Two More Lukes

Here’s two new Luke additions that I was fortunate to add recently. The first, has been on my want list for awhile which is a Australian Toltoys Luke Jedi with blue lightsaber. It features the offer for the Nien Nunb mail in offer and one interesting thing of note is that it still mentioned Revenge of the Jedi on the offer even though the top of the card and back say Return. These were later covered up with a sticker fixing the name change and then ever further on were printed with the correct title.

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The next addition is a 65C Blue Saber Luke. The 65C card has 65 figures on the back and the Emperor mail in offer on the lower corner. It is the last U.S. card that you can find the blue lightsaber Luke, before the next batch of figures were released and the back of the card was updated to 77 figures.

65cbluefront65cblueback

For those that aren’t collectors, but familiar with the movies, you might be wondering why they even made Luke’s lightsaber blue in the first place as it was green in the movie. Here is my theory that makes sense to me. In the early trailers with the Revenge of the Jedi title, some scenes actually show Luke with a blue lightsaber. Here’s a still from one of those early trailers.

It has been said that Industrial Light and Magic was having trouble with the blue for the scenes out in broad daylight, so the decision was made to switch the lightsaber to green. I think this was done very late into postproduction, so Kenner, who was working to get the toys ready in time for the movie release, actually had the blue sabers made up for the toys. Once the decision was made for green, they then moved production over to the new correct color. However, having already made up a bunch of the blue ones and possibly having them packaged at this time already. they just released them in both colors for a short while.

 

 

Rebelscum Virtual Toy Comic-Con

Starting tomorrow at noon is the first Rebelscum Virtual Toy Comic-Con. This is the first time that I’ve seen a concept like this done, but it seems like a fun idea. I originally was going to just participate as a buyer, but earlier this week I picked up a nice group of vintage Star Wars items locally, so now I’m attending as a dealer. Tonight the dealers are setting up their sales and I pretty much have mine all ready.

Anyone that cares to take a look can view it here on the rebelscum forums.

Here’s the flyer advertising the event as well.

OS X Mountain Lion

OS 10.7 Lion was released just 7 months ago and in a shocking move, Apple announced OS 10.8 Mountain Lion today. When I first heard about this from the tech sites this morning I actually thought it might be a joke or parody. However, when I got to work. sure enough Apple had a web page dedicated to the forthcoming OS. It has been awhile since Apple announced anything that didn’t have some kind of a leak, so in that regard it was nice to be surprised by Apple again. The update appears to be incremental just like the one from Leopard to Snow Leopard. In my opinion, the main focus seems to be more about adding some of those missing links of getting data between your iOS devices onto your computer with iCloud. They’ve added messages, reminders, notes, game center, sheets, and twitter integration. All of these were on iOS devices first, but they are a welcomed addition.

I’m looking forward to all of these. but the ones that I’m most excited about are the new messages app that replaces iChat, and airplay for the mac. The main change with the messages app is that you can now send and receives iMessages on your computer. An iMessage is basically a free text between your iOS devices. Before iOS 5, I used google voice for my main texting. It had a nice web interface on the computer that you could use for this same type of functionality. However, I always preferred the text messaging app built into the iPhone, so when iMessage came along I switched over to using that among the people that I knew that had iPhones. However, I missed that when I heard my phone buzz, I couldn’t just see my message on my computer and reply from there. Instead I had to reply on my iPhone or iPad. Now, I have the ability to reply to iMessages right on my Mac. The great thing is that this program is available today in Beta form, which can be installed on Lion, so I’m using it right now.

The other feature I’m excited about, is Airplay. With the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, airplay allowed you to send the entire screen of those devices to an Apple TV. Now, they are adding that ability to the Mac as well. So basically you can send a game, movie, presentation, etc over to your T.V. Gone are the days of having to hook up cables, figuring out resolutions, etc to get your computer to display properly on a T.V.

Apple has stated that Mountain Lion will be available this Summer, so roughly a year after Lion was released. There is some speculation that they might even make it free, but even if it stays at the $29 price of Lion, I don’t see a reason not to upgrade.

Here’s the link again to see some more screenshots and some of the other details as to what is new.

Revenge of the Jedi Proof Sheet

On of my more recent additions is this proof sheet for The Force lightsaber store display. This was printed up before the movie’s title was renamed to Return of the Jedi from Revenge of the Jedi. The proof sheet shows the color bars at the top and also has the crop marks for the area that was used for the actual store display. I hope to get this framed up sometime over the next year. This came directly from a former Kenner employee that has had some great items that he saved back in the day.

Star Wars in 3D

This friday, the first of the 3D converted Star Wars films is released with The Phantom Menace. I’m generally not a fan when a 2D movie is post converted to 3D as it usually feels flat. I’m going to give this one a try though of course because it is Star Wars. I’ve only seen one of the trailers in 3D and wasn’t too impressed with that experience. However, I’m still going to attend each one as depending on the success of each film, will determine wether we get the next and I want to have the opportunity to see all 6 films again in the theater. I’ll post back what I think of the 3D experience after I see it. There are also theaters showing it in 2D, so I’ll probably see if again the old fashioned way too.
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