I’m the king. Christmas present highlights-

-I always get some Star Wars crap, but Star Wars Operation is gonna be dope. Also, I’ve wanted to read The Making of Star Wars for a while now, and Shadow Games, despite having a terrible cover, is about Dash Rendar from Shadows of the Empire, his first significant appearance since, and, because he’s one of my favorite expanded universe characters, that makes it worth reading. The calendars are also pretty cool.

-The original Planet of the Apes novel, as well as the animated series Return to the Planet of the Apes.

-I Am Better than Your Kids by Maddox- Wasn’t a huge fan of his first book, but I’ve flipped through this, and it’s already the funniest thing he’s written in ages (though I find he’s almost always still a good source for amusement).

-Chas: The Knowledge- a minor Hellblazer storyline. Should be fun.

-Roger Ebert’s memoir Life Itself.

-Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonder Struck- I loved Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, so I’m expecting greatness.

-The Autobiography of Mark Twain and The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain- Mostly unread (by me) work by the king.

-Orbiter by Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran- Already read this—it’s pretty amazing. Full write-up coming soon.

-The Time Machine Did It by prolific Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder- If the first chapter is any indication this is pure Swartzwelder craziness. Every other line is a joke and pretty much all of them land.

-The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman- Although I prefer his non-fiction, I did really like Downtown Owl, so I’m looking forward to Klosterman’s second novel.

-Community season 2- My favorite current sitcom’s (so far) best season. Started listening to the commentaries- they are fun and informative, but I wish Dan Harmon was on every one like he was for season one.

-Habibi by Craig Thompson- Can’t wait to dig into this beast. Love Blankets to death, and I’ve heard this is better.

As you can probably tell, I mostly asked for books, and I look forward to a great deal of reading.

The People Vs. George Lucas (Alexandre O. Philippe; 2011)

Assembled primarily of interviews with irritating, whining Star Wars fans, The People Vs. George Lucas kind of tries to offer a fair shake to the man who made THX-1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars, but it falters by giving a surprisingly disproportionate amount of screen time over to those who buy into the delusion that their childhoods were sodomized by the very man who (by their own admission, much of the time) provided such a massive inspiration during those formative years.

I’m an unabashed Star Wars apologist. The Special Editions are, at worst, a mild irritation, and I (!) like the prequels, but I think even most jaded Star Wars fans would be embarrassed if they saw themselves reflected in some of director Alexandre Philippe’s interview subjects.

The film is entertaining and moves at a brisk pace. Some of the angry fans were fun to laugh at, and it was nice to hear the occasional reasonable person weigh in (Neil Gaiman was a nice surprise), but sadly, The People Vs. George Lucas offers no new argument. It’s just the same fan bitching you’ve heard since 1999, formatted into a watchable, but unremarkable package.

Star Wars: Rebel Mission to Ord Mantell by Brian Daley

This 1983 audio drama tells the story of the incident at Ord Mantell mentioned by Han Solo at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. I love this format and I wish more of them had been made. This was pure original trilogy style fun in the vein of the Marvel comic books and Daley’s own Han Solo Adventures.

Trekkies (Roger Nygard; 1997) and Starwoids (Dennis Przywara; 2001)

First, let me put this out there: Star Trek and Star Wars have absolutely nothing in common. I hate that, as a fan of both venerable science fiction franchises, I can’t express my love for one without someone piping up about how the other is better. For the record, I’m a bit more of a Star Wars fan. It’s mostly to do with nostalgia, but also, The Empire Strikes Back is better than “City on the Edge of Forever,” in my view the two pinnacles of each franchise. Also, Star Wars never plunged to the depths of Voyager. But in the end, who cares? They’re both brilliant for entirely different reasons, and if they weren’t both so long-lived and successful, we’d never be having this conversation.

Trekkies and Starwoids, however, are entirely comparable. They both attempt to explain the phenomenon of fandom, and they both succeed, but only marginally.

The biggest problem with both of these films (but especially Trekkies) is their lack of nuance. Star Trek and Star Wars are both worldwide phenomena which attract all kinds of people, most of them quite normal (even those who attend conventions). The makers of Trekkies found the most insane, unbalanced people possible to represent Star Trek fans. This makes the film quite humorous (I was laughing hysterically the whole time), but it also kind of ignores all the people in the background of the conventions, who aren’t dressed as Klingons, and who don’t dream of Brent Spiner while looking in the direction of his house. I fucking love Star Trek. I watch it all the time. I’d consider myself more than a casual fan. But the people in this movie are crazy, and the filmmakers go out of their way to exploit that.

In this way, Starwoids fares somewhat better. Though I found most of its subjects irritating (manic, hyper dorks are the bane of any self-respecting fan’s existence), very few of them seemed at all unbalanced. Yeah, waiting in line for The Phantom Menace for six weeks seems insane in retrospect, but it was the most anticipated movie of all time, and once you find out how it really works (you take shifts, you’re not there day and night), it doesn’t even seem all that hard. The line is much of the focus of Starwoids, but I found the other stuff involving action figure collecting, an embarassing looking Star Wars musical, and an actor who played one of the Jawas a lot more interesting. The 2005 documentary Star Wait about the Attack of the Clones line was far better for entertaining line antics.

Trekkies is a more well made, better paced, and all around more entertaining film, but I found Starwoids less mean-spirited toward its subjects. Starwoids is a celebration of Star Wars, but Trekkies is often derisive toward Star Trek.

NOTE: I hate names for fan groups, whether it be Trekkies or Starwoids (a term I’d never heard until I saw this film—and by all accounts, I’d fall under its banner) or (the worst) Whedonites. Fuck that shit. Can’t you just enjoy something and be a fan of it? Do we really have to define ourselves this way? Stupid.

This is for Dabeedoo.