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WIRE Buzz: Lucasfilm & Porsche build a fast Star Wars ship; Kid Flash zooms back to The CW; more
It likely won’t be part of the on-screen action when The Rise of Skywalker arrives in theaters next week, but a new Star Wars fighter — spawned from a cool collaboration between Lucasfilm and Porsche — definitely wouldn’t look out of place with Poe behind the controls, either.
Design minds from the two companies recently teamed up to dream up the "Tri-Wing S-91x Pegasus Starfighter,” a sleek vessel inspired by both the Star Wars universe and Porsche’s all-electric Taycan sedan. Watching the 11-minute video that tracks the design process is like a fascinating voyeuristic peek at the creative thinking that goes into bringing to life a spacecraft worthy of the Rebel Fleet.
With help from Lucasfilm creative executive Doug Chiang, the teams literally reshape a car into a deft three-winged fighter, applying the same ethos that Star Wars relies on when it’s time to take a real-world object and rethink it for the galaxy far, far away. Chiang explains.“George [Lucas] taught us that Star Wars design is about bold designs, simple designs,” Chiang says in the clip. “We ask ourselves: ‘Is it iconic?’ A good example of this is the TIE Fighter — it’s bold; it’s graphic; it looks like a logo. Is it something I can redraw very quickly? When the audience sees it on the screen, they only have a few seconds to know what it is.”
Sadly, the Pegasus reportedly will remain here on Planet Earth as a byproduct of the Episode IX marketing machine, and it’ll only see life as a 5-foot scale mockup on display at the movie’s Los Angeles premiere. But Porsche mysteriously teases that the ship will "live forever in a future Star Wars universe" at the end of the video, and in the meantime we’re left with a new insight into how the Star Wars design team takes an idea from concept to reality. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker warps into theaters on Dec. 20.
After an extended absence, Wally West is flashing back.
True to the buzz generated by this year’s San Diego Comic-Con talk about how Season 6 of The Flash would unfold, Keiynan Lonsdale — who’s been only an intermittent presence at The CW since disappearing from The Flash following Season 4 — is at last returning to the series for the season's 14th episode, via TV Insider.
According to the report, showrunner Eric Wallace hints we’ll be getting a more seasoned, mature version of Kid Flash, who apparently ran off to put in some hard self-discovery time during the season-and-a-half since he’s been away. “After working on his inner life in Tibet, Wally West, aka Kid Flash, is back to help Team Flash against a familiar threat ... but one with a very new face!” Wallace teased.
“…[W]hat’s different this time [is that] Wally has grown, along with his speedster abilities, too. …this won’t be your same old Kid Flash making a reappearance” on the Earth the good guys inherit in the wake of the world-shattering Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover, he added.
Since Kid Flash is showing up after Crisis, the threat possibilities about whom Team Flash will stare down on the back end of Season 6 are wide open. Got a theory? Share it in the comments!
If the announcement of a proper Dungeons & Dragons video game at this year’s Game Awards has you hopeful that the iconic role-playing franchise is stepping up its … role … as an interactive powerhouse, then it looks like your 20-sided die just made the perfect roll.
Speaking with Gamesindustry.biz recently, Wizards of the Coast president Chris Cocks shared that the just-announced Dark Alliance video game is only the first of several gaming projects of all shapes and sizes the D&D universe has planned in the months and years to come.
Teasing “seven or eight” new D&D titles in the works, Cocks said the goal is to hit “a variety of genres ... And in future games we will explore different areas, whether it's grand strategy and combat at army level scale, to really intimate character portrayal.” He went on to say that single-player adventuring will be key across the future D&D lineup — but it won’t be the only way to play.“There will be single player modes in all of our games, but we always think that our co-operative perspective, that forming a party with your friends and doing great things together — the party is bigger than individual components —will always be an important part of our secret sauce.”
While that doesn’t spill the beans too much on what Wizards of the Coast has planned, at least we know that the resurgent popularity of Dungeons & Dragons won’t be a mere momentary blip on gamers’ radar. It all begins with Dark Alliance, which is slated to storm the gates sometime in the fall of 2020.
