Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. This is my first time at a Star Wars Celebration. I'm paying for this trip out of my pocket and decided to do so months and months ago for a couple of reasons. First, I'm excited for the continuation of the Star Wars Cinematic Universe and have had faith in JJ Abrams since day one. Secondly, I'm an annual passholder at Disneyland, yet live some 3,000 miles away. Since Celebration was at Anaheim this year and Star Wars is back in a big way... well, it was an easy decision to spring for this nerdy adventure.
I was lucky enough to get a reserved press seat for today's JJ Abrams/Kathleen Kennedy panel, but a piece of me wishes I could have camped out last night with the hardcores... and not just because Abrams and Kennedy sprang for free pizza for everybody in the line. I very fondly remember the Episode 1 line experience. Two weeks outside one of Austin's lesser theaters to be at the first showing of a new Star Wars movie. That didn't turn out so well, but I'd never trade the sense of community and palpable excitement I got from that line.
This is going to sound like the most privileged sentence ever, but the reason I couldn't camp out is I literally just traveled over 20 hours coming back to the states from New Zealand. I'm getting old and my body couldn't take concrete sleeping after that insane flight.
I'm sure the excitement level amongst those hardest of the hardcore fans would have been amazing, but I can say that upon arriving at the Anaheim Convention Center I wasn't lacking in buzzy atmosphere. The place was electric.
Normally here is where I'd break down the panel discussion and describe the footage, but thanks to the miracle of the internet (and a wise decision on Lucasfilm/Disney's part) they live-streamed both the panel and trailer premiere. I will say that seeing BB-8 roll out on stage live and in person was worth the expense of the trip just by itself.
It makes me wonder if this is a precedent for big events like this. For a long time I've been saying that San Diego Comic-Con should go this route. Ever since I saw how E3 handled their big video game reveal panels, complete with footage, I've been convinced that Comic-Con needed to follow suit.
Now with Star Wars taking up that tact here I don't know how Comic-Con can keep going as they do. You can't get more protective and secretive than Lucasfilm and Abrams with Star Wars and they still managed to wow an entire convention of people plus millions all over the world with their reveals. There is something special about feeling the energy of the room at Comic-Con, but since they have shitty cam leaks of every special piece of footage anyway I can't see the studios not wanting to make a direct and instantaneous world-wide splash in much the same way that The Force Awakens did today.
Right after the panel, still grinning ear to ear and muttering “Chewie, we're home” over and over to myself I made it onto the Celebration show floor and headed toward the Cantina, which is exactly what it sounds like. Starwars.com set up a complete replica of the Mos Eisley Cantina where they had a bunch of livestream programming set up.
I was asked to appear on one of these segments with a few other online type folk to go through the trailer, pausing at key moments and discuss our impressions, thoughts and theories. Some dickhead named JJ Abrams showed up, though, and I was bumped half an hour. On the plus side I got to see Guillermo from the Jimmy Kimmel Show, dressed up as Princess Leia (buns included), interview JJ, which was pretty cool.
When JJ was done he spent a good 10 minutes signing autographs and taking selfies with fans as I mounted the stage with the internet's favorite Devin Faraci, Slashfilm's Peter Sciretta and Big Shiny Robot's Bryan Young and we talked about the trailer, noticed new things (we all kinda freaked out when realized there was a bloody finger trail on Boyega's Stormtrooper helmet) and just kinda geeked out. I'm the handsome sumbitch below. No, the other one. Okay, I'm the guy in green.
Our timing was pretty good, actually. Just as we finished the trailer a bunch of Neo-Stormtroopers appeared on stage and ushered us away. Pretty neat checking those guys out up close, by the way. I dig the new helmet design anyway, but seeing them in person really makes me love them. Both old and fresh... which seems to be the tone from all the marketing on The Force Awakens at this point.
Next stop on my whirlwind day was to check out some early Star Wars Battlefront gameplay footage and... that's embargoed until tomorrow, but I can say I'll be pre-ordering the shit out of that game.
As if all the Star Wars nerdery wasn't enough, I was also able to jump on a shuttle with a select group of lucky-ass press who were taken to Disneyland to watch the big 12 minute presentation of Brad Bird's Tomorrowland.
This footage was being shown in the Magic Eye theater (aka Captain EO theater) and much like Big Hero 6 and Guardians of the Galaxy it will be a fixture there for anybody who bought admission to Disneyland to see.
However it is not open yet. It opens tomorrow for anybody at the park, but today we got to sneak in and get a first glimpse at a huge chunk of footage from Tomorrowland (while actually in the real Tomorrowland to boot).
Before entering the theater we were able to check out some art and stills along the wall where people will queue up. I immediately focused on Disney Parks related imagery that showed a young boy near the It's A Small World attraction at the 1964 World's Fair. The still next to it clearly showed one of the Small World boats and people in period costume.
One thing to mention before I go into the footage: The Magic Eye Theater at Disneyland is like the best Dbox theater ever. The seats thump dramatically, either with the score or events onscreen, water will spray lightly on you, lights will react in time to stuff happening on the screen and the sound is just killer. We got a little bit of all that in this experience.
The bulk of the 12-ish minutes was all following a little boy going to the 1964 World's Fair, lugging a big bag off a bus, through the amazing looking plaza and into a building where he plops it down in front of a stern-looking Hugh Laurie.
I assume this boy is young George Clooney and he has gone all this way to show off one of his inventions. This seems to be an audition of sorts for inventors and a 10 year old boy is out of place amongst all the older tinkerers trying to impress with their wares.
Laurie looks a little surprised to see the kid, but checks out his stuff. The kid unzips red bag and reveals a jetpack made out of his mom's vacuum cleaner.
Young Thomas Robinson gives a great performance here, confidently rattling off engineer mumbojumbo as he affixes parts to the jetpack in front of Laurie. He gets the attention of a girl around his age named Athena (Raffey Cassidy), but loses Laurie's attention when he admits that while the jetpack activates he hasn't gotten it to fully work yet.
We see quick cuts of the kid gearing up and trying out the jetpack and, in a scene reminiscent of The Rocketeer, failing miserably when the jetpack isn't controlled and sends him crashing through farmland. Since we were in the super special Disneyland theater each time the poor kid skipped along the ground or hit a fence we got a thump.
Laurie actually plays this scene a little playful when he could have just as easily been the stern prick in a suit. He clearly doesn't like that the boy captures Athena's attention, though, and he shuts hi down real quick.
Bummed, the kid sits on a bench outside and Athena pays him a visit, telling him to follow her and slipping the boy one of those Tomorrowland pins.
I should note that Athena seemed... off. Intentionally so. I would wager a guess that she's an incredibly lifelike robot or some other manner of inhuman. But she obviously has feelings and is intrigued by this boy.
She leaves with a warning: Follow, but don't get caught.
He sees them board the It's A Small World ride and when he's stopped by a ride operator (in a nice cameo from composer Michael Giacchino) he backs away and secretly jumps a rail and boards an empty boat.
The ride is the same one you know, but there comes a point when a big laser scans him, picks up on the Tomorrowland pin and his boat is stopped. The floor opens up beneath him and his boat takes a big dive and ends up floating in blackness towards a large elevator-sized metal box.
This is his portal to Tomorrowland and when he gets there everything is shrouded in mist. He can see giant robots building skyscrapers in a double-helix pattern and ends up confronting one that is building a walkway. He's accidentally knocked off the path, only to fall onto another platform. His jetpack shatters and just when he starts getting upset about that the big, floating robot appears, picks up the pieces of the jetpack and starts repairing it for him.
This is good because a few scenes later he ends up in a free fall through the fog and uses the now fully functional jetpack to safe his little life.
The feeling of the Tomorrowland stuff totally gave off a Bioshock Infinite vibe and that's a good thing. I have a feeling my favorite part of the movie was what I just saw, but that's because it managed to hit a lot of personal fetishes of mine. Disney Park stuff, period 1960s cool, futuristic yet retro cityscapes, kid-on-an-adventure beats and the thrill of flight. The tone was playful and Bird went for the maximum sense of awe he could (which is quite a lot).
Giacchino's score was outstanding and we got a little montage from later in the movie stuff that was mostly just stuff from the last trailer with Clooney and Britt Robertson.
It's a hell of a great tease, though, and made all the cooler for actually getting to watch it IN Tomorrowland.
I ended my day heading over to Trader Sam's, the sweet-ass Tiki Bar near the Disneyland Hotel, where I caught up with some friends and sipped a fruity drink out of a souvenir shrunken head cup. In other words, it was a hell of a good day. A hell of a good day.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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