Darth Vader and Loki ponder their new fate: What will life be like as Disney villains?
An original AVbyte musical, featuring Travis Slavin as Loki and Michael Ruocco as Darth Vader, with original music and lyrics by Antonius Nazareth.
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Star Wars gets an Asian makeover in Seon Soong’s clever, martial arts-flavored morality tale from China.
The premise: A solemn old man boards a subway train. Although his senior status entitles him to a seat, none of the passengers budges, leaving this elder unceremoniously standing. In the way of the Jedi, he seeks justice — much more nimbly and fiercely than you might at first imagine.
Soong is a student in the Animation School at the Communication University of China, based in Beijing. H/T Animation Blog
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A Wookiee belly dances while a Klingon band lays down a nasty groove. Who says nerds can’t have sexy fun? This video captures the action at a Raks Geek performance at Chicago’s Viaduct Theatre. As one reviewer described them, “One part art, two parts comedy, and three parts sexy, Raks Geek is alternately silly, beautiful, and seductive. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” H/T My Disguises
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A Touch of Zen, one of the most spectacular Chinese martial arts actioners of all time, is today’s Trillion Dollar Movie. The 1971 epic from writer-director King Hu served as a major inspiration for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Key scenes and story elements also have been heavily paraphrased in both Star Wars and The Matrix.
It’s long — running more than three hours, divided into two parts — but sit back and enjoy the ride, as this film is guaranteed to sweep you up in the action given its lyrical beauty, heroic cast of Ming Dynasty 
characters and breathtaking fight scenes. It’s also a genre-bending pleasure, starting off as a ghost story then morphing into a romantic comedy, a political thriller and a Buddhist parable, before finally evolving into a no-holds-barred martial arts extravaganza.
Much of the plot centers around Miss Yang, who bears a striking similarity to Princess Leia. Miss Yang lives in an abandoned, possibly haunted fortress, where she has gone into hiding to escape a brutal regime that tortured and killed her father. Ku, an impoverished scholar from a nearby village, takes a shine to this damsel in distress and emerges as her most steadfast defender. Together, joined by a small band of Shaolin monks, they will challenge the corrupt Eunuch Wei and his many evil minions.
King Hu, who perfected his craftsmanship working with the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong, shot A Touch of Zen in Taiwan. He won a technical grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival recognizing his gorgeous landscapes as well as the special effects and editing behind the stunning swordplay. Hu continued making movies another 22 years, including Raining in the Mountains and Legends of the Mountains, both loosely based on the same source material as A Touch of Zen, namely, Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Some of his later works are worth seeking out, especially those with action choreography by Sammo Hung. Still, none quite compares with this milestone production.
Closed captioning available in English and Spanish. Enjoy, and do return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: The free full version of the movie has been removed from the Internet. In its absence, here is the original trailer.)
C3-Bieb-O wants to be your droidfriend as Justin Bieber’s hit “Boyfriend” gets re-mixed for the homies on the Planet Tatooine. Sample lyrics:
Tell me what you like, I’ll tell you what I don’t
The wookie tries to fix me, but I know he won’t
I’m the droid you’re looking for, Ben Kenobi knows
I’ll protect you even better than a Tauntaun in the snow
Created by Teddie Films with START, a YouTube gaming channel. Inquiring minds want to know: Who is C3-Bieb-O’s wigmaker and how did Chewbacca learn to cut the rug so well? H/T My Disguises
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George “Storm” DiCostanza and Paul Sabourin, with help from a few friends, implore fantasy author George R.R. Martin to “write like the wind” and finish his Game of Thrones books. Formerly with the a cappella group Da Vinci’s Notebook, DiCostanza and Sabourin hail from Arlington, Virginia. They’ve carved out a niche for themselves in the realm of nerd musical comedy, achieving great success with their WookieeLeaks project, employing Twitter to reveal secrets from Star Wars. H/T IMAO
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The Carrie Fisher-William Shatner feud reignited over the weekend when the two stars both appeared at Comic-Con in San Diego. They didn’t bump up against each other in the flesh, but Fisher told the world via Twitter, “I’m horrified to hear that intergalactic fraud Bill Shatner will also be at Comic Con,” while Shatner tweeted an unflattering photo of a “Fisher sighting” at Comic-Con, purporting to show a more rotund Fisher in her original Princess Leia bikini. Shatner touched off the rift last September when he dismissed Star Wars as being a Star Trek clone. The comment prompted dueling YouTube videos by Fisher and Shatner, presented here to bring you up to speed on the contretemps.
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