star wars

New Video Review of Solo: A Star Wars Story

Our latest CatSynth TV episode features a review of the latest offering in the Star Wars franchise, Solo: A Star Wars Story.

The video has some spoilers in it, so we advise waiting to watch it until you have seen the movie.  For now, here are some non-spoiler takeaways:

  • The movie continues to fill in the storyline between Episode III and Episode IV, along with the Rebels TV series and Rogue One.
  • Donald Glover is great as Lando Calressian!
  • Star Wars does a good job with its gangsters and bar and club scenes, going all the way back to the Mos Eisley cantina.  There is no shortage of such scenes in this movie.
  • It’s a smaller scale story than the main movies or even Rogue One.  And force-wielders are less prominent than in any other movie or series.
  • Sadly, no cats.

We do recommend it for Star Wars nerds like us, as well as casual viewers. 😺

Star Wars Day: Tookas in Forces of Destiny

Last year on May the Fourth, we shared a bit about felines in the Star Wars universe.  In particular, the many species of tooka, a small animal with cat-like appearance and behavior that was featured in both the Rebels and Clone Wars animated series.  Tookas also make an appearance in the new Forces of Destiny animated shorts.  In one episode, Jyn Erso saves and befriends a tooka that has adopted by a girl as a pet.

We at CatSynth love these short videos in the Forces of Destiny series.  Most of the attention has gone to their featuring of the women in the franchise, but they also cleverly weave together characters from different stories over the timeline.  We will have more to say about this series in a future article.  But for now, May the Fourth Be With You! (Oy vey!)

Star Wars Day: Tookas and Loth-cats

As we join many of our friends in the informal celebration of May 4th as Star Wars Day (i.e., “May the Fourth be with you”, oy vey), we lament the lack of felines in the Star Wars cannon. There doesn’t appear to me a feline sentient species analogous to Caitians in Star Trek. But there is a cat-like family of creatures that appear in the animated series Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels: the tooka.
Tooka

[From Wookiepedia]

Tookas are quite feline in appearance and appear to serve a similar function to domestic cats on Earth as companion animals and rodent control. A specious of tookah native to the planet Lothar, the Loth-cat, is shown in Rebels. They appear to live wild on the grasslands of the planet, but can also be kept as pets.

Loth-cat
[From Wookiepedia]

While there are few felines in the Star Wars cannon, they are abundant in fan art. We are particularly fond if this series featuring major characters and their feline companies, including Rey, Princess Leia, and Padme Amidala.

Padme’s cat in this image by Disney animation artists Griz and Norm Lemay reminds me a lot of Luna <3.

RIP Alphonse Mouzon, Vera Rubin, Carrie Fisher

2016 continues to be a year of losses. Below we visit three people whose work has influenced our diverse interests here at CatSynth and who passed away since this holiday weekend.


[By Dontworry (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons]

Alphonse Mouzon was one of the important early artists in jazz fusion, and performed with many of our musical heroes, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Gil Evans. In 1971, he joined Wayne Shorter and the rest of Weather Report for their debut album Weather Report. The band has a mixed history – something we should write about on another occasion – but those first albums in the early 1970s have a sound that were quite influential and resonate with those of us who love jazz fusion of that era. You can hear some Mouzon’s 1971 work with Weather Report in this video:

Vera Rubin is a name that should be better known that it is in popular culture, as her contributions to cosmology and astronomy are central to our current understanding of the universe. Her work made the case for dark matter and its prevalence in the universe. It was another step in the process of understanding our place in the universe. The earth, then the sun, then the galaxy, all became just small and non-centrals parts in a much larger universe; and the discovery of dark matter showed that the “stuff we are made of”, the ordinary baryonic matter (all the chemical elements and such that we learn about in school) is only a small portion of the mass-energy of the universe. Dark matter has since been eclipsed by dark energy in terms of cosmological composition.

In addition to the grand perspective, Rubin’s work helped us understand why galaxies like our own Milky Way are shaped the way they are and move the way that they do. She was also a strong advocate for women in science, not just in her own career and field but overall in terms of advocacy in inspiration.


[By Riccardo Ghilardi photographer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons]

From great science facts we move to great science fiction. Star Wars is one of the important mythologies in contemporary world, and many of us who saw the original movie in 1977 remember it vividly. While Carrie Fisher was not one of the comedic droids or Darth Vader, her character Princess Leia was important to the story in ways a kindergarten-age kid couldn’t quite fathom at the time. What also makes Fisher particularly interesting is how she presented herself, flaws and all, completely outside of the mythology of Star Wars. She was brutally honest and with a dark, dry sense of humor that came out in real life and in Princess Leia. Indeed, after she reprised the role for Episode VII, she was very up front taking on the trolls who mocked for simply doing what we all do: age. Her semi-autobiographical Postcards from the Edge was an accidental discovery in a video store – I liked seeing women leading a dark story, and only afterwords realized that Fisher wrote the screenplay and the original book.

We at CatSynth send our regards to the families of Alphonse Mouzon, Vera Rubon, and Carrie Fisher; and to all those taken by 2016.

Worthless Kitty Backfill: "Not a catsynth pic" and other diversions

There are real catsynth photos, and then there is this submission we received this week:

It came from a rather odd site with copies of the same picture over and over again, with long biblical quotes. The trackbacks were rather suspicious, indeed the whole thing seems kinda sketchy. Thus I am not providing a link to the original source to order to protect you, my loyal readers (hey if you're reading this post you must be pretty loyal).

Speaking of biblical spam, this seems like as good a time as any to note (as so many have already) the resemblance between the new Pope Benedict XVI and the Emperor from Star Wars:

You can google “pope star wars emperor” for plenty of earlier and more authentic references. While the metaphor for the imperial past of the Church is obvious, I wonder what it says about the future? Perhaps the ultimate fate of the Church is to be overrun by dancing ewoks…

We'll have to wait about the ewoks, but in the meantime, the cats are invading the Holy See. It turns out that the new pope is quite the ailurophile. If he loves cats, he can't be all bad, though I still don't like this “the dictatorial relativist Left is apoplectic” thing.

Yub dub, erub yub