Website: Galactic Symphony
Owner: Michael Hopcroft
Reviewed by Lady Aeryn.
Over the years George Lucas has reiterated that he considers the story in the Star Wars saga a symphony of recurring themes, with many story threads and motifs echoing one another throughout all the films.
The Galactic Symphony website (http://gs.michaelhopcroft.com/), is an in-progress attempt to comprehensively catalog and analyze as many of those motifs as possible, no matter how large or small. Though many sections of the site are still under construction and due for release in this coming year, the two centerpiece sections, "Archive" and "Analysis," are both up and running with a great deal of content.
The largest running section on the site is the "Archive," a massive collection of side-by-side comparisons of certain shots throughout the movies, which serve to illustrate either an echoing story motif (such as The Phantom Menace, Revenge of the Sith, and Return of the Jedi all including funerals in their ending sequences) or a simple recurring visual shot (Artoo being sucked up into a shaft or vessel). Each comparison makes note of where the shot/scene falls in its respective movie, which characters are involved, and frequently includes descriptive/analytical commentary from the person who submitted the comparison. The comparisons are navigated via a single scroll box on the side of the page, which can be sorted chronologically either by the film order or the date the comparisons were added to the site. This section alone offers almost 1200 comparisons, which - since they are all listed together in the same scroll box - can take some time to scroll through.
The Analysis section is almost completely identical in its layout - side-by-side picture comparisons with occasional commentary. I admit to wondering just what the difference was between it and the Archive section that warranted them being listed as separate sections (it's certainly not to take the strain off the size of the already massive Archive section; the Analysis section only has about 20 entries, compared to the more than 1100 of the Archive), but the information in both sections is no less interesting for it.
The site is interactive, and one can submit their own comparisons (as well as post comments on entries) after a quick registration on the site, or through a suggestion thread on the site's message board.
The site does feature a number of ads in its layout, but their placement makes it easy to look past them. The site's pages, especially in the Archive/Analysis sections, seem to load slowly in some browsers (at least on this reviewer's humble laptop) including Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, though slightly less so in Firefox, which the site is apparently designed for viewing in. But the site's massive collection of information usually makes the minor inconvenience worth it - many of the motifs listed I had not yet noticed before (and now that I've seen them almost can't believe I missed them), leaving me even more in awe of the complexity and intricacies of the saga. There are more comparisons listed here than any one person, no matter how observant, could hope to have spotted on their own. As such this site proves very enlightening, and more than proves the Star Wars saga is the symphony its creator sought it to be.
