Showing Tag: "star" (Show all posts)

WILLOW: A STAR WARS STORY?

Posted by John Allen Small on Friday, April 15, 2022, In : Pop Culture 

..So I've been reading about this made-for-streaming series reportedly in the works that is a sequel to the George Lucas-Ron Howard film Willow, and I keep wondering if it will make references to the Lucas-Chris Claremont trilogy of follow-up novels. I personally liked those books a great deal, but I suspect they're now going to be shunted off into non-canon like the Star Wars Legends material.


In any event, an online conversation I started on the subject earlier today brought this response ...


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EINSTEIN, THE JETSONS AND THE VOICE OF WORLD CONTROL...

Posted by John Allen Small on Friday, July 2, 2021, In : Opinion 

“Books, young man, books!”


It’s probably not the sort of thing a lifelong science fiction nerd like Yours Truly ought to be admitting publicly. There are fellow nerds out there who will almost certainly demand that I turn in my old Buck Rogers secret decoder ring and surrender myself for interrogation by Darth Vader’s sinister Death Star probe droid once the news gets out.


I’ll just have to take my chances, I suppose. After all, I’m the guy who years ago got chased out of a Star Tre...


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SIR ALEC GUINNESS: AN APPRECIATION

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, March 3, 2021, In : Tribute 

People have been going on for years about how Alec Guinness hated Star Wars


He didn’t, not really. What he hated was that so many filmgoers who loved his portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi seemed to know him only for that role and were unfamiliar with the long, lengthy career he had enjoyed prior to the 1977 classic.


While Guinness noted in several interviews that he did not really understand the film when it was in production (in a letter to a friend after getting the role, he described the s...


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HERE'S ONE FOR THE GEEKS OUT THERE (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE...)

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, December 12, 2019, In : Pop Culture 


Most fathers and sons, I’ve been led to believe over the years, bond over such things as sports. My sons and I are obviously cut from very different cloth, indeed…


I can’t remember now exactly how the subject first came up but, during an unexpected mutual lull in our daily responsibilities at the newspaper office recently, my son Josh and I found ourselves talking about crossover fiction. At one point Josh got to talking about how Star Trek has (at least in the comic books) crossed ove...


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THAT SENSE OF WONDER...

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, August 14, 2019, In : Reminiscence 

In spite of the fact that I was a mere 3 years old when it debuted in 1966, Star Trek is one of a small handful of TV shows that I can actually remember watching while on my daddy’s knee back during their original airings. (The others I remember from that era include Batman, The Green Hornet, Ron Ely’s Tarzan, Get Smart and, believe it or not, Mission: Impossible.) For that reason, I feel I am justified in considering myself to be a first-generation Trek fan; I may not have understood mos...


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Fandom, Disney Is Killing "Star Wars"

Posted by John Allen Small on Tuesday, June 12, 2018, In : Pop Culture 

In one of the better-known installments of the Peanuts comic strip, Linus makes the following observation during a conversation with Charlie Brown: “I love mankind—it’s people I can’t stand!!”


I'm starting to feel much the same way with regards to Star Wars. I still love George Lucas' creation - it's the fans and the new distributor I'm learning to hate.


I just read an article stating that Solo: A Star Wars Story may end up being the first Star Wars movie to lose money, and that R...


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SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (A Fan's Review)

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, May 30, 2018, In : Pop Culture 


Hadn't had the time to do this before today, due to deadline pressures at my day job and other obligations, so I’d like to take a moment to share my thoughts regarding  Solo: A Star Wars Story.


WHAT I LIKED: Pretty much everything, despite my initial misgivings about the project. Alden Ehrenreich actually did a pretty fair job of channeling Harrison Ford as the title character (Ford has made similar comments himself in a couple of interviews I’ve read), and Donald Glover made a better Land...


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May The FIRST Be With You...

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, May 2, 2018, In : History 

Something occurred to me the other day, as I was trying to wash the bad residue of the day’s national news cycle from my psyche by going back to the stuff I loved as a kid…


George Lucas (or maybe it was Alan Dean Foster) predicted the rise of Donald Trump.


Way back in December of 1976, roughly six months before the movie actually debuted in theaters, Ballantine/Del Rey Books released the novelization of the film Star Wars. The book carried the byline of the film’s writer-director, Geo...


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HAN SOLO: A LITERARY CHRONOLOGY

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, July 29, 2015, In : Pop Culture 

Here's something I promised Win Eckert I would post when I got home, following a discussion on the topic that we had at his house during our recent visit... 


During the first wave of Star Wars prose fiction that began with Del Rey’s publication of Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye in 1978, L. Neil Smith’s Lando Calrissian trilogy (which takes places prior to Han Solo’s ownership of the Millennium Falcon) represented the earliest chronological adventures in the series; t...


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PIC O' THE DAY

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, May 30, 2013, In : Pictures 
An unused ad concept for the original release of Star Wars back in 1977. I rather like it myself... although I wish they would have included John Carter as well as Buck and Flash, since he predated them all. Oh, well, nobody ever asks my advice on these things...
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THANK YOU, MR. LUCAS

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, June 7, 2012, In : Pop Culture 
(The Town Cinema theatre, Kankakee, Illinois, June 1977)


As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, it was 35 years ago this week that a trip to one of the local movie houses where I lived had an unexpectedly profound impact upon my imagination – and, indeed, upon my life.


The movie in question had actually opened in other cities a couple of weeks earlier; between that time and the day it finally arrived at the old Town Cinema theatre in Kankakee. Illinois, I had seen a number of news rep...


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SOMETHING FROM THE ARCHIVES...

Posted by John Allen Small on Friday, January 13, 2012, In : Pictures 

Was going through some old computer discs the other night looking for some old notes for a fiction piece I've been working on when i came across this old picture of my son William I put together in Photoshop a number of years ago. Gee, he was a cute kid at that age...
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I WOULD HAVE GONE TO SEE IT...

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, November 17, 2011, In : Pictures 

Between my job at the newspaper and being busy trying to complete a fiction story I'd been invited to write for an upcoming anthology I haven't had much time to even think about this blog here of late. But I didn't realize how long it had been until I got a message this morning asking "Why no new posts?" So I thought I'd pop in just long enough to let the 3 or 4 who pay attention to this blog know I'm still here, and to share another of my fantasy movie posters. This is one I did back in 2003...
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More Dream Covers: View-Master Packaging

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, September 14, 2011, In : Pictures 


This was another experiment in creating my own covers from a few years back: in this case not a book or magazine or comic book cover, but the package art for a fictional Talking View-Master set from the 1970s. (Remember those?) Again, a silly little thing I did on Photoshop but I've still got a soft spot for this sort of thing.

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MORE TREK: THE EUGENICS WARS

Posted by John Allen Small on Friday, June 24, 2011, In : Pop Culture 


As long as we're on the subject of "Star Trek," let me begin by stating that there's a story behind the above illustration...


Back in 2000, as much for my own amusement as anything else, I wrote an essay entitled "The Eugenics War Declassified," in which I attempted to explain how the Eugenic Wars first mentioned in a 1966 "Star Trek" episode could have still occurred given what had actually transpired historically during the intervening years. As a fan of Philip José Farmer and his Wold Ne...


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"ALL RIGHT... WHO CALLED ME A TREKKIE?"

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, June 23, 2011, In : Pop Culture 


 (Note: The above picture is my son William standing in front of the original model of the USS Enterprise at the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum during or visit to Washington D.C. in 2009)



 

“I didn’t know you were a Trekkie, Small.”


The comment was made by my boss one day a number of years ago as he happened to overhear a conversation I was having with a co-worker. We were talking about the film “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” which I found (and still find) to...


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Pic Of The Day

Posted by John Allen Small on Tuesday, May 31, 2011, In : Pictures 
Following my good buddy Win Eckert's example, I thought every now and again I'd post some picture that I feel worth sharing. We'll start with this thing I did a while back while fooling around on Photoshop trying to keep myself entertained...
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About Me


John Allen Small John A. Small is an award-winning newspaper journalist, columnist and broadcaster whose work has been honored by the Oklahoma Press Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press, the National Newspaper Association, and the Oklahoma Education Association. He and his wife Melissa were married in 1986; they have two sons, Joshua Orrin (born 1991) and William Ian (born 1996). Mr. Small is the News Editor and columnist for the Johnston County Capital-Democrat, a weekly newspaper headquartered in Tishomingo, OK. He obtained his nickname, "Bard of the Lesser Boulevards," from a journalism colleague - the late Phil Byrum - in recognition of the success of his popular newspaper column, "Small Talk." (In addition to the many awards the column itself has received over the years, a radio version of "Small Talk" earned an award for "Best Small Market Commentary" from the Society of Professional Journalists in 1998.) John was born in Oklahoma City in 1963; lived in the Bradley-Bourbonnais-Kankakee area of Illinois for most of the next 28 years (with brief sojourns in Texas and Athens, Greece, thrown in to break up the monotony); then returned to his native state in 1991, where he currently resides in the Tishomingo/Ravia area. He graduated from Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School in 1981, and received his bachelor's degree in journalism from Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais in 1991. The years between high school and college were a period frought with numerous exploits and misadventures, some of which have become the stuff of legend; nobody was hurt along the way, however, which should count for something. In addition to his professional career as a journalist he has published two short story collections: "Days Gone By: Legends And Tales Of Sipokni West" (2007), a collection of western stories; and "Something In The Air" (2011), a more eclectic collection. He was also a contributor to the 2005 Locus Award-nominated science fiction anthology "Myths For The Modern Age: Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton Universe," edited by Win Scott Eckert. In additon he has written a stage play and a self-published cookbook; served as project editor for a book about the JFK assassination entitled "The Men On The Sixth Floor"; and has either published or posted on the Internet a number of essays, stories and poems. He has also won writing awards from the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the National Library of Poetry. He is a past president of the Johnston County Chamber of Commerce in Tishomingo; was a charter member and past president of the Johnston County Reading Council, the local literacy advocacy and "friends of the library" organization; served as Johnston County's first-ever Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator in 1994-95; served two terms as chairman of the Johnston County (OK) Democratic Party; and has taught journalism classes for local Boy Scout Merit Badge Fairs. He is a member of the New Wold Newton Meteorics Society.

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