Star Wars Celebration Watch – Will We See A Trailer For Episode 8?
Star Wars Celebration is only 68 days away, and speculation on the event that is finally returning to Orlando is already heating up!
The last time Celebration inhabited the famous Orange County Convention center in Sunny Florida, Star Wars was in a much different place than it was now. 2012 saw many changes for the franchise, with the much-maligned release of the Star Wars Kinect video game (which included a now-laughable dance mode) and the announcement of a Seth Green led cartoon that was (thankfully) never released called Star Wars Detours. (For those that don’t know, Star Wars Detours was a cartoon skit show where various Star Wars characters would interact in ways you’d never expect, such as the Emperor pocket-dialing a tabloid and Obi-Wan Kenobi using the force to hit on a young woman.)
Seriously… it was bad.
The Star Wars franchise was in a dark place that summer, but stars such as Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid and Mark “Luke Skywalker” Hamill himself showed up, and so did the fans.
Right down the road from Celebration, at Disney’s Hollywood Studios had just celebrated Star Wars Weekends. This event at Disney World “celebrated” Star Wars culture with photo ops of Disney characters dressed as Star Wars characters, and culminated in a Hyperspace Hoopla Live Dance Show where the Emperor rapped along to “Mama said Knock you Out”, Vader did a Michael Jackson impression and Chewbacca and Padme gyrated to “I’m Sexy and I Know It”.
Seriously… It was bad.
To say the Star Wars franchise was in a dark place was putting it lightly. Revenge of the Sith had been released 5 years priot, George Lucas himself had all but called off the idea of anymore movies and fans thought the film franchise was completed. Forever.
So, where would the savior come from? Who would be the Luke Skywalker to lift the sunglasses of silly games, T.V. cartoons and horrible dance-offs? In October that year Disney would buy the entire franchise. Disney, the same company responsible for much of the camp and silliness through licensing themselves, and fans were understandably worried.
However, Disney did things differently. They knew they wanted to create new movies, and it order to do so they had to get Star Wars back to it’s roots. Slowly the camp started to disappear. There was no sequel to the Kinect game, Star Wars Weekends were cancelled as soon as the theme park expansions were announced, and Detours was shelved. Forever.
Then came The Force Awakens, a metaphor not just for Rey and Kylo but Star Wars as a franchise – Star Wars gritty and dark again, and fans rejoiced.
April 13th, 2017 Star Wars Celebration returns to Orlando, the first such event in Florida since the Disney purchase. The Theme Park connection is already there even as Disney builds there new expansion and fans that travel to one this April will likely go to the other.
So what can we expect from Celebration this year? A trailer. While The Force Awaken’s teaser trailer was more than a year before it’s release, Rogue One’s first teaser released in April for the December release.
The same timetable exists for “The Last Jedi.”