12ish Days of Blogging: Several Rogue One-related Links

On the second day of my 12ish Days of Blogging, I give to thee several Rogue One: A Star Wars Story related links. Before I continue further I want to give credit where credit is due. Without writers Paul Cornell (whom I've reviewed his first issue of Stormwatch) and Bill Willingham (don't recall if I've reviewed any of his stuff here...), doing a 12 Days of Blogging and 12 Stories, respectively, I never would have thought to do this. My X-mas related posts would have seemed out of nowhere. Also, I want to think Disney for joining Star Wars with the holiday season for the forseeable future. Now, Star Wars is synonymous with the holidays!


So ergo, it wouldn't be the holidays without some Star Wars related links, right? So here's some links related to Rogue One that I found of interest.


Whitaker reprises role for Rebels - In an awesome bit of synergy, Forest Whitaker reprises his role from Rogue One in the Star Wars animated series Rebels.  Really cool indeed.


Vader Pun Controversy - If you haven't seen Rogue One yet, hereby SPOILERS. Otherwise, there's a bit of controversy about Darth Vader cracking a pun. I admit it caught me off guard and jolted me out of the scene. However, I didn't consider it a scandalous treatment of the character. Certainly, no worse than Vader's comment at the end of Episode 3. Heck, it bothered me less than any of the things Anakin does during the prequels. As the article above points out it is well within character. Which after reading said article I can see the author's point about Vader cracking puns being within character. Guess it all depends on a certain point of view.


Rogue One's Massive Opening Weekend - The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on how well Rogue One performed at the box office during its opening weekend. It performed well. Very well. A high box office speaks favorably towards future Star Wars Anthology movies and Star Wars movies using mostly original characters. Very good news indeed.


Rogue One Cameos - One of the things that I greatly enjoyed about Rogue One was the cameos. As part of the enjoyment was the surprise of those cameos I'll say this link contains massive SPOILERS!


Bold Ending is what the Franchise Needed - Yep, SPOILERS. In hindsight I shouldn't have been surprised by the ending but, yeah, the ending is a huge reason I enjoyed the film.


How Rogue One Changes Perceptions of the Original Trilogy - Once again, another link that one should really see the movie first if you don't any SPOILERS. This piece is a much, much more eloquent piece than when I blogged about how Rogue One greatly improves Rebel Alliance campaigns in Star Wars TRPGs - except applied toward the original trilogy.


A marketing rant - Over at ComicMix, here's what's really a rant over using Rogue One to cater to different markets such as using Chinese actors to appeal to audiences in China. Since I wasn't aware the actors were Chinese I thought they were cast as homages to Lucas receiving inspiration from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. The more you know I guess...


Mark Hamill is a Fan - Yep, Luke Skywalker likes it. I concur too.


A New Martial Art Style Created for Rogue One - The actor who played the blind monk apparently created his own style. Now, that's cool.


Till Next Time.