Trebuchet here with some Avengers movie speculation.

There hasn’t been this much buzz over something so small and pink since the Clinton Administration. I speak of course of what appears to be a Skrull board game piece that MTV (they’re still around?), discovered at a toy fair.

The board game in question is The Avengers: Mighty Battle and it’s hard to argue that the piece in questions isn’t a Skrull.  This could mean that Joss Whedon’s adamant proclamation that there aren’t any Skrulls in the upcoming Avengers movie is just a diversion… but…

Apparently, Fox may own the rights to “Skrulls” through its Fantastic Four License. So what gives? The way I see it, one of two things is happening.  Either Joss managed to get the rights to the name from his dear, dear friends at Fox, or more likely, they aren’t Skrulls.  We’re probably looking at “Chitauri”, which are basically Skrulls of another flavor.  It’s kinda like saying, that’s not a “Grizzly” bear, it’s a “Kodiak”!  The Chitauri showed up as the big bad in the 2006 animated movie Ultimate Avengers: The Movie, so they have that going for them. Either way, I can’t wait until May!

The Avengers drops into theatres on May 4th.

(via MTV Geek)

Back in 1999, a high school buddy of mine and I caught that case of Skywalking Pneumonia that seemed to be going around that May, and we went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for an opening matinee. A couple of hours later, we walked out and said, “Um… it had lightsabers. Lightsabers are cool. Right? I mean, I thought they were… cool… and there were – Exactly what the fuck just happened to us? Why do we suddenly miss Ewoks? And if I hear the word ‘Meesa,’ I swear before God I will plow this car into a fucking abutment!”

Since then, there’s been a lot of hyperbolic talk about George Lucas raping childhoods, while Lucas defended himself by saying The Phantom Menace was meant to be a kids’ movie, but the bottom line is that a lot of people see the movie as a filthy aberration. And I am one of them… to the point that I never paid to see another Star Wars movie in the theater again (I was, um, provided a copy of the 2002 leak of Attack of The Clones, and I saw Revenge of the Sith at a free advance screening sponsored by the radio station I worked for).

Well, it is now thirteen years later. And despite Lucas’s tone-deaf verbal defenses of the movie in the face of fan revolt, there is finally, all in one day, two pieces of concrete evidence that we fans were right.