The opening ceremony was the highlight of Friday's Celebration IV events. Highlight in that it was the headliner, had the longest line and all in all was a darned good show. Today -- May 25 -- is the 30th anniversary of the release of "Star Wars," right down to the day. To celebrate, all of us in the opening ceremony tonight -- and there were hundreds of us -- were given a square of white cake. But only after we sang "Happy Birthday." And yes, I sang. An image of the famous, to "Star Wars" fans, one-year birthday poster from 1978 filled the projection screen. The cake was good.
The Postal Service gave us first-day issue envelopes with canceled "Star Wars" 41-cent stamps. May 25, 2007.
I also signed the giant 30th anniversary card. Never mind what I wrote.
Panel discussions began today. My favorite was the first: "The Archaeology of Star Wars," with Dr. David West Reynolds. Reynolds is a real, honest-to-goodness archaeologist who set out in 1995 to find the lost filming sites in Tunisia for the original movie. And damned if he didn't find them. He even found the plastic krayt dragon bones, with some help from a local boy and his father. Reynolds used slides to show the clues he followed in production photographs and "Star Wars" trading cards, clues nonarchaeolgist not might think to see. He recognized a site near the Tusken Raider attach, for example, from a grouping of three rocks amid a vast background of rock and sand. Three rocks, and he had it!
Reynolds kept hammering home his excitement: "360 degrees," he would say. That was what gave him a giddy feeling. Trading cards and movie photographs are two-dimensional. But once he had identified the shooting locations, he could walk around or turn. Turning is something you can't do with a photo. The ability to turn, to look around and to walk around what you can feel are real places in the "Star Wars" fantasy word, to imagine yourself there: This is most of the excitement I've ever gotten from "Star Wars Galaxies" and other first-person "Star Wars" games.
On to Saturday!
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