chuck.kahn: April 2005

LORDS OF LIGHT!!!!!

Today marks the ninth anniversary of Thundar The Barbarian's first post on USENET.

Thundar took his (I'm assuming it's not a her) name from the 1980-1984 cartoon series Thundarr the Barbarian and was infamous for his anonymous tirades in alt.video.laserdisc and other groups. His posts even adopted "LORDS OF LIGHT!!!!!" from the cartoon. Although most found him annoying, myself and others couldn't help but be amused by his waayyy out-there rantings. Eventually, he stopped posting and was never to be heard from again.

Happy Birthday Thundar, and if your reading this, think about starting a blog!

"Revenge of the Sith" still not on IMAX DMR roster

On the IMAX website there's a Coming Soon page of upcoming IMAX DMR releases:

Missing from this list is "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith", the final Star Wars film ever, which is being released in theatres May 19, 2005. That's less than a month away. (If you haven't seen it, the trailer can be viewed at starwars.com.)

Here's some background on IMAX DMR from the same website:

"To create the brightness and clarity that audiences have come to expect from The IMAX Experience®, IMAX uses a proprietary computer program to make the images sharper than they were originally, while colors are adjusted for the unique technically superior characteristics of the IMAX screen. The completed re-mastered film is then transferred onto the world's largest film format, 15-perforations 70mm."

So in addition to experiencing the sound presented on an IMAX-quality sound system, your eyeballs get to drink in a huge, highly-detailed, rock-steady picture. Better than what 35mm, 70mm or DLP presentations can deliver.

Past IMAX DMR releases included:

Apollo 13
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Spider-Man 2.
The Polar Express
Robots

Note: All IMAX DMR releases since Apollo 13 and Attack of the Clones have maintained their original length and aspect ratio. Technical limitations in 2002 involving the ability of "reel units" to hold movies longer than 120 minutes were overcome with The Matrix Reloaded.

Back in February of this year, I posed a question to starwars.com's Jedi Council:

I have yet to receive an answer.

Robots was granted a DMR release by 20th Century Fox, the same studio distributing Star Wars. Attached to Robots was the Episode III trailer. So why isn't Episode III on the DMR roster? I don't know. While I try to figure that out, I made a petition: