Sorry for getting this one up late, people.  But it’s still Monday, so that’s good!

When I set out to do an Empire Strikes Back joke, the first thought that popped into my head was the “Fuck you, DAD!!!” line from Reno 911.  I was going to have Darth Vader try and convince Luke they should spend some quality time together.  THEN, I thought what it would be like if Luke imagined Vader as a good father.  THEN the image of two armless cats high-fiving each other from VGCats popped into my head.  Mix ‘em all together and this is what you get.

To all you trekkers out there:  I’m sorry.  Sometimes I even hate myself a little.  This was by far my favorite movie of 2009.

But hey, it’s funny, I think.  And we haven’t done a gay joke in forever, not since the Terminator strip (and that wasn’t really gay, just gay-ish).  Just think of this as an alternate alternate reality.  Wherein Spock Prime is a jerk.

… now that I think of it… I should’ve given Spock Prime a goatee.  Dammit!  Now I hate myself even more.

Read the comic again with this video playing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’ve been reading For The Reels for a while, you’d know that Jon and I originally said that we would wait to parody a film until it’s DVD release.  That way we give a chance to those who haven’t seen it in theaters to see it before we spoil anything.  In this case, Avatar has only been out for about two-and-a-half weeks.  JN and I figured in our recent podcast that we could make an exception for huge event movies  (I mean, it’s not like people haven’t gone to see it, it’s made over $1 billion worldwide already).

Though we’re not going operate like Theater Hopper or Joe Loves Crappy Movies (awesome as they are) and riff on movies currently in theaters that people – or maybe, I – don’t care about.  For The Reels is about all great movies, old or new.  We’re still gonna do the old classics.  We’re still gonna do the more recent classics.  Avatar was so good, I’d consider it a new classic.

So when I first saw the movie and sat down to think of a joke, two thoughts popped into my head.  #1: Jake Sully probably had a wet dream in his machine when he mated with Neytiri.  It’s a funny concept but I wanted to draw something more visually engaging, as the movie was a visual masterpiece.  So I went with #2: At night, Pandora lights up like it’s under a black light.  People who go to raves would have a freakin’ awesome time there.

It was hard to come up with a joke for LOTR, but I discovered that the more you think about something that seems a little off at first impression, the weirder it becomes.  Take for example Gimli’s request.  Anyone else find it a little weird and fetish-y that he would ask for her hair?   Me too.  So I ran with the idea.

Jon was insistent on parodying this movie because it’s his favorite movie, but for the longest time I was drawing a blank on the joke.  I did write one where HAL 9000 was speaking in leet, and that was more funny than the joke itself, so I just rewrote 2001′s most popular scene in leet.

I wasn’t too familiar with leet, though, so I had to do a lot of heavy-duty research, and ended up learning more about it than anyone without a pocket protector should ever have to know.