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Credit Where It's Due (5/19/99)
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The day has come and gone. The lines of fanatics camping out on the sidewalks have dissipated, and sixteen years of waiting have finally borne fruit. As the dust starts to settle following the premiere of Star Wars: Episode I, and all the real fans have seen it at least six or eight times already, and cash registers all over the country continue to ring up millions of dollars worth of officially licensed merchandise, it's probably worth reflecting on just how big a part our beloved Macintosh platform played in the creation of the special effects spectacular.
Whoops-- looks like we sort of can't. By now you may have noticed the big flap between Play Inc. and Industrial Light and Magic, Lucas' special effects production company. Play makes the 3D modeling and animation software called Electric Image, which they claim was used on "standard Macintosh computers" to generate "between 300 and 400 on-screen shots" in the movie. In an open letter published by Play earlier this week, they state that Lucas promised them that Electric Image's "significant contribution" would be "publicly acknowledged in articles about the film," but instead they found that EI's use had been all but covered up. There's more on this in a Wired article.
Of course you knew there was a conspiracy theory in here somewhere, right? Stop us if you've heard this one before, but it's long been widely rumored that ILM has a "Jedi Agreement" with Silicon Graphics; basically, ILM gets SGI's latest and greatest workstations in return for agreeing never to trumpet any effects they create on non-SGI systems. MacNN has a nice special report on the whole rumor. To us, that whole story carries the distinct scent of urban legend, but that won't stop the likes of us from believing it lock, stock, and barrel. It's a shame, isn't it? But the well-informed Mac faithful can take personal pride in knowing that their platform of choice payed a hefty role in bringing the latest Star Wars installment to light.
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SceneLink (1546)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/19/99 episode: May 19, 1999: Want to prevent Sears from turning into another Best Buy? Then sign up to dig in and help. Meanwhile, Some Apple tech has a red face right about now, following the discovery of blatantly incorrect information in the Tech Info Library, and Macs may have played a much bigger role in creating The Phantom Menace than George Lucas will admit...
Other scenes from that episode: 1544: Preventative Medicine (5/19/99) Another retail chain, another opportunity for all you wacky Mac fanatics to strut your Apple-savvy stuff... Every since Apple first enlisted the aid of its absurdly helpful user base when the call went out for volunteers to demo Macs at local CompUSA locations a couple of years ago, the company knew they had tapped into something big... 1545: MegaBITS? Mega-oops (5/19/99) Maybe we're just naïve, but we wouldn't have expected Apple to include blatant misinformation in their Tech Info Library. Recently, for example, we think we recall someone pointing out that Apple had posted a TIL article which claimed that Fast Ethernet (as in, the 100-base-T interface provided on all shipping Macs) actually used different wires in its connecting cables depending on which protocol (AppleTalk or TCP/IP) was being piped through it, which, based on our admittedly limited knowledge of networking, is pretty clearly incorrect...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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