May the Fourth be with you on Star Wars Day
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Who doesn’t enjoy a good pun? The first known instance of the punny phrase “May the fourth be with you” occurred on May 4, 1979, when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party in the United Kingdom celebrated her ascension to Prime Minister with an ad that said, “May the Fourth Be with You, Maggie.”
In the decades since then, the phrase “May the fourth be with you” has grown, with May 4 becoming a holiday, of sorts, known as “Star Wars Day.” The first known organized celebration of the day happened in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on May 4, 2011, and since 2013, The Walt Disney Company has officially commemorated the day with various events at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
Stay tuned to this website on May the fourth of this year for some exclusive discounts on Colin Cantwell’s signed and un-signed artwork, as well as the mugs and shirts in our store that bear his creations.
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Other Star Wars days in May
Of course, the next day, May 5, lends itself to some punny fun as “Revenge of the Fifth Day,” a play on the title of Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith. Given how many people like to cosplay as stormtroopers, Darth Vader, and other members of the Galactic Empire, it’s a perfect counter-balance to the lighthearted fun of May 4.
And if you really want to push it, May 6 can turn into “Revenge of the Sixth Day,” for another 24 hours of Sith-themed festivities, or it can be “Return of the 6th,” which, of course, takes its name from Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. (Fun fact: that film was actually called Revenge of the Jedi before George Lucas decided that Jedi don’t take revenge. Of course, Sith are happy to take revenge on anyone who messes with them.)
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The final opportunity in May to celebrate Star Wars is May 25, in honor of the May 25, 1977 release date of the very first movie, known simply at the time as Star Wars. It’s a date burned into the brains of those of us who saw the film when we were kids, and writer/director/producer Patrick Read Johnson cemented it into history with his wonderful movie 5-25-77, which is an ode to his teenage years when he had the chance to visit ILM during the making of the first film.
Celebrating Colin Cantwell’s legacy in May
Finally, any day is a great day to acknowledge the legacy of Colin Cantwell, who not only designed various Star Wars spacecraft but also worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, WarGames, and other movies. He was a NASA liaison to the public during the 1960s and actually fed data from the lunar lander to Walter Cronkite during the broadcast of the historic moon landing on July 20, 1969.
And as we’re learning in the research we’re doing into his life, he did so much more too, including creating computer-generated video for a production company called Marks & Marks, composing an opera, writing two science-fiction novels (CoreFires and CoreFires II), working as a computer programmer for many years at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and more.
Stay tuned to this blog for further details!
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