When a TV series gets canceled today, it’s practically guaranteed that fans will organize a campaign online to save the show. Such campaigns are often Exhibit A in support of the argument that the Internet empowers the little guy and transforms passive audiences into an engaged public. But do these Net-based, grass-roots campaigns actually work? If every cancellation leads to another protest movement, how effective can the protest be?
The 1997-98 season for the major and minor broadcast TV networks saw notable campaigns on the Net for six canceled series. (For some reason, one-hour dramas tend to inspire the most support online.) Of those six, two were brought back by their respective networks, apparently thanks to the fervent protests of fans on the Net.
Pat Kleckner, who works as a marketing and technical support representative for a computer company, sums up her and her online colleagues’ efforts: “We wanted ‘The Magnificent Seven’ back on CBS. And we had the tools to make that happen. Our secret weapon: the Internet.”
Premiering in January of this year as a midseason series, “The Magnificent Seven,” based on the movie of the same name, won decent reviews and strong early ratings. When word spread that it was unlikely to be renewed after the initial batch of nine episodes had aired, Kleckner and other like-minded fans on the Net felt the network hadn’t given the new show a fair shot at building an audience. Determined to save it, they sent e-mail, letters and faxes to CBS and pooled $5,000 of their own money to buy a prominent ad in the May 5 Daily Variety to voice their support.
CBS went ahead and canceled “The Magnificent Seven” on May 20, so Kleckner and the other campaigners switched into second gear, writing and faxing executives at CBS affiliate stations. And they bought another ad, this time in USA Today, and timed its publication with the CBS affiliates’ meeting in Los Angeles. This time, their efforts succeeded. On June 8, less than a month after the series’ official cancellation, CBS granted “The Magnificent Seven” a midseason renewal — and credited the fans on the Internet for influencing the network’s decision.
The Net’s immediacy and instant feedback enabled Kleckner and her colleagues to change their strategy quickly when it became necessary to convince affiliates to side with them. “The renewal campaign probably would not have worked without the Internet,” she says. “We were working against the clock most of the time.”
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Television has traditionally been passive entertainment: You watched it; you enjoyed it; but if there weren’t enough people tuning into your favorite show (according to the Nielsen ratings), the broadcast network took it off the air and replaced it with another program. If that upset you — well, tough.
Things started to change in 1967 when fans of the original “Star Trek” organized and flooded NBC with letters protesting the series’ possible cancellation after its first season. They also managed to convince the network to renew “Star Trek” again after its second season — but not after the third.
The next high-profile write-in campaign to save a series faltering in the ratings was the 1983 effort on behalf of CBS’s female police drama “Cagney & Lacey.” Fans persuaded the network to grant the series a stay of cancellation, and “Cagney & Lacey” would go on for five more seasons. “Cagney & Lacey” supporters argued, in part, that the networks had an obligation to provide viewers with programs of “quality” — and their campaign led to the formation of a nonprofit organization called Viewers for Quality Television.
Despite such events, organized letter-writing campaigns remained a rarity. Rounding up fellow watchers of a particular program to take part in such an effort — or, for that matter, even identifying them — remained a daunting task.
The Internet changed that. Today, through newsgroups, e-mail lists and Web sites, fans of a television series can remain in constant touch with one another. To enlist others to help save a show from cancellation is now easier than it has ever been before; an online campaign for an endangered TV show can be put together in a matter of hours.
“It used to be that only the very special series merited a campaign,” says Dorothy Swanson, president and founder of Viewers for Quality Television. “TV critics have told me throughout VQT’s 15-year history, ‘Be careful what shows you go to the well for, or campaigns will be diluted and mean nothing.’ Well, that’s happened. It’s not special anymore. Just about every show that’s canceled gets a ‘campaign’ because it’s the ‘favorite’ of a group of people. TV critics are jaded about it.”
Swanson suggests that TV networks may not put much stock in e-mail. “Used to be, a viewer would have to get out a piece of paper, put it in the typewriter, type it, place it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and take it to the mailbox. That showed commitment and forethought,” she argues. “Now, [you] click on an icon and can send an immediate message. While that’s fine, executives know it doesn’t require much effort to do that, and they don’t know whether it was a 4-year-old or someone in their desired 18-to-49-year-old demographic group.”
Cyndi Glass, a library assistant who ran an unsuccessful online campaign to save the CBS police drama “Brooklyn South,” observes, “I do think that e-mail and newsgroup postings are taken much less seriously than snail-mail, and I have also noticed a tendency for the networks to look at Web boards and [message boards on] AOL rather than Usenet newsgroups, if they give the Internet any credence at all.”
Swanson adds, “When you e-mail a network, it goes to whomever monitors that Web site — usually somebody with the audience services department. [Even if] you think you have an executive’s private e-mail address, after one unsolicited e-mail from a viewer, you can be sure that exec will [change to a] different e-mail address. But with a letter, it goes to his office. Where it goes from there, you have no control — but its initial destination is that office.”
Association with the Internet may actually hinder the effectiveness of a save-our-show campaign, suggests Karen Irving, a proprietor of a graphic design company who ran the campaign to save “The Sentinel” on UPN. She and other “Sentinel” fans organized through the Net but delivered their protests via thousands of calls and faxes, and successfully convinced UPN to reverse its decision.
Irving recalls, “We spent a lot of time suggesting that individuals not represent themselves as part of an Internet campaign [when contacting UPN to voice support for 'The Sentinel']. Because the Net is so immediate, it is often discounted by the networks as ‘fanatic’ and ‘knee-jerk.’”
Veterans of the “Magnificent Seven” campaign disagree. Christine Twedt, a webmaster by occupation who worked along with Kleckner, says, “I believe the fact that we were able to directly reach the executives at CBS, via their direct e-mail accounts, helped substantially. In traditional write-in campaigns, if the mail is sorted in some distant mail room, there’s no way to know if the message got to those who matter. With e-mail, we can send that message directly to their desktops. It’s more visible.”
In the case of the successful “Magnificent Seven” campaign, the show’s creators made a point of giving credit to Net activists. “It is my firm belief that the effort and enthusiasm of this significant group of fans was a primary factor in influencing the network,” says John Watson, an executive producer of the show.
One theory that’s been reported suggests that the show was already set for renewal, and CBS merely seized the Internet campaign to generate publicity. “Not true,” Watson insists. “When CBS informed us that we would not be on the fall schedule, they [did say] they were considering the show for midseason, but this was by no means certain.”
Maybe it’s the rosy hue of optimism from her accomplishment, but Kleckner believes that the TV networks are beginning to take the opinions of television viewers on the Net more seriously. “Now that the network decision-makers themselves are coming online with e-mail, I believe they see firsthand the Internet’s value as a powerful and far-reaching tool,” she says. “I believe [our] campaign generated enough attention and respect to give credibility to this electronic tool.”
Still, not every campaign works, and the people behind the unsuccessful efforts often take a less optimistic view about the impact of Net activism. Kris Voelker, a multimedia designer who has been running the Internet campaign to save the CBS family drama “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” says, “‘Dr. Quinn’ fans have been told that their e-mails have been an annoyance, whereas ‘Magnificent Seven’ fans have been praised for the volume of e-mails they have sent to CBS.”
David Loehr, a writer and artist who championed ABC’s controversial religious drama “Nothing Sacred” on the Internet, has harsh feelings about his experience: “Response from ABC [to our campaign] has not been bad; it has not been polite; it has not been simply unsatisfying. It has been downright rude.”
So why does one Internet campaign succeed and another fail to sway the network powers?
Watson, the “Magnificent Seven” producer, says, “I suspect the effect was cumulative — the combination of ads, letters and e-mail to executives at the network and affiliates had an impact because of their passion and by their sheer number.”
Cyndi Glass, of the “Brooklyn South” campaign, advises, “Don’t wait till [your favorite show has] been canceled like we did. Get a campaign going to keep it on the air, and if it’s in doubt, like ‘Brooklyn South’ was for a month, that’s when to really apply the pressure. In retrospect, we waited too long, and fans of the show had no clue that it would be canceled.”
Veterans of other campaigns agree: If you like what you watch, support it immediately if you want the show to stay on the air. TV networks today typically want a new series to achieve acceptable ratings in less than four weeks or the ax begins to sharpen.
This week, the first of 36 new series will premiere on the broadcast networks. It’s anybody’s guess how many of them will inspire campaigns online to save them from oblivion. Which will you want to save if the need arises: The college angst drama “Felicity”? The “docs in space” sci-fi series “Mercy Point”? The quirky buddy cop show “Buddy Faro”? The Irish-American family drama “Trinity”?
As Glass and others like her who fought for their favorite shows suggest, it may not be too early to start thinking about which of the new series might be worth campaigning for online — even before they start airing.
Feel like playing your Sega Genesis games on your PC? You can — regardless of whether your operating system of choice is Windows, MacOS, MS-DOS or Unix. Ever wanted to play Gameboy games on your Windows CE handheld computer? You can, thanks to emulator programs like Virtual Gameboy.
Straddling the legal line between reverse-engineering and software piracy, scores of programmers are coding freeware programs that emulate the hardware of video-game consoles, arcade machines and even other personal-computer formats.
Most media coverage has depicted emulation (or “emu”) programming as a backward-looking novelty: “Hey, remember all those cool arcade games you played in the early ’80s? Now you can run the same exact code on your PC and play them again!” But what’s happening is deeper than just digital nostalgia: Emu programming is seriously blurring the lines between the proprietary formats that have always balkanized electronic gaming.
From programs like the hugely popular M.A.M.E. (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) to those perfectly mimicking popular video-game systems, emu programmers have liberated game code from the confines of hardware. Of course, all emulators aren’t created equal — and the speed and feel of game-play on an emulator depends on the power of the computer running it and the coding of the emulator itself. But there’s an ever-increasing choice of emulators available on emu sites like the venerable Archaic Ruins. And the increasingly mind-boggling possibilities of the form are multiplying fast.
“I think hardware is still king, but emulation is proving code is quite powerful in today’s age of quantity over quality,” says Brad Oliver, 27, an Arizona State University student who has worked on M.A.M.E. and is now coordinating the effort behind a new emulator project, M.E.S.S. (Multi Emulator Super System), which will emulate several computer and video-game hardware formats via one program.
“The emu development process is getting quicker,” observes Gordon Hollingworth, a 26-year-old NT systems manager in England who codes emulators. “It won’t be long before a company releases a piece of hardware, and an emulator [for it comes out] two months later. Emulation could advance to such a point that people would ask, ‘Why develop [new hardware] when we can emulate the process quicker in Windows, MacOS, etc.?’”
The Internet’s emu scene is only 3 years old, but emulators for most of the old video-game hardware — including the Atari VCS, ColecoVision and Nintendo Entertainment System — were perfected long ago. All of the major-brand home computers from the late 1970s and early 1980s — systems from Commodore, Apple, Atari, Tandy and Texas Instruments — have also been resurrected in software form. These days, most emu programmers work on tweaking and enhancing their emulators. (Hardly anything is released as a “final” product; everything is considered a beta version.)
The challenge now isn’t just to make an emulator; it’s to make the best emulator possible. Competition to make the best can be intense — just look at all the Super Nintendo emulators out there (there are at least seven different ones). Rivals often share their technical information, though, and some eventually choose to merge their individual efforts.
M.A.M.E. works differently; theirs is a collective project bringing together hundreds of programmers who code separate driver programs to run arcade machine games. The result: At current count, M.A.M.E. can run nearly 500 arcade-game ROMs (the code that constitutes the game’s software), and the program goes through a substantial update about every month.
“Realistically, there’s no point in being competitive. If one person withholds information, chances are, a legion of [other] coders will eventually [figure] it out for themselves,” says Cameron Mac Millan, 24, a computer systems consultant in Ireland who beta-tests for emu programmers. “Besides, what really is the prize for being first? Having your name in cathode ahead of everyone else’s? Ultimately, it just delays the project.”
This culture of “open hardware” is producing a less savory effect: To see these emulators in action — to play games — you need the games’ code, and that’s fueling a new level of piracy on the Internet, particularly for software originally meant to be used on video-game systems. Nintendo and Sega have been on the forefront in shutting down Web sites illegally distributing ROM images (game code that has been dumped from ROM chips into software form) of their copyrighted game cartridges and arcade machines. The Interactive Digital Software Association, the major trade association that represents the interactive entertainment software industry (of which both Nintendo and Sega are members), launched efforts to actively police for piracy on the Net, beginning in March of this year.
Marat Fayzullin, a 25-year-old graduate student at the computer science
department of the University of Maryland in College Park, is regarded as one
of the early pioneers in emu programming. Yet this author of five emulators,
including the aforementioned Virtual Gameboy, holds a very critical view of
his colleagues and the Net’s emu scene: “I am not a ‘scene’ person and would
very much dislike to be [regarded] as one. I have been here [long] before
these pirates and do not want to have anything to do with them.”
Emu programmers typically distance themselves from piracy; ask one of them where you can get a certain ROM image — or, for that matter, when their emulator will be able to run a certain program — and you’re likely to be ignored. They’ll remind you that you only have the right to dump ROM images of a game cartridge or chipset from an arcade machine you already own. Still, let’s be real: How many people own an actual arcade machine, or have the technical know-how to build and operate a ROM dumper?
“It all comes down to one thing: Your entitlement to use the emulator according to the laws in your home territory,” Millan points out. “People have to exercise their own judgment and self-control.”
The pretense is understandable. Some programmers tell of being threatened with legal action by companies owning the proprietary hardware they’re trying to emulate. Generally, emulation programming in itself is not illegal under international copyright laws, but apparently that hasn’t deterred companies from trying to thwart an emu programmer’s progress.
Hollingworth, one of four people chipping away at the Nintendo 64 hardware, says he’s been targeted: “I had to halt my N64 emulator about a month ago because an organization started legal proceedings against me for ‘Illegal Web Content due to serious infringement of copyright.’ Basically, [it was a] ‘slap on the wrist’ for emulating a piece of hardware copyrighted by another company. This was thrown out due to there being no legal precedent for this claim (in the U.K., I guess).” He would not identify the “organization” behind the action.
For the copyright holders of pirated game ROMs, going after the emu programmers themselves may be understandable, but it misses the point. Extending the pirate analogy, emu programming, at worst, is akin to building ships favored by pirates. You can’t stop the shipbuilders, because there are perfectly legitimate reasons for using ships — just as there are for emulators. Emulators enable code to be used across various platforms; they allow archived personal and business information — such as data that can only be read on an antiquated spreadsheet program that, in turn, ran on a long-defunct computer operating system — to be accessed on modern PCs.
As for the piracy of video-game ROMs, emu programmers aren’t totally unsympathetic to the copyright holders. Says Kevin Brisley, 28, a Canadian software developer for a medical imaging firm, whose claim to emu fame is the arcade machine emulator Replay: “The bottom line is that companies have a right to defend their copyrights. If they want to force a ROM archive site to remove their images, they’re perfectly within their rights. However, my personal feeling is they shouldn’t alienate their past and current customers by quibbling over programs that haven’t generated any income for them for the past 10 years. I would love to see companies offer their ROM images for a nominal fee.”
“While they may never be able to turn a profit by selling old ROM images,” Oliver admits, “they certainly stand to lose more in PR value by not offering alternatives.” He singles out Nintendo for the cease-and-desist orders the company has given to sites illegally distributing ROM images of
its classic arcade games such as the original Donkey Kong: “They’ve received so much bad PR via their recent hard-line tactics that they are sure to suffer from it.”
Would the copyright owners ever distribute ROM images by selling them, or even giving them away, on the Web? It’s a radical suggestion, sure to evoke guffaws from the board rooms of companies like Nintendo and Sega. But consider, for example: What better way to plug your company’s new games than by giving away old titles that are no longer bringing in significant, if any, revenue? Namco, the copyright owner of Pac-Man, features the yellow dot-gobbler in an upcoming 3D action game for the Sony PlayStation (another video game console, by the way, that emu programmers are working on emulating).
To promote this new game, why not give away the ROM images of the original arcade version of Pac-Man through the company Web site? The company could provide users with access to the ROMs only after seeing online promotions for the new game, filling out a demographic survey and/or agreeing to be put on an e-mail list announcing new products.
Additionally, computer and game hardware companies might want to informally support the efforts of emu programmers. That’s what U.S. Robotics did earlier this year when it included the Palm computing device emulator, Copilot, in its development tools packet. The work of an independent programmer, Copilot benefits U.S. Robotics by encouraging software development for its PalmPilot line of personal digital assistants. While the emu scene is tearing down the barriers for code among proprietary formats, it can also support the intrinsic value of a piece of hardware by opening up development for it and extending its market life.
Despite the controversies over piracy, emu programmers’ motivation tends to be more personal than worldly. Usually they program emulators because they want to do something with their talents. Emu programming is hardly about ego, they say. Mostly, they cite the challenge of hacking hardware and converting it into software as the most compelling reason. Hollingworth describes the process as though it were magic: “Emu programming has its own uniqueness. Writing [traditional] software is all well and good, but to create something in software that does everything a piece of hardware can do, and then run that hardware’s own software, is fascinating and stimulating.”
Of course, digital nostalgia does play some part in motivating the creators of emulators. What it’s “really all about,” says Oliver, is “playing the games and reliving good memories. You can emulate the games, but you can’t emulate the experiences. That sounds ridiculously cheesy but, hey, so was Dig Dug.”
A year from now, on Memorial Day weekend, 1999, the next chapter of “Star Wars” will premiere in theaters. Currently in extensive post-production, the as-yet-untitled film will be the first in a new trilogy.
Officially, not much is known about the movie. We do know that it, like the rest of the trilogy, will be a “prequel” set before the events of the original “Star Wars” trilogy. It will introduce us to a 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker — the future father of Luke and Leia who’s destined to become Darth Vader. Other than who’s starring in it — Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman — that’s about it.
Unofficially, on the Web, much, much more is known about this film — depending on whether you’re willing to believe what you read. While scoops sent in by spies involved in a film’s production have become standard material on movie-gossip Web sites, for the “Star Wars” prequel the process has been both more intense and better organized.
With the skill and determination investigators might use to solve a crime, online “Star Wars” fans have been assembling the prequel’s entire story line a whole year in advance of the movie’s release — by stitching together official news about its production with insider scoops, gossip and plausible theories. At The Force.net — one of two major sites solely focused on “Star Wars” prequel news and gossip — you can even read an illustrated “Virtual Edition” of the movie. (If you prefer not reading plot-revealing “spoilers” of movies you might want to see, this would be a good place to stop reading. And definitely don’t follow the links.)
Most of the scooped information, often debated among online fans for their veracity, has been trivial: The names of characters and planets — if they’re real or stand-ins for finalized, cooler-sounding names to come. Or: who or what is a “Gungan” — and is it the same thing as a “battle droid”? (Final consensus based on additional scoops: They’re different things.) Think Princess Leia’s hairstyle in the original film was laughably bad? Wait until you check out the ‘dos George Lucas has envisioned for Portman — complete with ceremonial makeup that will make her look like either a mime or a geisha.
But some other scoops have been more tantalizing, and perhaps distressing to the filmmakers — especially the revelation of a “pod” race sequence on the desert planet Tatooine in which young Anakin competes. This report lent further credence to speculation that the first prequel pays homage to “Ben Hur” by presenting Anakin’s early life as a slave. Supposedly, Lucas himself was upset by this specific posting.
Most of the scoops didn’t surprise the production company, Lucasfilm Ltd., according to a Web informant who uses the pseudonym “True Fan,” who provides tidbits of information to the other notable “Star Wars” prequel gossip site, Prequel Watch. Corresponding with me through a third person’s e-mail, True Fan describes her/his sources: “I have sources that work directly for Lucasfilm Ltd. and LucasArts Entertainment in many different departments. My main source of information has worked closely with Lucas and Lucasfilm for more than 15 years.” True Fan says he/she is careful not to give away critical plot details — like the pod race.
(For the record, a representative of Lucasfilm Ltd.’s Internet Development division could not answer specific questions for this article and, instead, issued his company’s standard statement regarding fan sites: It has no official policy regarding them, though the company is generally supportive of fans’ efforts on the Internet.)
“The Lucasfilm production staff wasn’t caught off guard at all [by the online scooping],” True Fan writes. “They expected this to happen. Matter of fact, Lucas assembled an ‘Internet task force’ because he knew the implications the Internet would have on the film.”
Another scooper for Prequel Watch — who works for the creature animation division of Lucas’ special-effects house, Industrial Light & Magic, and who chooses to remain nameless — writes, “I can say that there appears to be a LOT of bogus [information] out there, but also a lot of ‘real’ stuff that has pissed off more than a few people here.”
Paul Davidson, a 20-year-old college student and one of a dozen “Star Wars” enthusiasts who runs The Force.net, makes a surprising claim: “I’d say 90 percent of our confirmed scoops [regarding the prequel] are totally accurate at the time they’re received (inaccuracies tend to involve the scooper’s interpretation of the information rather than the information itself), and perhaps 95 percent of the information on our site at present is totally accurate.”
Started in the summer of 1996, The Force.net has evolved into a sprawling conglomeration of fan-produced Web sites dedicated to various aspects of the “Star Wars” movies. Scott Chitwood, age 25 and one of the original founders of The Force.net, stakes the accuracy of his site’s “unconfirmed information” on the screening process every scoop goes through: If something submitted sounds outrageous, it’s immediately dismissed; if it sounds plausible, then other, reliable informants are consulted to confirm it.
Granted, this isn’t scientific, and the site admits to having been duped before. “The most notable stuff we’ve posted that turned out to be false actually had some degree of truth in most cases,” Chitwood says. “For example, we had one person come to us in 1996 saying they were a friend of Natalie Portman and that she was up for the part of Luke and Leia’s mom. But after a while we figured out that the person was a fake. We publicly announced we had been had. But a few months later Lucasfilm announced that Portman actually won the role. Pretty bizarre.”
“You really are only hitting about a 20-30 percent accuracy when it comes to ‘leaked’ information,” True Fan says in her/his e-mail. “A lot of people are just trying to second-guess Lucas and his team, and then pass that information on as valid. So, unless you have an inside track of some sort, most information is just a lucky guess … or false.”
Regardless, it’s not just the information itself leaked to the Internet that has proved to be revealing, but what the fans have done with it. When on-the-set spies sent in detailed descriptions of costumes used in the production, contributors to The Force.net drew up illustrations. Even something as seemingly insignificant as a photo released on the official “Star Wars” Web site, one of Lucas and a co-editor examining special-effects footage for the film, prompted a minor investigation by The Force.net: What were these men looking at on the video monitor? The blurry image on the monitor was enlarged, digitally enhanced and scrutinized on The Force.net as if it were a highly classified, fuzzy snapshot of a UFO flying over Area 51.
The most telling example of this kind of tenacity is the site’s Virtual Edition, a fully illustrated, blow-by-blow breakdown of the prequel film’s plot. If the process of digging up information on the “Star Wars” prequel proceeds in the fashion of a criminal investigation, then the scoopers are the eyewitnesses — and Roderick Vonhvgen, the Webmaster of the Virtual Edition, is the prosecutor who’s piecing the crime scene together. A 30-year-old Roman Catholic priest in Holland (yep, believe it or not, he says), Vonhvgen began the project in June 1997 by assembling official news, scoops and rumors into a coherent movie plot.
“Unfortunately, there were a lot of false rumors popping up in various places,” Vonhvgen says of his early effort on the Virtual Edition. “I’ve done a lot of research since then (watching the [original "Star Wars" movies] again and again, reading the novels, etc.), and the more information I gathered, the more I was able to see which scoops made sense and which ones were probably false.”
Vonhvgen creates the scenes for the Virtual Edition by using image-editing software to cut and paste pictures of the prequel’s cast (culled mostly from non-”Star Wars” sources) against official production drawings and photos of the movie set, which he touches up digitally. Other ingredients include set and prop photos snapped by spies, stock photos, images from other films, original art and computer graphic models designed by another The Force.net contributor.
The result can look a little cheesy. But in terms of plot, it appears Vonhvgen has mapped out the whole movie, including major action scenes. Most who are familiar with both Lucas’ personal style and thematic fetishes and the early drafts of the “Star Wars” screenplay (from which unused scenes have reportedly been repurposed for the prequel) may find the Virtual Edition unsettlingly credible.
“At present, I consider [the Virtual Edition] to be an informed plot analysis,” Vonhvgen says. “Some plot elements are not entirely correct because there are some spoilers I don’t want to make public, but there is little ‘fan fiction’ left in the current version.”
The most impressive part of this work in progress is also the source of Lucas’ grief: the pod race. Storyboarded with several images incorporating impressively designed computer graphic models, the sequence depicts young Anakin competing in a rocket-vehicle race that’s reminiscent of the brutal chariot race in “Ben Hur.” The event is presided over by a young, thinner Jabba the Hutt who intends to fix the outcome by sabotaging the racers’ rocket pods, including Anakin’s. Guess who wins despite the slanted odds?
“Some time ago there were rumors on the Web about a ‘drag race’ taking place on Tatooine [in the prequel],” Vonhvgen says. “Nobody knew what that drag race could look like. Because I try to visualize the rumors, I was challenged to make a ‘virtual edition’ of this, too. A German magazine published pictures they took while floating in a hot air balloon over the sets in Tunisia (Lucasfilm was furious, of course). One picture was labeled ‘junkyard.’ But when I looked for the 30th time at the tiny picture, trying to figure out what those blurry dark shapes could be [in the photo], it suddenly hit me! I enlarged and enhanced the picture: Each shape consisted of a pair of enginelike things, followed by a smaller dark spot. In fact, what I was looking at was not a junkyard but a bunch of ‘pods’ pulled by pairs of huge engines — the ‘Star Wars’ version of the chariots in ‘Ben Hur,’ with engines replacing the horses! I made some pictures based on that observation, and it was like a bomb exploding on the Web; the number of visitors [to the Virtual Edition] skyrocketed because of this scoop.”
All of this intensive investigative work raises the obvious question: Why do it? And won’t it spoil the fun?
“For some fans, digging up little bits of info on the film is what they consider to be the fun of being a fan,” says Chitwood. “Our site is for those who like to sneak [a] peek at their Christmas presents. I would hope that those who don’t want to know anything would avoid our sites. We give them plenty of opportunities to stay away from spoilers.”
Carl Cunningham, a 26-year-old office manager who runs Prequel Watch as a spoiler-free repository for news on the “Star Wars” prequel, says, “I believe nine out of 10 fans don’t want to see or hear too much about the film until they see it for the first time in May 1999. Who wants to be looking up at the screen on that MAGIC DAY and think, wow, this is just like what I read on the Internet?”
By now you might be wondering whether Lucasfilm has ever orchestrated a disinformation campaign, either to throw off determined fans or to trap a mole — as the production company of the new “Godzilla” supposedly did when it leaked “fake” concept drawings of the title character in order to catch a spy.
“I can say with 100 percent certainty that Lucasfilm has not leaked any disinformation,” The Force.net’s Chitwood maintains. “There are enough weirdos on the Internet to do that for them. Anything on the Internet now that is incorrect was either made up by someone not involved with Lucasfilm or was a mistake made by the person reporting the information.”
Even without active disinformation tactics, plenty of questions remain about the accuracy of the fan sites’ reports. True Fan writes: “A lot of people are going to be very surprised when the films come out because they think they know what is going to happen when actually they are just believing in a rumor. It is not hard to figure out the plots of the prequels, but Lucas has a few surprises up his sleeve that I don’t think anyone is expecting.”
And as the unnamed informant at Industrial Light & Magic points out, the movie is subject to Lucas’ editing whims: “Mr. Lucas can change his mind on anything at any time … and he purposely made sure that there are alternate avenues for a few of the most important things. Even we at the creature animation shop have been told to change and alter things already … and I’m sure there will be more of that in the months ahead.”
So what if it turns out that Chitwood, Cunningham, the priest and the rest of their gang were wrong about almost everything they thought they knew about the first prequel — including the spoilers they chose not to reveal? What if the Man himself, George Lucas, has the last laugh?
“For them to have us and everyone else completely fooled when we thought we were 100 percent right would be incredible,” Chitwood admits. “You’d have to admire that. We love ‘Star Wars’ so much I’d love to find that there was a tighter lid on things than there has been.”
Cunningham sees this scenario as remote, too: “But, hypothetically, I would probably be almost relieved, believe it or not. Not relieved because we were wrong, but because the films would not have been spoiled by any of us fan sites.”
That’s the ultimate ambivalence behind the fan detectives’ work.
“If I had known when I started [gathering prequel information] that it would be this easy,” Chitwood says, “I would never have started the prequel site. I think I know more than I would have liked to have known.”
