Ask Me Anything #29

After being on hiatus for the past two months, "Ask Me Anything" is back. This is a regular feature which appears here on the first Monday of every month.

You can ask me any questions you'd like, whether it's about my work, opinions, influences, favorites, least favorites, or anything else you think I might have an answer for. Questions can be posted in the comments section below, and I'll either answer them there, or in a separate post sometime later in the month.

Please take the time to view the previous questions so that we don't wind up with a lot of repetition. I've been asked a lot of good, thought provoking questions in the past as well as some really banal ones, all of which I tried to answer. You can see the previous questions by visiting Ask Me Anything  #1, #2 ,  #3, #4, #5, #6 , #7 , #8, #9,  #10,  #11,  #12 , #13, #14,  #15 , #16, #17 , #18 , #19,  #20,  #21, #22,  #23, #24, #25, #26, #27 and #28.  Answers not found following the questions can be found in the archives section for each associated month under Ask Me Anything.

Now ask away. 

Over 700 Monsters to Choose From

My month long tribute to Return of the Jedi is over. There will be plenty of new stuff to look at here in the weeks ahead including the return of Ask Me Anything this coming Monday. In the meantime, head over to my other blog, The Grim Gallery, now in it's third year, where you'll find a new monster every day 365 days a year.

30 Years of RETURN OF THE JEDI - Even More!

My look back at Return of the Jedi is over, but for more, be sure to check out Neato Coolville for a look at some of the stuff I didn't cover.

30 Years of RETURN OF THE JEDI - Part 31

To close this month long celebration of Return of the Jedi I present to you this selection of stills, including some common, some rare,  images from cut scenes, and even one from the special edition. I present them without any captions, or commentary. Just bask in the images themselves. 

May the Force be with you!

30 Years of RETURN OF THE JEDI - Part 30

Since the first Star Wars movie came out, I'm guessing just about everyone wondered what Darth Vader looked like beneath that helmet. I'm not talking about actor, David Prowse (above) but what sort of disfiguring, rasping creature "more machine than man" as Ben Kenobi informed us he was. The first hint I recall was, I believe in an issue of MAD magazine illustrated by Don Martin, that showed Vader's costume hanging on a hook, and the silhouette of a skinny, bearded old man taking a shower. This was obviously done for humorous effect and was not meant as serious speculation.

When The Empire Strikes Back came out, we received our first true hint to the nature of Vader's bare noggin through a very short clip of his helmet being lowered into place over the exposed back of his burn scarred head.

 This put to mind the face of the masked prince in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, or as Famous Monsters would suggest, Vincent Price in House of Wax. 

With Return of the Jedi, we'd finally get out look beneath the helmet. Before that moment, we'd get a few more hints at the cyborg anatomy of Darth Vader. First Luke chops of Vader's hand with his lightsaber revealing a writs full of severed, smoldering wires. Later as the Emperor's force energy courses over Vader, it illuminates him like an x-ray, revealing not just his skull, but bits of machinery in his neck and arm, suggesting he still had some serious injuries to come after those that would be revealed in Revenge of the Sith. 

Then the moment finally arrives when Darth Vader asks Luke to remove his mask, and the whole audience stopped breathing in anticipation. My guess is that this was not what they were expecting to see. I sure wasn't. Except for a couple of, admittedly serious looking, scars and a lack of exposure to sunlight, he was just an old man. I get that this was Darth Vader finally re-obtaining his diminished humanity and that that would probably be undermined if his face was a mass of melted flesh, but my young self was a bit let down. 

For some reason, when Return of the Jedi was rereleased in 1997, part of CG tinkering that george Lucas instituted was the erasure of Vaders prominent eyebrows. This made him look a bit more worm-like. 

The final indignity to be bestowed on Vader would come at the end of the movie when his ghost, or rather the ghost of Anakin Skywalker manifests beside the ghosts of Yoda and Ben Kenobi. The return of the jedi. Vader has been redeemed, and this scene as originally shot is fine and well, and even a bit touching. 

When Return of the Jedi was released on DVD as the prequel movies were finished, we had to suffer with poor Sebastian Shaw as Anakin's ghost being replaced by much younger Hayden Christensen as Anakin's ghost. Why don't Yoda and Ob-Wan get to appear in their youthful forms. For that matter, where are the ghosts of all the other jedis? At least the scenes with Luke and his helmetless father weren't reshot with Hayden Christensen -- so far. 

Anakin was also released as an action figure during the waning days of the Kenner toy line. 

Senior Anakin Skywalker was also released in the modern line of action figures in both his corporeal and spectral forms, before the prequels arrived and confused everything.