Star Wars Celebration: A lot of attention for Princess Leia and The Last Jedi

The annual Star Wars Celebration will take place this weekend in the American city of Orlando. This year’s event is mainly about the 40th anniversary of the franchise and the farewell of actress Carrie Fisher, who passed away last December.

The Star Wars Celebration is, as the name suggests, the biggest Star Wars party of the year. That party will get some extra cachet at the Convention Center in Orlando this year as the franchise celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. In honor of the occasion, several celebrities from the ‘Star Wars family’ showed their faces on the main stage of the event on Thursday. While Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and George Lucas, among others, reminisced, there was also extensive attention to the late Carrie Fisher, who died in December, known to Star Wars fans as Princess Leia Organa.

Not only Ford, Hamill and Lucas spoke beautiful words about the woman they saw as a source of inspiration and sister, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson also expressed their appreciation for the colorful actress. Even Billie Lourd, Fisher’s daughter, appeared on stage. Every statement about Fisher, who once again took on the role of General Leia in Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, has always received ovation in the halls of the Celebration.

That fate also fell to the trailer of The Last Jedi. Lucasfilm has used the Celebration to show a new trailer for the upcoming Star Wars movie for the past few years and this year was no different. Thousands of fans saw the first fragments of the new film in person in the room and millions more watched the trailer at home, via the live stream. Although the trailer did not give away too much about the story of The Last Jedi, it became clear that Luke Skywalker is allowed to talk in this film. Mark Hamill, the actor behind Luke, got the laughs in the room on his hand by mistakenly calling Daisy Ridley (Rey) ‘his daughter’. Most likely an intentional slip of the tongue, but the reaction of the public was no less; the speculation about who Rey is and what family she belongs to is one of the hottest topics leading up to The Last Jedi.

While the celebrities in attendance are a major draw for some of the public, it’s the other activities that make the Star Wars Celebration what it is. Many of the fans out there wear the costume of one of their favorite Star Wars characters. It’s almost impossible to get bored of Darth Vaders, Boba Fetts and Stormtroopers every few meters within a day. If you look closely, you may even come across a wonderfully well-crafted Chewbacca furry, not to mention the dozens of R2D2 droids driving around. Because many fans give their own interpretation to the suits, the Celebration also becomes a colorful affair. A pink R2D2 and a Stormtrooper with a disco helmet? It’s all possible at the Orlando Convention Center.

In addition to looking, visitors can also learn a lot and buy a lot. This learning takes place in the many panels. While in one room a group of writers who have worked on Star Wars comics talk about what it’s like to write a Star Wars story, in the other room a panel on the importance of strong female protagonists is underway, while again somewhere otherwise designer Doug Chiang gives his audience a glimpse into his kitchen. If there isn’t a nice session going on for a while, a tour around the exhibition floor might be worth something. Anyone who doesn’t go home with at least a t-shirt or a figurine, or one of the millions of other Star Wars products, is very good at keeping his or her hand on the cut.

While the Star Wars Celebration is the highlight of the year for many Star Wars fans, it’s not the only important time of the year for fans of the well-known sci-fi franchise. In December, for example, Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi will hit theaters worldwide. Electronic Arts’ new shooting game Star Wars Battlefront 2 is expected to hit stores some time before that. And the Celebration itself? It will skip next year and will be back in 2019, at a location to be announced later.