The highly anticipated seventh installment in the Star Wars space opera hits cinemas today, and there is no better place to see it than in Brooklyn — a borough so in love with the franchise that we carry lightsabers in bars, dress our sporting stars as Jedis, and watch the films in theaters typically dedicated to Shakespeare.
Here is a look back at some of Brooklyn’s most notable Star Wars-related events over the years.
10. Brooklyn Paper Radio — the new podcast that is taking New York media by storm — scored an exclusive interview with R2D2 this week. Listen here!
9. The Brooklyn Museum ruffled art-world feathers in 2002 when it hosted a touring exhibition of Star Wars memorabilia. The museum defended the show as a way to bring the masses into the cultural institution, but critics — including this very paper! — nevertheless slammed the show.
8. Han shoteth first! The borough has played host to several Shakespeare-Star-Wars mashups over the years. In 2011, theater group a Festival of Fools staged an original play in Williamsburg called “The Impostor Striketh Back” featuring choreographed lightsaber fights and a masked, Darth Vader-esque villain. And last year, Greenpoint’s Word Bookstore hosted a book launch for “William Shakespeare’s the Jedi Doth Return” — “Episode VI” rewritten entirely in iambic pentameter — where staff and patrons acted out some scenes.
7. If there is only one good thing you can say about “Attack of the Clones” — and there is — it is that it gave Brooklyn’s beloved baseball team the Cyclones — also known as the Clones — a flimsy excuse to host a Star Wars-themed game. An annual tradition since 2013, the games typically involve team mascot Sandy the Seagull dressing as a Jedi, Darth Vader throwing the first pitch, and costumed characters hamming it up on the field between innings.
6. In an even more tenuous sports-team-Star-Wars tie-in, Nets star and self-described “huge Star Wars fan” Brooke Lopez once begged George Lucas and J.J. Abrams to give him a walk-on role as a Wookie via a New York Post article. The filmmakers did not give him one, but the team did make bobblehead toys of Lopez dressed as a Jedi, which it gave away at Monday’s game.
5. A few years ago, in a neighborhood not-so-far-away, Brooklyn played host to an epic space saga of Lucasian proportions. In 2011, some phantom menace stole Bedford-Stuyvesant engineer Flynn Michael’s custom lightsaber, after the Jedi Master took his eye off the weapon in a local bar. Michael — who founded a lightsaber fighting group — had all but given up recovering the blade when two years later, a mysterious stranger who identified only as “SithBandit” returned it to him.
4. Weirdo Gowanus ice creamery Ample Hills scored a huge scoop this year when Disney agreed to let it create several Star Wars-themed flavors — the Light Side, a marshmallow ice cream studded with Krispies, and the Dark Side, a dark chocolate ice cream with brownie bits and white-chocolate pearls. The store’s co-owner Brian Smith is himself a former science-fiction screenwriter — he co-wrote the 2005 made-for-television movie “Alien Express” starring Lou Diamond Phillips.
3. Another Brooklynite reaping the spoils of the latest film is local children’s author Adam Gidwitz. The Disney franchising empire tapped the former Saint Ann’s School teacher to create his own retelling of “The Empire Strikes Back” for youngsters, which he interpreted as a how-to Jedi manual dubbed “So You Want to be a Jedi?”
2. Mill Basin native Jimmy Kimmel recorded a week of shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October — the same time the final “Force Awakens” trailer hit. To celebrate, he recruited local staffers to redub the teaser with thick Brooklyn accents. May dah force be wid you!
1. And finally, you can catch “The Force Awakens” at movie houses across the borough! And for our Imperial credits, you can’t beat the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is projecting the film onto a 35-by-19-foot screen in its main performance space.
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” at the BAM Harvey Theater [651 Fulton St. at Rockwell Place in Fort Greene, (718) 636–4100, www.bam.org]. Various dates and times. $18.
