May the Fourth Be With You!

Issue #15: And also with you...

Hello there folks! Happy Star Wars Day!

This week’s issue isn’t going to be as long as normal. I don’t have a lot to say but I felt like I really needed to get one of these out to celebrate one of my favorite holidays.

Star Wars is a big part of my life (if you don’t already know that). My journey into Star Wars started in 1980 when I went to the theater to see The Empire Strikes Back. It was the first Star Wars movie that I saw in the theater (I was only 4 years old when the original film came out and I was living in Germany so I don’t remember knowing anything about it). Now, here we are, 42 years later and I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t like Star Wars. I have (obviously) watched all the movies (multiple times). I have watched all of the TV shows. I have read many of the books. On that note, I’d like to give a shout out to Dave Brown for giving me the first Star Wars novel that got me started reading the books. That book, by the way, was Vector Prime. I’ve also played a large amount of the Star Wars video games as well as many different variations of the tabletop role playing games. In 2019, I traveled to Chicago to go to my first (and hopefully not last) Star Wars Celebration convention. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make Celebration this year in Anaheim due to my impending relocation. And a couple of years I started up a Star Wars themed podcast. Granted, we talk about more than Star Wars on the show now but Star Wars is our main focus.

My point being, I love Stars in all its shapes and forms.

So with that, I bid you another Happy Star Wars Day! May the Fourth Be With You all!

This week’s list is, naturally, Star Wars related. This is a list of my top 3 (that’s right, I’m only doing 3 this week) favorite Star Wars films.

1. Rogue One - This has been my favorite Star Wars film ever since I saw in that first time in the theater. I loved seeing the story about the war itself from a different perspective. Different from the Skywalker perspective that is. I loved the rogue (no pun intended) elements of the film. The cast was incredible, especially Forest Whitaker as one of my favorite Star Wars characters: Saw Gerrera. The rest of the case was amazing as well. I just love this film so much. So much, in fact, that I named my podcast after it.

2. The Empire Strikes Back - This 2nd entry in the original trilogy is only slightly beat out by Rogue One. This one holds a lot of sentimental value for me. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first one I saw in the theater. The action sequences in this films were so great. The story was great. We see the first encounter between father and son. We see Yoda for the first time. We see Boba Fett for the first time. Just a great film.

3. Revenge of the Sith - the prequel trilogy gets a lot of flack but this final episode in the prequel trilogy has so much going for it. We get to see the fall of Anakin that we had heard so much about in the original trilogy. We see how the Republic becomes the Empire. We see why and how the Jedi Order basically died out.

Rogue One Radio

On this week’s episode of Rogue One Radio, we did a recap of episode 5 of the Disney Plus MCU series Moon Knight. We also played tunes from The Venomous Pinks and No Matter. You can check out the episode on YouTube here:

For this week’s track, I went with a Jawbreaker song. I was reminded earlier (thanks Justin) that, not only is it Star Wars Day, it is also Jawbreaker Day. This is actually probably one of my favorite songs from the Dear You album.

That’s it for this week! Have a great day, a great week, and remember to Be More Kind!