For all of you die hard Star Wars fans who think that you have seen all movies in the Star Wars universe, more then likely you have not.
A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, in fact this galaxy.
The 1980 short film was created to accompany The Empire Strikes Back in theaters. It was the directorial debut of Star Wars‘ pioneering set decorator Roger Christian and a special request by the big man himself, George Lucas. After it screened in cinemas, it suddenly vanished.
A popular Lucas-approved short that was in some markets aired in theaters as a companion piece to Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in 1980.
The plot
“Sir Maddox, a knight returning from the Crusades, finds his village and keep destroyed by unknown attackers. Most of the inhabitants are dead, including his family, and the few that did survive have become infected with a disease, possibly the plague. Having left nothing to live for, Sir Maddox decides to track the attackers down and avenge his family and village. In the nearby forest, he stops by a lake, but accidentally falls into it and almost drowns due to the weight of his armor. However, a mysterious beautiful maiden in white appears to him and he is somehow saved. Thankful beyond words, he asks who she is and learns that she’s a prisoner of Black Angel, a mysterious eerie knight in black armor. Sir Maddox immediately vows to free her, but she, saddened, implores him to stay away from the evil knight. His word being his bond, Sir Maddox tracks the ominous Black Angel down anyway with the suspicious help of a strange shady snickering peasant and learns firsthand why the creature is so feared.”
The film was shot at Eilean Donan in Scotland[2] in autumn 1979. The budget of £25,000 was given to Roger Christian by an Eady Scheme fund from the British government.
George Lucas tied the film as a programme with The Empire Strikes Back in the United Kingdom, Australia and Scandinavia. It was never released on any home media, such as VHS and DVD, and for many years the original negatives were believed to be lost.
In December 2011, the 35 mm negative was rediscovered by an archivist at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, California.[1][5][6] On 13 October 2013, it was screened for the first time since its original release, and became available on Netflix and the iTunes Store for streaming and download, respectively, in early 2014.. On 12 May 2015, the film was uploaded to YouTube with an introduction by Christian.
Aside from being physically tied to Empire Strikes Back, Christian used rolls of film left over from Empire to shoot Black Angel,the short film has other similarities to Star Wars, the director says.
Star Wars is supposedly set somewhere in Arthurian times and the crusades. Dark Angel ties in with that.
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When it comes to music, it is very rare that I have to admit “I stand corrected”, especially when it comes to a piece of music I know inside out.
‘Jeff Wayne’s musical version of the War of the Worlds’ is by far my most favourite album in my collection, I actually have a variety of versions of the album. The original vinyl from 1978 and 3 CD versions. The original version on CD, the 2009 live version recorded in Dublin and the 2011 new generation album.
I saw the 30th anniversary show live in Dublin in June 2009 , which I really enjoyed, I was however very disappointed(to use an understatement) that in later years, Justin Hayward would be replaced by Westlife’s Brian McFadden(something I still can’t understand). I did write to Jeff Wayne and asked him to clarify why he replaced a very talented singer and musician with someone who has less talent then my small toe.(I did not use those exact words though.
But before I get side tracked, the blog is about a mistake I made. One of the singles from the original, and subsequent, album is “Forever Autumn” a romantic but yet haunting ballad. The song was played on the radio this week and the presenter mentioned that this song was actually written for a Lego commercial.
I was outraged and said that it was a ridiculous statement. The thought of it, a classic piece of a concept album originally music for Lego. I went on to say, that I am an expert when it comes to that particular album. However after a bit of research(and not even that much research) I discovered that the original melody was indeed written by Wayne in 1969 as a jingle for a Lego radio commercial.
Vigrass and Osborne, the performers of the original jingle, added lyrics to the song and recorded it for their 1972 album Queues. Their version was also released as a single and gained moderate commercial success in Japan, selling more than 100,000 copies and becoming a top-20 hit on the country’s record chart.
Although it pains me, I am a big enough man to admit “I stand corrected”.
Ending the blog with the version we all know and love so well.
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On February 11, 1938 the BBC broadcast the first piece of television science-fiction ever.
A thirty-five-minute adapted extract of the play RUR, written by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek, was broadcast live from the BBC’s Alexandra Palace studios. Concerning a future world in which robots rise up against their human masters, it was the only piece of science fiction to be produced until the BBC television service resumed after the war..
The play introduced the word robot, which displaced older words such as “automaton” or “android” in languages around the world. In an article in Lidové noviny Karel Čapek named his brother Josef as the true inventor of the word.In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters’ lands and is derived from rab, meaning “slave”.
The play had been referenced in several popular TV shows after it’s first broadcast in 1938.
n the Star Trek episode “Requiem for Methuselah”, the android’s name is Rayna Kapec (an anagram, though not a homophone, of Capek)
In Batman: The Animated Series, the scientist that created the HARDAC machine is named Karl Rossum. HARDAC created mechanical replicants to replace existing humans, with the ultimate goal of replacing all humans. One of the robots is seen driving a car with “RUR” as the license plate number.
The 1999 Blake’s 7 radio play The Syndeton Experiment included a character named Dr. Rossum who turned humans into robots.
In the 1977 Doctor Who serial “The Robots of Death”, the robot servants turn on their human masters under the influence of an individual named Taren Capel.
In the 1995 science fiction series The Outer Limits, in the remake of the “I, Robot” episode from the original 1964 series, the business where the robot Adam Link is built is named “Rossum Hall Robotics.
In Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, when Wolff wakes Chalmers, she has been reading a copy of R.U.R. in her bed. This presages the fact that she is later revealed to be an android.
Although the original play was written in 1920 nearly a 100 years later it is still referenced in Sci Fi shows and ganes. Currently a new movie version is in production with a release date in 2019.
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It’s no secret that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are good pals, but perhaps the best demonstration of their friendship is the fact that not even a $40 million bet has been able to come between them.
Star Wars has made creator George Lucas a lot of money over the year. But in 1977, he made a bet with fellow director Steven Spielberg that has wound up costing him over $40,00,000 so far, and all of it going directly into Spielberg’s pocket.
The bet was made when Lucas was visiting Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, before Star Wars: A New Hope came out. Suddenly, the two of them were arguing which movie would do better — but they were arguing for each other’s films. Lucas said CloseEncounterswould make more money, while Spielberg insisted on Star Wars.
So the bet was made: Each of them would give the other 2.5% of their respective stakes in their own film, if it was the most successful. And even though Close Encounters made a whopping $303 million, Star Wars trounced it, making $775 worldwide in 1977 alone.
Since then, Spielberg has continued to get his share from theatrical re-releases, home video sales, and more.Adjusted for inflation, the film has made $1.48 billion at the box office, It is estimated that Spielberg made $40 million.
What’s perhaps most remarkable is that Lucas supposedly actually made good on his bet with Spielberg — and the two have remained friends, teaming up for four Indiana Jones films in the years since the lopsided bet. Of course, the fact that they’re both billionaires may have made the wager a slightly less bitter pill to swallow.
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It is a well known fact that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong -Un has “issues” (to keep it PC).
But this has been running in the family for generations.
In the late 1960s, Kim Jong-il, heir to the North Korean dictatorship at the time, became interested in making propaganda films.
Kim was already deeply fascinated by film. He had even established an underground operation to obtain bootleg copies of international films that were banned in North Korea for his viewing pleasure, expressly against the wishes of his father, national leader Kim Il-sung.
The younger Kim reportedly amassed a library of more than 15,000 titles, particularly enjoying the James Bond and Rambo franchises.
In the 1960s, Kim became fascinated in making films himself. Fortunately for him, it was at that point that his father began to place more responsibility on Kim, who was installed as director of the Motion Picture and Arts Division in the Propaganda and Agitation Department of North Korea.
Kim’s early movies focused on the anti-Japanese struggle of Kim Il-sung and his comrades in Manchuria during the 1930s. While these films helped Kim curry favor with his father, they were unfulfilling for the young movie lover.
He bemoaned that his casts and crew were far inferior in skill to those employed by Western productions and that his employees were unmotivated and lazy.
It was then that Kim began to obsess over Shin Sang-ok, the hottest director/producer in South Korea at the time.
In 1978, Shin had already created more than 60 movies and was well respected in the industry, but his future career was in jeopardy after his studio was shut down by the repressive South Korean government.
Kim believed that Shin was the only director that could save the North Korean movie industry, and began to create a complex plan to capture the director.
Kim lured Shin’s recently divorced wife, South Korean movie star Choi Eun-hee, with a forged message offering her a directing position in Hong Kong. Once there, Kim arranged for the actress to be abducted and brought to North Korea.
As planned by Kim, Shin began searching for his captured ex-wife and traveled to Hong Kong to try to find her, where he was chloroformed and abducted by North Korean agents.
Shin attempted to escape the tyrannical nation multiple times, resulting in him being imprisoned in a North Korean prison camp where he lived on a diet of grass, salt, rice, and ideological indoctrination.
“I experienced the limits of human beings,” Shin wrote of his experience there. After four years of imprisonment, in 1986, Kim was convinced that Shin was ready to start making films, and released Shin and Choi from their confinement and brought them to a meeting.
Shin and Choi had each not known that the other was being held in North Korea and were elated to see each other alive.
The two were brought before Kim, where, in a speech secretly recorded by Choi, he explained his plan for the couple. He wanted them to produce communist propaganda for him and to claim that they had come to North Korea to escape government repression in the South.
Shin agreed to cooperate with the dictator and was immediately put to work directing Kim’s propaganda films. Shin and Choi also remarried, on the recommendation of Kim.
“I hated communism, but I had to pretend to be devoted to it, to escape from this barren republic,” Shin recalls. “It was lunacy.”
While in North Korean captivity, Shin and Choi were showered with gifts and lived in some of the greatest luxury that the country could muster.
Despite this treatment, Shin said that, “To be in Korea living a good life ourselves and enjoying movies while everyone else was not free was not happiness, but agony.”
As a director for North Korean, Shin created seven movies, the most perplexing, as well as the last, of them being the 1986 Godzilla rip-off Pulgasari.
Pulgasari tells the story of an iron-eating Godzilla knock-off molded out of rice and blood by an elderly imprisoned blacksmith. The titular monster’s hunger for iron drives him to overthrow a villainous emperor, but then renders him the villain when he threatens the very resources of the farmers who supported him.
In feudal Korea, during the Goryeo Dynasty, a king controls the land with an iron fist, subjecting the peasantry to misery and starvation. An old blacksmith who was sent to prison for defending his people creates a tiny figurine of a monster by making a doll of rice, and before dying asks the gods of earth and sky to make his creation a living creature that protects the rebels and the oppressed.
When the figurine comes into contact with the blood of the blacksmith’s daughter, the creature springs to life, becoming a giant metal-eating monster who the blacksmith’s daughter names Pulgasari, which is the name of the mythical monster his father used to mention as an eater of iron and steel.
After much suffering, the peasants form an army, storm the palace of the Governor and kill him. The evil King becomes aware that there is a rebellion being planned in the country, and he intends to crush it, but he runs into Pulgasari, who fights with the peasant army to overthrow the corrupt monarchy. After the defeat of the king, Pulgasari attacks the people and eats their tools.
In order to create the special effects for the film, Kim stayed true to his methods and tricked a Japanese special effects team, the one who created the original Godzilla movies, to come to North Korea when they believed they were to work on a film in China.
What they created was a goofy, disjointed film that included a rubber puppet attacking swords and a despotic emperor whose attitude actually bore a resemblance to that of Kim himself. Its anticapitalist message is obscured by its bizarre central character.
Despite these issues, the film was a hit in North Korea, and Kim began looking for foreign distributors for the film so that he could spread his propaganda across the world. He began talks with a distributor in Austria, and later that year, Shin and Choi traveled to Vienna to meet with them.
It was there that the couple would make their escape. With the help of a Japanese movie critic friend, Shin and Choi were able to lose the North Korean agent supervising them and make their way to the American embassy where they were granted political asylum.
This escape outraged Kim, and Pulgasari was pulled from theaters around the country.
Due to this limited release, Pulgasari was virtually unseen outside of North Korea until it was given international release in 1998 in a rare period of greater openness from the North Korean government.
While the filmed bombed at South Korean theaters, it slowly began to gain a cult following worldwide for its eccentricities. Now the film can be found at underground and cult movie theaters around the world.
Somehow, despite how insane this movie can be, its absurdity is continually upstaged by the insanity of its backstory.
Donation
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
History of Sorts 
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