Short answer: Yes, through critique practice and design patterns. Longer answer follows.
Exactly like this.
Generally, improving my thinking
This is broad, but quite true. After making a practice of looking at interfaces systematically, and putting that critique into words that I can read, and vet, and feel comfortable posting on the frakking internet for anyone to read, I’ve gotten better at it. As a design manager, learning to quickly critique other’s work is invaluable. As a direct contributor, I can bring a more sophisticated real-time critique of my own ideas, which makes the design that much better, even doing pair design.
Apologetics
It would be easy to just rag on sci-fi interfaces. But having to put critiques of them out in the world, I have to understand that they’re created by talented (or at least well-meaning) people and I should seek to understand what they were doing, and even give an interface a thought pass, imagining that they’re not broken, but brilliant. That doesn’t always pay off, but when it does the results are golden. Deep insight that is shareable in fun memetic stories. So I’ve developed apologetics as part of my critiques, and it allows me to see the good in a design rather than just trashing them. Which is a lesson the whole Internet could take to heart, n’est-ce pas?
Better skepticism
I’ve spoken at conferences about the risk in conflating sci-fi interfaces’ cinematic coolness with their real-world goodness. By systematically, pedantically, deconstructing them to understand them, I feel more confident in my ability to not get misled by the cool things I see in movies and TV.
A rich backpack of inspirations
At the same time as I’m building up skepticism, I have to admit that these interfaces are really, really cool. In getting to know the survey intimately, I have a century-wide pool of examples and inspiration to pull from when tackling a new design problem.
Giving me new patterns to work with
Occasionally I’ll run into genuine new patterns (in the Alexander sense) that I can incorporate into my work. Should I need to design a chat feature, I can always remember the Empire and consider a hierarchical display option as seen in the Star Wars volumetric projection interfaces.
But let me give a more concrete answer. Big thoughts often coalesce from many places at once, and my latest book was just that. One major place it came from was an analysis of the HUD in the Firefly pilot, i.e. If the HUD (above) knows where the bad guy is, why does it ask Mal to aim it? It seemed like Hollywood had this conceptual challenge, and then I realized that humans may have, too. We don’t like the thought that computers can do some things better than us, but they can. Then after doing a lot of exploration, realizing they do, and more importantly, in some domains, they should. No one had written a book about it, so I did. And part of it came out of sci-fi.
You may be surprised to note that I don’t get visual ideas from sci-fi. Part of that is I haven’t done visual design for interfaces in about 20 years. Part of it is I really am a function guy at heart. Other people are really vested in the presentation layer (and it’s very important to the success of a given interface) but that’s not me.
***
I realize all this is kind of vague, but without giving away client IP, that’s the most concrete answer I could give, reader. Here’s one for you: Has anything in sci-fi ever influenced your design work? (Comment! Comment!)
Yes, yes, yes! I agree. Way back when I started the blog, I modified a default WordPress theme and even I get frustrated with it sometimes. But I’m better at content than I am at WordPress design, and honestly would rather spend my time doing more writing and creating more reviews than selecting and modifying another template. Is there anyone who wants to volunteer to improve the template or suggest a new one? I’d love it. Email me at chrisscifiinterfaces.com if so.
Alternatively I might could run a kickstarter to see if we can raise the money for a professional WordPress developer to improve things. (This is an idea from another commenter, which I found awesome.) Until then, please comment with the particular problems you find frustrating, and I’ll see if I can incrementally improve those things in the meantime.
I’m a gamer myself, so I’m tempted to venture out. But there’s some stuff to discuss.
Let’s first distinguish between interfaces in cut-scenes, which are very much like the sci-fi interfaces I review here, and the interfaces of the games themselves.
Cut-scene interfaces are very much like the sci-fi interfaces reviewed on this blog. They might be a candidate for reviews. Except they don’t exit in isolation, they’re most often quite tied in with the game-itself interfaces, and those are entirely different beasts. The rest of this post discusses how different those beasts are.
Game-itself interfaces answer to different masters than sci-fi interfaces, even if on the surface they share surface similarities.
They are subject to pressures of usability, but the game is not meant to be perfectly usable. (That would be a button saying “win game.”)
They have to work exhaustively, meaning that if there’s a button it has to do something. sci-fi interfaces often have parts which actors are told work and parts they’re warned won’t.
Makers of sci-fi interfaces often tell the actor to just do their acting thing, and the makers will go back in later and backfill the interface around the actor’s motions. This of course affects the interface. Game-itself interfaces never backfill around users.
Sci-fi interface designers may have had no formal training in interaction design, and more around art and motion graphics. This makes those interfaces a kind of outsider art, which is kind of why they are sometimes brilliant and sometimes shite. (Even as more and more sci-fi interface studios are also doing real-world projects, they are clear about which one they’re working on.)
Game-itself interfaces are limited by the inputs of the gaming system: Keyboard or handheld controller. Sci-fi interfaces have little restrictions.
Sci-fi interfaces only occupy the full screen for at most seconds at a time. Game-itself interfaces are up the whole time during gameplay.
Sci-fi interfaces just always work. Even if the actor does something wrong, the effect that the story needs still happens.
Game-itself interfaces are customizable, so different people will be using different instantiations of the same thing.
Sci-fi interfaces have as their goal to tell the audience something, and can fudge most of the other semiotic layers beneath in the service of that. They mostly convey narrative information. A caused B change. C is happening. D is the intended plan. E is how F is doing this cool thing. The audience never has to use that information except in the service of understanding the story. Game-itself interfaces are about both the knowing and using that information directly.
The reviews would be different: we want to evaluate sci-fi interfaces for being believable, for how they contribute to the narrative, and what we can learn from them. game-itself interfaces would be reviewed for usability, for they equipped you to play the game. Just not the same thing.
So it’s because they are such different beasts, requiring a whole different conceptual framework, that I don’t think it’s right to include them here on this blog. There was a fellow a few years ago who started his own blog about game interface reviews, but I can’t find the blog URL in my inbox, or via search, but anyway I don’t think he was able to keep it up. Maybe he or someone else will be able to pick it up sometime.
But if someone started a blog on this topic (or wrote a nice in-depth article about it), I think it would be informative to analyses here. And heck, space agencies and sci-fi makers should pay attention to the lessons learned there.
Also I’m loathe to give too much attention to reviewing warfare and weapons interfaces. Hollywood already glamorizes war a little too much.
In the free-form answers, I came across some comments that bear a response. In this first post about those, I’ve aggregated a number of them that aren’t likely to need a comment thread associated with them. So here are some quick replies to these one-off comments.
Reader wish: More examples of interfaces, they don’t all have to be talked about exhaustively.
To this I must reply, firmly: No. Big no. Cosmic no. That’s my thing. My niche. It’s the whole brand promise here. If you just want a stream of images to be inspired by, takeyourpick, there are plenty. But for some damned fine reasons, I’m not interested in regurgitating screen caps. In fact the notion of just looking at the surface of these things is antithetical to this blog. I want to discourage drool-gazing (that sort of thing will land us in trouble) and encourage critical thinking. So…sorry, mate. Not going to happen. Your good news is there are other options for you!
Reader frustration: Ending a post with an implied follow-up and then switching to a different movie
Yes. Mea culpa. I am sorry. I know I left the Star Wars Holiday Special dangling for like two years and I still have The Avengers to finish. I tended to make progress on the Holiday Special near Star Wars movie releases. The Avengers is still there, waiting for me, but after that I will try to never do it again…
Reader compliant: Sometimes [the site] misses obscure BTS or frame-by-frame stuff I only know because I have a problem.
Ha. It sounds like you should be a contributor to the blog. (Pssst. Message me via chris[at]scifiinterfaces.com) And if contributing is too much, comment on individual posts. (You’ll have to head to the site if you’re an RSS person.) I would love to refine insights based on all the evidence, including missed details. Please! Let me know!
Reader request: More links to relevant research/thought
I think this is a request to include more references to better published or peer-reviewed thinking on germane subjects. I try to do this anyway, but please help. If you know of a related article that I missed, hop onto the site and post it in the comments.
Reader request: More facts about real world interfaces and solutions
I’ll try to do this, but it also presumes a lot of knowledge on my part. There’s so much software out there that I might not know everything. I try to do it when it’s relevant and I know of it. Similar to relevant research/thought above, if I miss something and you know of something, post it in the comments.
Reader complaint: When the subject clearly hasn’t any thought behind it, Dr Strange for example.
This is alarming, since well-reasoned analysis is the core brand promise here. (See my mini-screed above.) First I must disagree with disparagement of the Doctor Strange posts as an example. Note that it contains 4 posts detailing the thoughts around a magic cape. What’s not thought out there? Thinking is what this blog does.
Please head to the particular blog posts you’re thinking about, and add a comments, describing what you think it missed or how it could be developed more. Or, oh, even better yet, contribute a counter-post and submit it!
I’d love an article about space warfare interfaces. How multiple shows tackled vectors, 3D, prediction etc.
On principle I try not to review warfare interfaces. I get that it might be harmless in the context of computer gaming (I’m a gamer myself) but there’s the risk that I end up improving real-world ways to kill people more efficiently, which I’m loathe to do.
So unless it involves a benign pattern, I don’t plan on including these kinds of analyses. I can see the vague outlines of a counterargument in my head, but I’ll need to be convinced. Maybe it’s an opportunity for someone to start another blog? Maybe scifiwarfareinterfaces.com?
In the meantime, if you’re an RSS reader, know that I try to be good about content tags, so you can read up on non-warfare 3D (volumetric projection), and prediction. Haven’t seen anything about vectors, I think.
There are some posts about melee weapons, though, again, I try to focus analysis in ways that don’t improve their kill-y-ness.
OK. These done, now I’ll dedicate some posts to free-form back that probably does warrant separate comment threads.
33% of readers like that this is content that can’t be found anywhere else.
20% like learning more about interfaces in their favorite shows.
10% like how it sharpens their thinking around interaction design.
20% of people added a response of “all of the above” (the many slices) which is just awesome.
Your wish list
Many people asked for more frequent posts, and I wholly agree, but can’t do much about it. This is a labor of love, not a job, and I’m fitting it in to my schedule amongst work, marketing my new book, working on new stuff, and being a dad. (Wait. You know that I see maybe $5/month from this, right?)
I’d put the amount of work to review an average movie at 60 hours of work between screen cap, writing, formatting, and social medializing. The only chance I have of upping the frequency is to have more time (unlikely) or more authors, and while I have worked with a great team of them, none of them seem to have the time to do more than they already are/have. So, yeah, once/week is about as much as I can wrangle. Glad to know there’s demand?
More advice
Similarly to frequency, there was interest in more advice on which shows to watch. I’m going to presume that’s the report cards at the end of each review. That’s obviously tied to frequency of posts, so is similarly constrained.
More sub-genres
There was interest in more sub-genres (like anime, horror-sci-fi, or comedy) and I’m down for that. I had one author who had expressed interest in starting to cover B-movies, which I loved, but he wound up not having the time. I’ll use the requested shows as an indicator of which sub-genres.
Note though that I don’t feel especially equipped to review anime. (I took a risk with Ghost in the Shell. Anime fans: Did it work?) I feel that to do it right takes some background knowledge of the genre as a whole, the common tropes, sometimes the language, and the culture from which it emerged, and I’m lacking on all those fronts. 🙁 I have an author who is better equipped, but she’s also strapped for spare time. I’ll hit her up and see if she’s interested in going in again on some of the requested shows.
More authors
There were 8% who were expressed interested in different authors. I’m down for having more voices to bring more content and different perspectives to the site. Which leads us to…
Your opportunity/general shout-out
This and nearly all of the above problems could be solved with more contributors, let me put this out there: I am always looking for more authors with whom to collaborate and get more content. It’s not easy (here is the outline of the amount of work it takes) and my time to collaborate/be a thought partner/editor is constrained, but my authors do report it’s fun and rewarding. So, hit me up: chris [at] scifiinterfaces.com
Shows
There was a clear winner in the wish list for new reviews.
The Expanse (5)
Star Trek (3) (Since this was asked before Discovery, I presume this means the whole franchise, not just the new one)
District 9 (2), robot HUD and ship controls
Babylon 5 (2)
Westworld (2) (1 request said particularly as it relates to game design)
Great. A nice list. Some problems with it though.
The Problem of TV Shows
As much work as reviewing movies is, reviewing television shows is at least an order of magnitude more than that. (Black Mirror and similar anthology shows are an exception. Except as of the latest season finale we get that it’s a single diegesis which only goes to prove the point…)
Take an example from Star Trek. To review just one technology from the show thoroughly/confidently across the entire franchise (and here I have to make a shout-out to Quora author Cliff Gilley on this post), I have to watch 546 hours hours of television and movies. That’s 23 days straight without sleeping. Dedicated to viewing, understanding, screen capping as I go, cataloging, thinking about rules and exceptions. Maybe an AI could do it. But I ain’t AI. I did it for combadges, but that was greatly aided by the Memory Alpha wiki, which helped me filter out the shows in which the technology isn’t. Not all shows have that awesome of a wiki behind it.
This doesn’t mean I’m against reviewing TV shows on principle, but holy cow is it daunting when I think of the number of movies I could get reviewed in that same amount of time.
In addition to the daunting work, I usually like to wait for a series to be completed before I attempt to review the interfaces. That’s partly so I don’t have to go back and update analyses to incorporate new interactions that appear later, or refer to interfaces by the when they appear. A post named Teleporter Interface (2015–2017) doesn’t exactly roll across the tongue, keyboard, or the eyes.
I’ve made some exceptions. I have the first drafts of reviews for Firefly around here someplace since I wrote the book, and I just need to wrap up the three ongoing properties before I want to revisit those for publication. And I didn’t wait for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be complete before I started reviewing those movies, so exceptions can be made, I just have to have really good reasons to break the “rules.”
Those particular shows
So with that in mind, I have seen season one of The Expanse. I intend to go back and watch the next seasons. But given the cliff hanger at the end of season 1, I really feel I ought to let that one finish before I review.
With the new trailer for Season 2 of Westworld out, I suspect I should wait for that one, too, though I’m really itching to review that one.
And holy shit Star Trek. Unless I stick to the movies, I could spend the rest of my life reviewing those shows alone, and I’m just not up for it yet. If you want to help start, again: Hit me up.
I loved District 9 and got to include a few of the interfaces for the book, so I have a leg up on that one. Quite possible.
There were a bunch of fun one-off requests as well. Here they are, with any notes by me in [brackets].
Doctor Who [I want to do this especially given the new Doctor, but it has decades of material for me to review. I was last a regular watcher when the Doctor wore a striped scarf (!)]
Person of Interest (particularly seeing all the “inputs” the machine uses and the limited “outputs”) [Oh man me, too. Especially since it ties in to my interest in AI and I loved this show. They had done their homework on ASI and the show was fun and compelling to boot. And the show is over. So I’m down.]
Most readers see the site as a fun distraction, but nearly a third use it as inspiration for their design or sci-fi work. Around 16% just love getting more into the sci-fi they love. Fist bumps, fanpeeps.
Alerts
Seems like half of you subscribe by RSS, 16% by Facebook and 16% by tweet. The RSS news came as lots of added answers, so is that choppy chunk on top. One enterprising reader has set up an IFTTT alert. (Sweet.) The RSS news was an informative surprise. I presumed most folks were receiving alerts via Twitter and Facebook, and click through to the blog. I now should start thinking about the fact that many articles are read without the “chrome” of the blog ever been seen.
Sharing/social
I asked about sharing content as that’s how I have any hope of growing my audience. And for all the time this takes me and the other authors, I’d love to see the audience grow. But you’re only likely to share when the content is particularly awesome, in-depth, or about something that’s always bothered you.
Some folks said they didn’t know I did social media in relation to the site, and that makes sense knowing how many people subscribe by RSS. The social media links are visible on the website. They wouldn’t appear on emails. So, for you RSS readers…
I tweet notifications of new content from @scifiinterfaces. I also post to this (linked) page on Facebook.
Final reviews also get posted to reddit, so if you’re a redditor, there’s lots of related content on the FUI subreddit.
Videos take a massive amount of work, but when I have them, I have a channel on Youtube.
There are also links to Make It So, to t-shirts, and errata from the book that you may have never seen. The tip button folks didn’t know about is at the top-right of every page on the site, but not in the RSS feed.
Some readers reported that they don’t know anyone else with their same interest in sci-fi interfaces, so let me take the chance to recommend the Facebook group and reddit as a place you can get to know other folks with these same interests. Some warning: Nearly all other sites with a similar focus tends to collect examples with very little analysis. But still.
Next up we’ll talk about the important thing, and that’s what you think of the content.
I only asked after time zone, rather than location, which in retrospect was not smart. I was trying to figure when the best time to post was, but now I realize that wasn’t the only use of such information. Too late now. Maybe next year.
Looks like you’re concentrated in the middle of the Americas, and Lisbon/UK time zones. But there’s also readers on the continental-American coasts, Alaska(!), Europe, Southeast Asia, and what I suspect is Melbourne/Sydney. Hey look a chart.
WordPress gives me stats about the readership, too, but only down to the country. It largely agrees with the poll results, but I see that Japan may be happy reading but not so happy responding to polls. (A poll which was, admittedly, written in English.) If I crudely overlay the WordPress map to this map, looks like my anchors are North America, UK & Europe, and Eastern Australia. No surprise. English speaking worlds. (Though, I miss you, Ireland, South Africa, and New Zealand.)
Your jobs
I’m impressed with the breadth of jobs in the poll. We’re a bunch of smarties and creative types.
7 UX
6 Software (not in a design capacity)
6 Visual design for software
3 I make sci-fi interfaces
3 Education
A handful of game designers/developers (and author…) I wish we all lived near each other. We could have a sci-fi game night at someone’s place.
Tabletop Gamer
Game development & Education
Game designer, author, and publisher of Traveler5 materials
Former game developer; working as freelance now
Then an interesting set of one-offs.
Sci-fi writing & editing
Writer
AI programmer for games
Smart spaces/interactive installations
Visual effects (3D environments not sci-fi interfaces)
Management
Aerospace Engineering
Big data
Marketing, but I studied interface / interaction design
Advertising
Software development
Multiple: web design in higher education, art, graphic design on the side
Not related to science [sic]
Your social media
The poll showed a breakout that’s pretty similar to wider trends in the world, though Facebook is less popular than in the wider world and Twitter is more popular amongst you. Also there’s a stronger showing for Google Plus, and some fun one-offs, below.
Seems like most folks heard about the site through an online article. (Was it a particular one? Comment? I owe someone some thanks.) Some of you just went out and found it and some saw a tweet about it. One actually transcribed the URL printed in the related book. Damn. Props.
So that’s who’s out there, roughly where you are, and what you do. Next up we’ll talk about how you use the site.
Last summer, at the 5 year anniversary of the blog, I ran a readership poll. Thanks to everyone who took a few minutes back then to answer it (now closed). I know when I answer a poll I’m always curious about the results. So I presume you are, too. Here ya go.
Crap
First apologies on some aspects of the poll. I should have made some things multiple-choice, but by the time I caught it was too late. Shifting midway through the poll would mean I’d have to divide the results between radio-button and checkbox responses, and that would have been headachey. Next time, next time.
Overview
There were a total of 51 responses.
Overall, looks like me and the other authors are doing pretty good. 8 out of 10. Personally, I’ve always been a solid B+/A- student, so this plays out. 5 responders think the site is near god-like (that or they’re prone to hyperbole) and a couple of folks said we’re doing below average. Sorry, you two. Thanks for sticking with it.
The overview done, I thought my roundup and response to the poll was going to be a simple thing, but I was wrong. Between the aggregated data and the individual responses, it was too much for a single post. Also, I realized that some of my responses might raise some conversation from the group of us at large, which works much better if the post is limited to one concept so the comments don’t get muddled. So I’ll be breaking the results into three bigger posts.
The readership (you)
How the site is used
Your wishlist
Followed by a smattering of one-off comments-and-responses.
This also buys me some time while I’m preparing other material. But you’d guessed that.
Hey readers. One of scifiinterface’s writers, Hugh Fisher, is embarking on a cross-show analysis of speculative 3D file browsers. He first started thinking of it when viewing Hackers and remembering Jurassic Park. What others can you think of? (Yes, we know of Johnny Mnemonic, but it’s 3D cyberspace, not files, innit?)
Please list others you can think of in the comments (which is here for those reading RSS). The more detail you can provide, the better. And thanks in advance!
When The Star Wars Holiday Special aired, it was only one year after the first movie, and while Star Wars was an obvious success at the time, no one knew it was bound to become one of the world’s biggest media juggernauts, which would still be producing blockbuster movies in the same diegesis four decades later (with no end in sight). So we can understand, if not forgive, that it was produced as an afterthought, rather than giving it the full attention and deliberateness we’ve since come to expect from the franchise. In short it was a crass way to keep audiences—and the toy purchasing public—thinking about Star Wars until Empire could be released a year and a half later.
It was doomed from the start. CBS wanted to camp on the movie’s success, and stupidly thought to force-choke it into a variety show format, like The Sonny & Cher Jedi Hour or Donny & Marie, Sith Lords, Variety Show. At the time, Lucas couldn’t be bothered to provide much beyond the framework story and a “Wookiee Bible,” (mentioned here) which explained the background and behavior of the Wookiees, including the fact that they were the center of the story and they can only growl. The first director quit after shooting a few scenes. Other than The Faithful Wookiee, the whole thing seems obviously rushed to production. It had about 30 minutes of script that had to be stretched into 90 minutes of airtime. Though they pulled in some respectable TV names of the time (Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur, Art Carney) to carry the thing and even had the stars of the original cast, those actors couldn’t do much with what amounted to a salad of terrible ideas written by and for goldfish: people pegging the S meter on the Myers-Briggs test.
I’m quite fascinated by the Special partly for its narrative—for there is one, dishwater-flavored though it is—which requires us to be in the narrative and yet out of it at the same time, depending on the need, switching back and forth at a moment’s notice. For instance, you must dismiss the fact that Malla would have any interest in pausing her day for 5 minutes to stare at a security camera feed from inside a shop, because you know the point is the scene in the shop. Or, we dismiss the awkwardness of Itchy watching cross-species VR erotica in the family living room because we know that the point is the Mermeia Wow number. Or, we dismiss the tragic implication that Malla may be mentally challenged, because she takes a comedy cooking skit as literal instructions she should attempt to follow, because we know the point is the “comedy.” But how do we (or the toy-purchasing kids that were the target audience) know which parts to dismiss and which parts to indulge? There are no explicit clues. These are fascinating mental jumps for us to have to make.
It’s also interesting from a sci-fi interfaces point of view because, like most children’s shows, the interfaces are worse than an afterthought. They are created by adults (who don’t understand interaction design) merely to signal high-techn-ess to kids, whom they mistakenly believe aren’t very observant, and they do so under insane budgetary and time constraints. So they half-ass what they can, at best, half-ass, and the result is, well, the interfaces from The Star Wars Holiday Special.
Ordinarily I like to reinforce the notions that what designers are doing in reading this blog is building up a necessary skepticism against sci-fi (and plundering it for great ideas, intentional or otherwise), but in this case I can’t really back that up. What we’re doing here is just staring agape in amazement at what can come out of the illusion machine when everything goes wrong.
But, to compare apples-to-oranges, let’s go through the analysis categories:
Sci: F (0 of 4) How believable are the interfaces?
They are all not just props but obvious props. Straight up tape recorders. Confusing and contradictory user flows. A secret rebel communication device that shrilly…rings. Generally when they are believable, they are very mundane. Like, I’d say the Chef Gourmaand recipe selector or Saun Dann’s final use of the Imperial Comms (which contradicts Malla’s use of the same device.) The Special interfaces break believability all over the place and in terrible ways.
Fi: F (0 of 4) How well do the interfaces inform the narrative of the story?
If I’m being charitable, maaaaaybe some of them help set the tone? The holocircus and cartoon player tell of the gee-whiz high-tech world of this galaxy far far away. But the Groomer, the Jefferson Projection, and the living room masturbation chair are pointless (and unnerving) diversions that distract. Any goodness in Lumpy’s cartoon player is strictly accidental and depend on heavy apologetics. The Life Day orbs have some nice features, but they’re almost extradiegetic, a cinematic conceit. Admittedly the show only gave a nod to a central narrative anyway because of its genre, but it cannot be said that the interfaces inform the narrative.
Interfaces: F (0 of 4) How well do the interfaces equip the characters to achieve their goals?
This is the easiest rating to get, because it’s the thing movies are usually good at. But with the complicated and contradictory flows of the Imperial Comms, “secret” interfaces that rat out the users, extraneous controls and terrible interaction models, these interfaces are a hindrance much more than a help.
I have not had a review at 0 before, so I had to invent the category name. Now if my ratings were recommendations, The Star Wars Holiday Special would get a MUST-SEE, but for cultural reasons. Like, you must see it because otherwise you would not believe it is real. But for inspiration or even skepticism-building, it’s only useful except as a cautionary tale.
For some reason the Special got a lot of attention this past December (c.f. Vanity Fair, Vox, the Nerdist, Newsweek, Mental Floss) which makes me think it was a concentrated stealth push by Disney to coincide with the release of The Last Jedi. Or maybe it’s just other writers, like me, are filled with a kind of psychological wound that the new films always reopen. A fear that we will once again he asked to watch a stormtrooper watch a “holographic” music video with questionable silhouettes.
Whatever their reasons for talking about the Special, for me it serves as a reminder, kind of likeThe Laughing Gnome or perhaps Spider-Man 3, that even the greats occasionally have to overcome massive, embarrassing, WTF mistakes.
And with that, the review is done. I have gone into the Wampa cave and come out alive. Godspeed, Star Wars Holiday Special.
