
I'm in the process of writing down every thing that happened to me at C4. From first walking into the building to leaving the airport. there will be pictures galore. It should be a while before I post Thursday's epic adventures so hang on.
Here's a full piece of the action. this is just one and a half hours of my time at C4 on Saturday May 26, 2007 10:30am-12:00pm At the Behind the Scenes stage in room 503AB for the Continuity Panel(Keep in mind that this is a rough cut)
When we finally reached the Behind the Scenes stage we got to walk right into the room and still ended up in the front row (number 4 maybe). The panelists (right to left) Pablo Hidalgo (MC), J.W. Rinzler(Lucas Licensing/Editorial[ I later figured this out myself]), Leeland Chee(Keeper of the Holocron), Sue Rostoni(Lucas Books/ Editorial),Jacob Bronstine(Audio man[Came in late and scooted in between Sue and Shelly]), Shelly Shapiro(Del Ray/Editorial), Some guy from Lucas books that I have no idea who he was, and Randy Stradly from Dark Horse comics as an Editor.
First Pablo asked everyone to introduce him or herself. The Pablo showed a slideshow of the 31 years of continuity; the first book was the movie novelization that came out in December of '76. The slideshow consisted of images of book covers from Junior novelizations to comics to the Clone wars to foreign book covers. One of the odd things was that Lucas Film had done a Grateful Dead, (yes the band) comic series. I being not of that era knew nothing of the band's legacy. Latter on during the slide show they released the name of the last LoTF novel, Invincible. At first I was disappointed since then it has begun to grow on me. One of the things they talked about was Pronunciation. Jacob Bronstine said that they had a special pronunciation guide for many words. J.W. Rinzler said "Sometimes George changes pronunciation. We say it depends on which coffee he's had."
Unfortunately Pablo Hidalgo announced that the What's the Story portion of Starwars.com is coming to a close in 2007. But there will be something where fans can somehow contribute to the EU.
Leeland Chee unveiled the Holocron. It turned out to be Microsoft Access, a large depository of knowledge kind of like a combination of Microsoft Excel and Publisher. You can move boxes around to fit what you want and where you want them to go.
One person begged to see a part of the holocron and since Leeland couldn't let us see anything unreleased he showed us the entry for Jaxxon. People laughed and he showed us all of the different parts of the database. It turns out the continuity is more than just G-N. Each has 4 levels of canon inside of that level of canon: 1,2,3, and 4. Jaxxon was a level 2, S canon character. Leeland commented that he used to be a one but since he was mentioned in some higher canon sources, (i.e. SW Gamer) he got elevated to a 2. Shelly made some comment about how the fan's should let him have a higher canonicity.
At one point Pablo to say how he and a group of people discuss hard continuity questions. The one he mentioned was how Luke seamed to have been trained by Yoda for a long period of time when the Flacon got to Cloud City in a short amount of time. He stated that this was never going to become continuity so don't think of it as if it was. Chuckling he stated his theory that since the Falcon's hyperdrive was faulty the time-space-continuum had been messed up. Where the passengers aboard the Falcon experienced two weeks of travel Luke had six months of training on Dagobah. He joked that now Luke can say that he's older than Leia by a couple of months.
They then began having a Q&A. Somewhere during this my dad left to go someplace, the C4 store I think. One of the questions was answered by the unnamed guy from Lucas books. He said that there would be a 3-D Galaxy map coming out sometime next year. I went up to ask a question and happened to be the last person in line. I got right behind Doug Brag(SP?) and said hello to him. One guy probably four or five people ahead of me asked a question about the cancelled Darth Plagueis novel. One of the panelists, (I think it was Sue) answered that now wasn't the time for the novel and that Plagueis' species, Muun, came from George Lucas himself. I've always wondered if George will ever see a picture of Plagueis and say "That's not a Muun." So of course everything will be retconed within five seconds on the Holocron, the fan community will be in total disarray over the destruction of everything we know, and then the world will end; imploding in upon its self. As he asked his question a man from the Honduras Fan Force (I believe), left and sat down at his seat. I really, really like those uniforms. Once Doug got up he asked another question about the Plagueis novel, although I can't remember what it was. I finally got to ask my question of whether there would be any novels or comics during the 4000 years between the KOTOR Era and the Movie Era. They, being Shelly and Sue, put it bluntly at 'No.' Randy said somewhat jokingly that if John Jackson Miller wanted to go that far they would probably let him. So I sat back down and it turns out that we went overtime on the panel and had to leave.