Culture Schlock

George Lucas may have made a few trillion dollars on the Star Wars franchise, but that doesn't mean he didn't have to sell a few satellite dishes along the way.

Using a very loose definition of "cool", starwars.com has collected "10 cool Star Wars posters from Japan," including the above ad for the Panacolor X--a system that apparently involves both a satellite dish on a tetherball pole and a 29" television.

Besides being massively entertaining in their strangeness, the collection provides a helpful lesson in the Japanese way of thinking. In the U.S., we'd probably just do something like mount the dish on the side of Millennium Falcon, replacing the dish that's already there; you know, something that makes some degree of sense. There, the most obvious selling strategy is the unsettling image of George Lucas riding a satellite dish like a broomstick, sandwiched between Chewbacca and an Ewok, which is insane, even by American geek standards.