May The Fourth Be With You

Today is International Star Wars Day. Ep. IV was released in 1977, albeit on May 25th, not May 4th.

I was an idiot college student at UC Berkeley back then. I remember me and one of my geeky friends (I would never have heard of the movie if not for him) catching the BART train to the one theater in San Francisco where it was playing. Paid $2.50 for a matinee ticket. I was awestruck. Next day, I grabbed a bunch of my friends and I saw it again with them.

You know what else happened on May 4th? On May 4th, 1979, Margaret Thostaer became Prime Minister of Great Britain. And feminists all over the world danced madly in celebration of this glorious advance in women's rights. The world-wide celebrations lasted for at least a fortnight.

No, not really.

You know what else happened on May 4th? On May 4th, 1985, I was wedded to the lovely and gracious Mrs. Muse. Yes, that's right, she has been putting up with me for 32 years.

On one of his early albums (Orange), Al Stewart has a song called 'Night of the 4th of May' wherein the narrator recounts how he and his girlfriend decide to have an "open relationship" which, get this, destroys their relationship completely.

If you're a Star wars Fan and are old enough to remember the classic Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, you owe it to yourself to take 45 minutes out of your life and watch the "Princess Leia's Stolen Death Star Plans' videos linked to in the sidebar. It is a work of near genius. What the guy did was to take Star Wars Ep. IV, cut it up into 13 chunks, and rewrite the lyrics of each of the 13 songs on the Sgt. Pepper's album to tell the Star Wars Story. And it is just remarkable how he got the movie to fit thematically with the music of each of the songs, and in the same order as the songs appear on the original album. For example: Album cut #6 is "She's Leaving Home", which is about a young girl running away from home to be with her boyfriend and her parents don't understand, and this gets reworked into "He's Leaving Home". This is the segment where Luke rushes back home only to see the charred corpses of his aunt and uncle, and he knows, if he didn't before, that there is nothing left for him on Tatooine so he needs to leave the only home he has ever known.

As I said, if you're familiar with the Sgt. Pepper's album, you won't regret watching these videos in order.

Link here to the first of thirteen.

Update: Thank you morons for posting the Triumph the Insult Conic Dog Star Wars bit. It's hilarious.

posted by OregonMuse at 11:22 AM

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