I’ve just finished listening to Joel McNeely’s Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire soundtrack.
I bought this when it came out in the spring of 1996. And I have no idea what I did with that CD. So, after seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I found it inexpensively on eBay.
It arrived today.
I can’t get the multimedia features of the disc to work; Windows freaks out. McNeely’s score — the reason I bought the disc — is nice.
I never played the video game for the Nintendo 64, but I did read the novel and the comic book. Since next year is the 20th-anniversary of Shadows, I have this dream that an Expanded Edition of the Shadows novel could be published, this one incorporating the Darth Vader and Boba Fett material that featured solely in the comic book.
Shadows was a weird project — you had to experience it in a bunch of different formats to get the whole story.
Now, for some links I read today:
Peter Jackson remembers the late, great Christopher Lee – The world lost a giant when Sir Christopher Lee passed away this year. These anecdotes from Peter Jackson about the making of The Lord of the Rings and their personal relationship is at turns funny, thoughtful, and touching. Entertainment Weekly
Get Ready: Why 2016 Will Be Totally Nuts – Michael Tomasky offers up a number of predictions about the 2016 presidential election. I find myself agreeing with pretty much every one of them. Oh, some I quibble with, but by and large, I think he’s basically right on almost all of them. But It’s the ending, that’s not a prediction, that fascinates me the most, and I hope Tomasky returns to it in the new year: “This is not a prediction for 2016 per se, but an observation about the entropic direction we seem to be heading in as a country. We aren’t really citizens anymore in any meaningful sense. Most of us are chiefly consumers and spenders. Those of us who do take citizenship more seriously and are engaged in politics aren’t sitting down together to figure out solutions to problems, as citizens are supposed to do (in the imaginations, say, of the Founders); we’re ripping each others’ bowels out. It’s no wonder young people care less about democracy — they’re not seeing much democratic practice in their lives that’s appealing or salutary.” I want to read more about this. The Daily Beast
BBC Radio 4 – Drama, The Hunting of the Snark – “The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits” is Lewis Carroll’s mock epic poem about a quest by a group of strange people in search of the mysterious creature, the Snark. For Christmas, BBC Radio 4 produced an adaptation of the poem narrated by Tony Robinson (known by many, including myself, as S. Baldrick from Blackadder). This production is quite lovely. Give it a listen when you have the chance. BBC Radio 4