of the Jedi, Leia says that her mother was “very beautiful. Kind, but…sad.”

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Ed is another one of those shows that is being held up because of the music that they used in the show.  Over the years there have been some rumors about work being done on the DVD, but lately those rumors have become increasingly pessimistic toward any sort of release at all.

While everyone seems to want The Wonder Years, that is at least available on Netflix streaming.  The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of Ed, which is one of the best TV shows ever made.  It deserves a release onto home video.

Produced by Worldwide Pants, this show features Tom Cavanagh as Ed Stevens, a contracts lawyer at a high-profile New York City firm. Around the same time he splits with his wife (she slept with a mailman), he makes a single error in punctuation when going over a contract; and because of the resulting financial loss to the firm, he’s fired. Despondent, he heads back to his (small) hometown of Stuckeyville — ‘Anytown’, USA. There he realizes he’s been missed by a lot of friends whom he’s missed; and he sees Carol (Julie Bowen), the girl he’d adored in high school. Swept up in roiling emotions, Ed buys the local bowling alley on a whim, moves to Stuckeyville, and determines to win Carol’s heart. His horizons broaden as he settles once more in Stuckeyville, and the series itself settles into a charming, funny, often serious slice-of-life series focused not solely on Ed but on the lovable ensemble cast of people who live and work with him in Stuckeyville.

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When you look back on the Star Wars prequels, there is one thing that doesn’t stand out as very obvious at first.  There weren’t many introduced mysteries that we absolutely had to get the answers to.  Instead, most of the mysteries were laid bare for us to see as if we were the ones writing the screenplays.  This wasn’t true all the time, of course, but in those cases, the mysteries weren’t character driven enough, or sweeping enough to cover the trilogy.

Mystery Boxes are those mysteries that occur when you’re watching a movie or TV series brings up a bunch of questions that you feel the need to know the answers to.  They happen very frequently at the beginning of the original Star Wars film, A New Hope.

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