Something New and Surprising about Star Wars

Well, new and surprising to me anyway.

Back on May 19, I wrote a piece about the negative reaction among high-end critics to the final Star Wars flick, Revenge of the Sith. In the piece, I quoted Dale Peck in the NY Observer asking a semi-sneering series of questions, including this one:

What is it that led a handful of diehards to pitch a tent outside the Ziegfeld [theater in New York] weeks before the movie opened, so that they could buy the first tickets when they went on sale?

I now know the answer, thanks to an email from one Vince Hardy, who read my piece in a bowdlerized version on the Hawaii Reporter Web site. The line outside the Ziegfeld was part of a charity fundraiser put on by a Star Wars fan community called NYLine, which raised $46,000 for the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation.

Here's a video link about the effort.

Reason has long been interested in how fan communities operate (go here and here for examples). This adds one new dimension to my understanding of that process.