Daily Dose of English 34
May the 4th
Daily Dose of English 34
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about May the 4th, a very, very important holiday all around the world. Okay, I'm kidding. May the 4th is the sort of made up Star Wars holiday, because in Star Wars, they say, may the force be with you. And may the force sounds a lot like May the 4th, which is the fourth day in May. And so it's a sort of for fun holiday. I say that with big air quotes. That's when you use your fingers to sort of quote the words and it means that something is not really true. And so in this case, it's not really a holiday, but it's an important day for a lot of people in some capacity. Because it's a day to sort of think about Star Wars, which is one of the most important movie franchises in popular culture, at least in the English-speaking world. But honestly, I think it's gotten so big, it's just all over the world. because Star Wars holds a special place in a lot of people's hearts. It's a very special movie series and eventually entire universe that means a lot to a lot of people for many different reasons. And so I thought it would be a fun day to talk about Star Wars. And why not? Because I do really like Star Wars. Mostly because It was a big part of my youth in a lot of ways. Star Wars was the cool thing to enjoy, even though I was born way after the movies came out. The first movie was in 1977, I think, 77 or 78. The second one was a few years later in the 80s. And the third one was in, I think the 80s as well, like 86 or 87. And so they're old movies at this point. Uh, that was, that's 20 years, 40. They're like approaching 50 years old, which is crazy. But even when I was a kid, it was still the cool thing. The sequels had come out at that point, or sorry, the prequels had come out at that point. Um, and this, those are the, the second trilogy. in which I so they go first so they're called Star Wars 1 2 & 3 and that the original trilogy is 4 5 & 6 and so I Had watched most of them growing up. I didn't actually watch all of them, which is sort of funny I think I didn't never didn't see the first one until like 5 or 6 years after really liking Star Wars and I'd only seen most of them like one time and I did see the third movie, so the Revenge of the Sith, I saw probably like 20 or 30 times. No, probably not that many, but 15 or 20, because that was the only Star Wars movie that my family had. And it wasn't even a real copy. I don't know where we got it, but we had a DVD version of the Revenge of the Sith just on a random DVD. I don't know where it came from, but I watched that movie a bunch of times and it's good. It's not the best Star Wars movie, but it's good. And I really enjoyed that. Playing like pretending to be Star Wars characters was a big part of being a kid. And I did that for a lot of hours with my friends. We had a pretty big backyard. So that's the part behind your house is a yard and backyard is obviously in the back. And so we'd very frequently play there and use toy lightsabers and other sorts of Star Wars toys to be kids. I don't know, run around and play games and make up stuff, make up whatever it is. And then Star Wars Legos were a huge thing. I remember that I always, always wanted Star Wars Legos and all my friends had them. We'd trade things, we'd make things, we'd destroy things, and Star Wars Legos were a very big part of our of my growing up on which is sort of funny to think about because i don't think about that ever anymore which is maybe maybe too bad but you know and that's a big reason why star wars is so important to a lot of people is because it was a big part of their childhood they really enjoyed that like just the magic of it the story the the lights the colors the Alternate universes and all these things that didn't exist here on real earth and so Star Wars has that place in a lot of people's lives as being the thing that they That they really enjoyed as a kid There's also a lot of people who took it further, right? So they enjoy it in a more adult sense, where they like to learn more about as much as they possibly can about it, think about it a lot, and do various things with it. It's not a very good explanation. things like reading the lore. Lore is deep history, usually about something not real. So Star Wars, you can read the lore of Star Wars, which is like the history of all sorts of tiny planets and that sort of thing. And so a lot of people really, since Star Wars is so popular, a lot of people really like the lore and the story and that sort of thing that you can find all over the internet, right? There's a ton of information about Star Wars. There's more than just movies. There's hundreds of books and other various things. Comics, I think, as well. And so a lot of people use that as a sort of a place to escape, right? And so we use this word escapism for something that you use in order to not think as much about the real world as Earth, right? And so a lot of people use Star Wars as a way to escape to a different world where they can enjoy creatures from other planets and so many different things that you can sort of think about and pretend to do. It's this world of make-believe. And that's great, honestly. I think there's nothing wrong with having a thing that you really enjoy and like to think about in your off time. I'm also recently, I've been watching the movies again, the original trilogy that was made in, like I said, the 70s and 80s, and they look really, really good. Like they were literally made in the 1970s when there wasn't really computer technology to do animation. And yet, these movies look really, really good. They look better than a lot of movies that come out today in 2024, which is interesting and wild. I believe I've talked about this a little bit on my movies episode back a while ago, but the reason they look so good is because they're real in a lot of ways. They shot, like they had to take a picture and shoot physical objects that looked like those things because they couldn't generate them on computers. generated some things right they could do a couple animations here and there but it's pretty obvious what that is and it looks a lot worse in fact in the re-release i think of the of the fourth movie so the a new hope There's a scene right at the beginning of the movie where they added something. They actually added things a couple years later using a computer because it was sort of missing from the original one because it was like a giant beast in one of the first scenes. And it looks obviously terrible because computers weren't very good then. And yet everything else does look quite good. The smoke, the effects, the lights, the sets, like they're in real places that they built. Even a lot of the scenes of, for example, the Death Star on the outside, they made miniatures for, like they actually made little versions and they took cameras and they went in those little versions and that's why these movies look so much better than movies shot almost 50 years later. And I think that's something really important about those movies for anybody who's interested in film or filmmaking is to remember that you can do amazing things, yes, with a large budget, but without computer help. Nowadays, we see movies with enormous budgets with hundreds of millions of dollars that look like garbage. That's a little bit sad sometimes because especially if this movie has a good story, it can kind of get lost in looking terrible. However, usually the movies with the biggest budgets look the worst and have the worst storyline. Not always true. Some of the really big ones recently are the Avatar movies. Those look really good and a lot of people love them because the story is also quite good. So it's not 100% of the time, but it is a trend. So that's one of the reasons I really like Star Wars and especially the original trilogy because they just look so good and they have really good kind of everything in a lot of ways. Sure, there's problems, but that's not the point. Anyways, I'm going to leave it there for today. I think that's enough talking about Star Wars, and I hope that you have a great rest of your day. May the 4th be with you. Have a good one. Bye!
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