Mike Audette’s Weekly Star Wars Fandom Focus!
By Mike Audette // Well guys, we did it. We broke the Internet. Date of passing: Monday, October 19th, the Year of our Lord Two-thousand Fifteen. Star Wars: The Force Awakens full theatrical trailer dropped during halftime of Monday Night Football (I’ll get to that later) and it blew our collective minds into absolute oblivion.
Even before that, we had the tickets go on sale and numerous sites crashed due to the overworking on their servers. Reports on Twitter ranged from pure joy to sadness to straight-up rage at the lack of cohesion and proper facilities for movie ticket websites. In the end, I do believe everyone was able to get their tickets for the film, whether it is on opening night of the 17th or some point during the day on the 18th. I shudder to think of the workplace productivity that is going to go down the drain that week from all of us fans taking those days off as PTO.
As for the trailer itself: %&%^$%$&$(&*! It had so many incredible shots, amazing moments, and even more unanswered questions. Only Star Wars could do something like this. I can’t go without mentioning John Williams either. That man knows how to make grown adults weep with joy. I challenge you to not get chills from listening to the score from that trailer.
Partial Rant: The trailer debuted during Monday Night Football. The amount of people I saw complaining that they had to watch “sportsball” to see the trailer was so ridiculous. Star Wars fans are supposed to be an open-minded and welcoming group. I was an athlete and sports fan before I became a Star Wars fan and I was extremely disappointed in the words and actions of some out there in fandom.
Surprisingly this was not the only awesome thing to happen in the Star Wars universe recently. Wednesday the 14th marked the return of Star Wars Rebels! It had been a long time coming but people were absolutely over the moon to see the clones come back. A few of us lucky souls were able to screen the two episodes early at New York Comic Con a few weeks ago and one person in particular (*cough*Johna*cough *) was ecstatic to see the glorious return of Captain Rex. It’s also nice to have so many Rebels-themed podcasts returning to give everyone their usual outlet to analyze and discuss at length the happenings that’s going on in the land of Rebellion.
Fandom certainly had its highs and lows this week, but the highs 100% drowned out the lows. In just two short months The Force Awakens will be released worldwide and everything will change–for the better we can only hope.