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.

Comments

[Jeff]

In my twenty-plus years of attending science fiction conventions, I have never seen a con where there wasn't notable charity activity. Bake sales, auctions, autograph-for-donation tables, and assorted functions are a regular part of cons.
There's a whole segment in the movie Trekkies about fan charity work and the money raised.

[joe]

I wish we had a regular poster who could tell us whether a device could actually be created that used light to create a fencing weapon.

[R C Dean]

I wish we had a regular poster who could tell us whether a device could actually be created that used light to create a fencing weapon.

No. It can't.

[kevrob]

I suppose one could create some sort of hand-hekd particle beam, but we all know from the work of Spengler and Venkman what happens when two such devices cross their streams, don't we? It ain't pretty.

Kevin

[Phil]

Following up on Jeff's comment, I'm involved with the DC-Area SW Collector's Club, which frequently does charity-related work; last year, sale of a club-designed Yoda pin raised several thousand dollars for Children's Hospital in Baltimore. Every SW fan group I know does this stuff all the time.

[Neb Okla]

They raffled off a really cool "Jedi Liberty" sculpture. Check it out at it's creator's website:

http://www.nathanbrickartist.com/liberty_jedi.html

The life-sized Han Solo in Carbonite is pretty cool too.

If you want a lesson in fan communities, check out Lugnet. I've never seen a more technically advanced or polite group of fans, though the occasional European wonders why they pay so much more for Lego sets made in Europe compared to US citizens (hint: TAXES).

[spur]

Is the New York Observer really 'high end'?

[thoreau]

joe-

Light beams themselves would be useless as fencing weapons. Light beams can pass right through each other without deflection.

(OK, a particle physicist might observe that gamma rays with enough energy to create electron-positron pairs can scatter off each other, but that doesn't involve visible light.)

Also, light beams can't terminate in mid-air without encountering an object that absorbs light, a point that I hammer home to my optics students when they do ray tracing.

Now, one might create an object that glows and deflects light, so maybe those light sabers are actually retractable weapons that glow. But they aren't pure light, that's for sure.

[Isaac Bartram]

Geez, thoreau, way to spoil the story:)

Ya coulda made sumthin' up. We'da believed ya, you bein' a PhD an' all:)

[Stevo Darkly]

Personally, I had this hypothesis that the "light sabers" were actually a jet of plasma (the superhot "4th state of matter") contained in a long, narrow magnetic field. Or something like that.

The magnetic fields wouldn't keep the plasma jets from sweeping through objects (unless they were very dense) and cutting through them. But if the magnetic fields of two sabers were brought near each other, they'd resist contact like two magnets of like polarity. Which would enable two sabers to parry each other, and maybe make that "K-k-k-k-k" sound and shoot sparks when held against each other, as can be observed in the films.

Thoreau, does that sound halway plausible? I'm sure there are problems, like maybe creating a containment field intense enough to produce the effect of a sharply bounded "blade," with a power source compact enough to fit in a saber's handle, and no effects that would sterilize the 'nads of anyone near the weapon, etc. etc. But hey, details.

Anyway, I can accept that more readily than beams of light that come to a sharp-pointed end and bounce off each other like solid objects.