I had read rumors about George Lucas going back and making further enhancements to the movies as well as adding elements that make them consistent with the new prequel episodes. Probably the most talked about rumor was the insertion of Ian McDiarmid as the Emperor Palpatine.
Back in 1977, when Star Wars was first released, the Emperor was only referred to but not actually shown. In Empire 1980, we finally got to see the Emperor through a holographic transmission to Darth Vader. This Emperor was played by an old woman with monkey eyes voiced by Clive Revill.
In Return of the Jedi we get to see Palpatine in person. Ian McDiarmid, however, was cast for the role as the old wrinkly sinister Emperor. McDiarmid, who was in his 30′s at the time, with the help of makeup and his awesome talent, played the role superbly. This actor inconsistency was pretty minor and probably wasn’t a big deal at the time. After all, the Clive Revill Palpatine in Empire was only on screen for one short scene plus the holographic appearance distorted his appearance.
Fast-forward to 1999′s Star Wars: Episode I ? The Phantom Menace and we see a much younger Palpatine, again played by McDiarmid. At this point Palpatine is an ambitious Senator clawing his way to power. McDiarmid followed up by playing Palpatine in 2002′s Episode II ? The Phantom Menace and 2005′s Episode III ? Revenge of the Sith . As a result we are left with a more glaring consistency problem with the Revill Emperor really standing out.
The internet rumor mill frequently made mention of McDiarmid reprising his role as the old Emperor Palpatine replacing Clive Revill’s Palpatine for Episode V. Rumors are rumors, but the possibility of this being done was something I thought would be great to see.
As soon as I got back to my house from Best Buy I stuck The Empire Strikes Back in my DVD player and went straight to the rumored McDiarmid scene and to my excitement, there he was…Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine.
For a nice visual side-by-side comparison of the 1997 version and the 2004 version, click here.
John Steinbeck, gave a press conference after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Here is a clip.
Steinbeck’s attitude in the interview is great since most of the questions are silly anyway and he treats them accordingly.
Steinbeck is most famous for his novel The Grapes of Wrath written in 1939. Steinbeck commented that an author’s primary function is criticism. Interestingly, he comments on how he enjoyed Hemingway’s short stories, which were great favorites of mine as a child, especially Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea.
In 1798 the American Republic was faced with the threat of war by a foreign power, France. In an atmosphere of fear, the Federalist dominated Congress, along with Federalist President John Adams, passed four laws in an effort to strengthen the federal government. These laws, known as the Alien and Sedition acts, were the government’s first real effort to suppress basic constitutional rights. This was, in fact, the Federalists’ attempt to suppress the dissent of the opposition Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson.
The four laws were as follows:
The the Naturalization Act, required aliens to be residents for 14 years instead of 5 years before becoming U.S. citizens;
The Alien Act, authorized the President to deport aliens who were dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States during peacetime;
The Alien Enemies Act, allowed the wartime arrest, imprisonment and deportation of any foreign alien;
The Sedition Act, made “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” a high misdemeanor punishable by fine and imprisonment.
The alien acts were never enforced, but the Sedition Act was. About 25 Republican newspapermen were arrested and fined and saw their papers shut down under this legislation.
Jefferson, along with James Madison and several Virginians, penned the historic Virginia Resolutions which declared the Alien and Sedition acts unconstitutional. The attacks on the silenced Republicans, and Jefferson in particular, were rampant in the Federalist dominated media. Federalist pundits proclaimed that the election of Jefferson would cause the “teaching of murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest.” The Sedition Acts actually turned out to be a factor in the Federalists’ undoing. One of the newspapermen charged and arrested was Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin. He was charged with “libeling the President and the Executive Government in a manner tending to excite sedition and opposition to the laws.” Bache had referred to the president as “old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams.” Bache’s arrest caused such public outrage that Adams was defeated within his own party by Aaron Burr in the election of 1800. No candidate was able to secure a majority of electoral votes and it was left to the House of Representative to elect the president. Finally, on the 36th ballot, Jefferson was elected. One of the first acts of President Jefferson was to pardon all those convicted under the Sedition Act and Congress restored all fines with interest.
Today, with the Bush administration’s zealous support of the Patriot Act and the arrest without charge of U.S Citizen Jose “Enemy Combatant” Padilla, the threat to the Constitution is real. Bush and his cronies love to throw around words like “patriot” and “freedom” and act as if they represent these ideals. American patriotism isn’t expressed by loyalty to the “king,” but by the preservation of a political ideal. Encroachments on privacy, the arbitrary arrests of American citizens, paranoid secrecy and fear of dissent is behavior that is completely un-American and leaves the Bush administration, not its opposition (Democrats, Libertarians, Naderites, Greens, independents, , disillusioned Republicans, etc.), an un-patriotic enemy of freedom.
President Bush now believes that universities should eliminate “legacy” admissions, where schools favor the children of alumni, and thinks it “ought to be based on merit.” It’s interesting that Bush takes this position, himself a beneficiary of a legacy admission, being the son of George H. W. Bush and grandson of Prescott Bush, both Yalies. Despite this, I do agree with the president on this point.
GOP congressional candidate James Hart of Tennessee believes that if blacks had been integrated centuries ago, the automobile, electric light and airplane would have never been invented. He is an advocate of eugenics and calls people of European descent the “favored race” and people of African descent the “unfavored race.”
This nut is running unopposed in the GOP primary in Tennessee 8, but a grassroots Republican group is backing a write-in candidate named Dennis Bertrand. Hart says, “Every person who opens the door — as long as they’re white — I’ll say, ‘I’m James Hart. I’m running for Congress. My name will be on the ballot in the Aug. 5 Republican primary. I think white children deserve the same rights as everyone else.”
Early in the Bush campaign, georgewbush.com featured a “create your own banner” tool. This allowed users to enter their own slogan and print it with the “paid for by Bush-Cheney ’04, Inc” tag. Needless to say, many couldn’t resist and had some fun with this.
At first, the sloganator accepted everything. Filters were then written in censoring words like “Hitler” or “dictator.” The Bush campaign has since killed it since, but here is a link to several that were saved. You’ll either love them or hate them.
By the way, the Sloganator was resurrected in its original form at georgewbush.org.
Last night I attended a Kerry nomination party at the the Blake Street Tavern in LoDo. It was a fun event and even my politically apathetic friends who went were charged up.
My friend Holly pointed out this hillarious resemblance. For the culturally challanged, Mike Teevee was one of the kids who won a golden ticket in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
