Star Wars Day 2024 Celebrated With Videogames, Movie Marathons, Cartoons, and Mark Hamill

"It all started with the fans," says 72-year-old actor Mark Hamill, in a montage of fans and actors in a newly-released video commemorating this year's Star Wars day.

Or, as Tom's Guide writes, "It's such a nice feeling to be a part of a huge community since fans are the ones who created this special day (by using "may the force be with you" as a pun for the date we all look forward to every year)." Lucasfilm and its owner Disney approved of this occasion, and now, we hold both official and unofficial celebrations to honor the beloved franchise... There are plenty of Star Wars Day deals to shop, movies, and TV shows that you can be a part of this year... [The new animated series] Star Wars: Tales of the Empire will explore the dark side of the galaxy by focusing on two warriors navigating the Galactic Empire... Stream Tales of the Empire on Disney Plus starting May 4.
But there's more. Friday the official Star Wars site wrote that this Star Wars Day "is a big one for gamers." This weekend will see the release of a free Zynga game by Nintendo called Star Wars: Hunters on iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch, while the game Brawlhalla will add Darth Maul as a playable character for the next three weeks. There's also an upgrade to "vehicular soccer" game Rocket League which enables the unlocking of Star Wars-themed items like Anakin's Podracer Decal and the Darth Maul Decal.

There's also discounts on games like EA's Star Wars Triple Bundle, Star Wars Battlefront II, and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, as well as discounts on games with Star Wars-themed content like Minecraft and The Sims 4. And the franchise has even "returned to Fortnite, "bringing a new collection of Star Wars content to the popular game, including LEGO® Fortnite, Battle Royale, Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival." There's more discounts on Star Wars-themed merchandise at Amazon and Macy's, as well as on books from Abrams Book and Chronicle books. In fact, there's special offers from a whole alphabet's worth of major brands including American Tourister luggage, Box Lunch, Corkcircle, Dark Horse... and even Hallmark, Target, and Walmart.

But ultimately the day is a celebration of the movies that fans have loved for 47 years, writes Tom's Guide: Lucasfilm announced that on May 4th you can experience the entire Skywalker saga in movie theaters. This includes all nine episodic films in chronological order.
The site also points out that two new Star Wars series will be premiering later this year. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is an eight-episode seriues "focuses on four children who go on an adventure while making their way home across a dangerous galaxy. Accompanying them is a force user (who will be played by Jude Law)." And Star Wars: The Acolyte (set in a new time period, the Jedi glory days before the Skywalker saga) begins streaming on Disney Plus June 4. (Fans will get a preview of The Acolyte at 25th-anniversary screenings of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace happening now.)

And the site even makes one last geeky suggestion for those who don't feel like going out this year: The official Star Wars website has released some unique and fun recipes you can make when May 4th rolls around. This includes a Chandrilan Squigs recipe inspired by Mon Mothma and even a Bad Batch of cookies you can decorate to your liking.

Seriously?

[Chess_the_cat]

Are people still holding onto this crap? There were two good movies 40 years ago. Not great; good. Every last ounce of joy has been wrung out of them. Please let it die. For the sake of our landfills bursting with plastic Star Wars crap at the least.

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

It's since evolved into a full-on marketing blitz to promote the "culture" of consuming Disney products.

Re:Seriously?

[Zarhan]

Yeah right. Let's face it, the Star Wars is part of western storytelling universe, and of course haters are gonna hate. Just let it be if you can't stand it.

Original trilogy that started it all: 3 movies full of action, with princesses, heroes, one of the most legendary villains of all time (who gets redemption at the end) and Cool Swords, what's not to like?

After that we have had both lemons (Ewoks, Holiday Special, Phantom Menace, whatever the movie 8 was) and excellent installments (Rogue One, Andor, Mandalorian). Not to mention other media: Lucasarts X-Wing, Tie Fighter and X-Wing alliance were one of the best space shooters (not gonna call them sims) of all time. I just replayed XWA with the Upgrade Mod (https://xwaupgrade.com/) and it's *still* excellent. Even the animations (Clone Wars, Rebels) have been quite ok, even if their target audience is on the younger side.

However, looking at trendlines, there has not really been anything in the past 5 years or so, since Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau took over. Every damn thing that has come out has been at the very least ok. Mandalorian started the renaissance, and goddarn *all* of the miniseries since then (Obi-wan, Boba Fett, Ashoka, Andor) have been at the very least ok, and Andor has been the best Star Wars since Empire Strikes Back. So if anything, Star Wars has been making a strong comeback, without any signs of fading away.

Don't pay for Disney+ if you don't care for it. Personally I'm just going to enjoy this ride as long as it lasts.

Re:

[war4peace]

Rogue One is a great movie, I'll give you that.
Mandalorian started OK (not great, but OK), then lost its way. Season 3 was very underwhelming.
Andor was good, but I'm not holding my breath. Let's see what Season 2 brings.
Obi-Wan was crap. Ahsoka (not Ashoka, by the way) was crappier. I haven't watched Boba Fett, no opinion there.
And I openly admit I'm too old, mentally, to enjoy the animations.

If anything, the Star Wars francize could be characterized as "inconsistent". It's like that sadistic father who car

Re: Seriously?

[LindleyF]

I'm 41. I just watched The Clone Wars and Rebels straight through for the first time. Took a while because there's a LOT of it; but that's what streaming is for. Quality varies in TCW but overall it's worth seeing. Very strong finish. Rebels was more consistently good. Definitely worth seeing. As for Ahsoka, it had pacing problems but worked as the live-action-for-some-reason Season 5 of Rebels. Those who didn't watch Rebels would have less reason to care.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

They really don't seem to know what to do with Ahsoka as an adult. I guess they don't want her to do anything too interesting as it would screw up continuity, but she made basically no difference to anything in her TV show. She might as well not have been there.

Maybe part of the problem is that Mark Hamill is getting on now, and it's expensive to employ and digitally de-age him for too many scenes. There is an obvious conflict there - Luke trying to rebuild the Jedi Order, Ahsoka having seen how flawed it w

Re: Seriously?

[LindleyF]

The structure of the show didn't allow her to succeed. The whole thing was built around Thrawn's return, which means narratively....he has to return. That doesn't leave a lot of room for hero agency. Perhaps that was a mistake by the writers. But, it does perhaps match thematically with Ahsoka's uncertainty over her role in things.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Thrawn was pretty disappointing too. After all the hype he turned out to be another boring Nazi caricature.

Re: Seriously?

[LindleyF]

I enjoyed Thrawn's portrayal on Rebels. It's close enough to what I imagined. I think it's the same actor in live action. But, he really hasn't done much yet. We'll see how he is in The Mandalorian and Grogu.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Andor was in the last 5 years... I think the thing is, even the original trilogy isn't quite as good as nostalgia and mythology suggests. They are fun movies, sure, but the level they have been hyped up to is unjustified.

Because of that, nothing will ever compare to them and fans who think that way will always be disappointed. I'm not saying there haven't been some really terrible SW shows lately, e.g. Boba Fett and everything past season 1 of The Mandalorian, but they can't seem to enjoy any of it because

Re:

[Baron_Yam]

>even the original trilogy isn't quite as good as nostalgia and mythology suggests.

As someone who was there at the time... the original movies were very good for the time. They were novel takes on the space movie genre, the special effects were next-level, etc. Sure, the dialog stank but you didn't notice on first viewing. They were well done, light fun. We have much better special effects now and Star Wars has influenced a half century of movies in its wake - this makes the original movies a lot less

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I think that's the essence of it, yes. For the time they were pretty good, but now we can't be wowed by VFX so much (although Star Trek is looking pretty spectacular these days) the writing needs to be a lot better. Disney doesn't seem to understand that, or is incapable of reliably making it happen. Andor seems more like a fluke than intentionally brilliant, at least at the corporate level.

Empire is good despite itself. Lucas decided he wanted the movies to be even more kid friendly, e.g. he changed the wa

Re:

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

I know three grown people who still want to have sex with the princess from the first movie. I think all of them know the actress died. One's a woman with three kids.

Weinstein's Legacy

[Kunedog]

And Star Wars: The Acolyte [youtube.com] (set in a new time period, the Jedi glory days before the Skywalker saga) begins streaming on Disney Plus June 4.

From the comments, I see it's almost cracked 700K dislikes out of 10M views. That level of anticipation might be unprecedented.

To be clear

[Slashythenkilly]

Mark Hamill has done nothing but shit on the new movies and the direction Disney has taken the franchise. He also had disagreements with Lucas about his character but all that ended in 1983 and that fanbase. The prequels defined the next generation of fans and abandoned most of what Star Wars was about for the ones anticipating them for 16 years. Lucas even abandoned his original trilogy fans with piss poor editing, horrible CGI, and script changes that were permanently integrated. Now we have the neutured Disneyfied movies which are marketed purely for kids on every possible medium and all thats left is a name of a promising 40 year old legacy which will never be fulfilled. Lucas is the idea guy that got the story off the ground but it was the people around him that made it successful through proper storytelling. This lack of creative influence is very clear in the prequels which no sense and are practically unwatchable now. All Disney cares about is dollar signs so whatever elements are needed to draw audiences are put in but the characters, the stories, and any creative human element are absent, drawing only on the past. Watch any other Disney franchise to see the same pattern of destruction

Re:

[Baron_Yam]

I disagree - Disney did what Disney does, they took an existing IP (sometimes their own) and then started raping the hell out of that nearly-dead equine. We're up to Land Before Time 53 now, aren't we? The quality keeps going down and Disney keeps cranking them out as long as there is a penny left to be made. This will be Star Wars.

But despite the majority of the movies (I maintain that Rogue One was a very good movie, though I think Disney was just the distributor on that), the TV shows have been a mixe

Re:

[Swervin]

Not to be a pedant, but Land Before Time isn't owned by Disney, it's currently owned by Universal Pictures. But the point stands, this is an industry wide thing.

Re:

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

If the first movie was done the way Lucas wanted it, most of us here would never heard of it.

Lucas is a talentless hack who got extremely lucky that he had a very capable producer and very good crew.

And that he kept the rights for the toys.

Moviemaking 101

[JBMcB]

How to make a good movie:

A director or writer has an idea for a movie. They get a studio to fund it and they go make their movie.

How to make a bad movie:

A big studio gets bought out by an even bigger studio for it's IP. The bigger studio convenes a panel to look for directors to make... something... with the IP they just bought. They lure a director with an enormous amount of money to make a moving using that IP. They have no idea what they are going to make, but there are going to be three films and it's g

Re:

[Baron_Yam]

I think you can still work within the framework of the 'bad movie' option.

That is, buy the IP and then apply the skin to something else. At their hearts, Rogue One, Andor, and Mandalorian are not Star Wars - they're stories told in the Star Wars setting.

So far as I can tell, Star Wars only has one story of it's own, and that's "Skywalkers are magically special and they're going to jerk the galaxy around in all directions and feel really strongly about it as they do so... and one Skywalker will blow up some

Re:

[JBMcB]

At their hearts, Rogue One, Andor, and Mandalorian are not Star Wars - they're stories told in the Star Wars setting.

I'm not sure how Rogue One or Andor came about, but the Mandalorian was pitched as an idea by Jon Favreau. The studio financed it, and, from what I understand, let him do pretty much whatever he wanted. Et viola, an excellent space-western set in the Star Wars universe.

The Book of Boba Fett was made because the Mandalorian was popular and it was decided to make more Star Wars stuff. Not because anyone had a neat idea for a story or a plot, but because more Star Wars stuff was needed.

Today's my birthday

[HBI]

I'm tired of hearing about the fourth being with me. F Star Wars.

I mean the movies were ok but i'm tired of hearing about it. Really.

meh! its starwars meh!

[Growlley]

The only suprise is Disney hasn't killed it yet.

5/4

[kqc7011]

It is actually Dave Brubeck day.

expected

[argStyopa]

As Disney has woke-slammed the beloved franchise into the dust regain and again, we can probably expect their promotion of whatever can resuscitate fans interest to reach hyperbolic levels.

I mean, it's probably easier than saying "we were wrong, sorry. We didn't realize you just wanted an adventure series and not a sermon" (shrug)