May the Fourth might sound innocent enough…if you’ve never heard or seen Star Wars or Star Wars Day. If you have, you might notice that it sounds pretty close to the series’ trademark phrase, ‘May the Force be with you.’
Some fans thought so too and so, May 4 officially became Star Wars Day. Celebrating May the Fourth has gotten so widespread that fans the world over celebrate it now.
This year, we were part of a lucky few invited to join Disney at the Sandcrawler in Singapore for the first ever official Star Wars day celebration here.
Disney’s chosen to hold the event in a small section in The Sandcrawler, and we were all ushered up there as soon as registration was done.
Just as the lift door opened, we were greeted by these two guys.
Moving on, we finally got to the main area, where we were greeted by a statue of BB-8 and a magnificent reproduction of Steve McQueen’s Le Mans (1971) movie poster. There are tons more scattered (of various old movies) throughout the space, which we’re told are all George Lucas’ favourites.
We love that the event was rather intimate; being crammed into venue might seem like a weird thing to love but it got us up close with the 501st Legion (Singapore Garrison), a group of hardcore Star Wars fans, who cosplay as the various characters in the series.
They don’t just do the main characters like Darth Vader or Anakin Skywalker, but also dress up as bit players like TIE pilots, Imperial Officers and even random Jedi Knights. Being so close got us the chance to REALLY admire the detail that went into the costumes.
Accompanying the 501st Legion were also the guys from Fightsaber Singapore. Like their name suggests, these guys (and some gals) are hardcore lightsaber duelists.
They choreograph their own fights, and we were incredibly lucky to catch a glimpse of them in action in one of their live performance slots of the day.
Yeah, they’re awesome.
Fightsaber Singapore also held a lightsaber training session…which unfortunately we weren’t able to join. We tried mind tricks, we tried bribery, we even tried begging but the session’s only for kids…which is weird since we’re kids at heart too!
If you’re not a fan of the activities, the event also had some cool collectible stuff!
It might seem large and unwieldy but that centerpiece up there of Jabba’s Sail Barge is an incredibly rare piece of merchandise. It’s new but only about 5000 of them were made, and only for pre-orders on HasLab. To see one of them in real life was actually pretty cool!
In another corner, we also have even more toys on display. We think some of these are from the Black Series, the Star Wars line geared for collectors, but we’re betting the spacecraft are from other high end creators.
We’re also really taken by the small diorama featuring the Battle of Naboo from Episode 1.
On top of that, there were also showings of Star Wars cartoons and the latest Rise of the Skywalker trailer in the auditorium. We weren’t able to catch them sadly (since they were showing at timed intervals). We missed them since we were too busy shopping…
If you wanted to show your love for the series by spending money, you could do that do at the Merchandise area.
It was constantly jam packed with people, with pretty good deals on Star Wars themed shirts, toys and even some Tsum Tsums. Oh…and it had a huge ass wall of Funko POP! figurines, each going for $10.
We hung around here the most (which was why we missed the cartoon and trailer showings in the auditorium), looking for bargains on awesome stuff and came away with a decent haul; netting a Chewbacca faux-leather drawstring bag, a mug and an Ewok (Wicket) pouch.
We had a really great time at the event, in no small part due to the fans from the 501st Legion and Fightsaber Singapore.
We’d also like to credit Anaqi for being our gracious model in the pictures with the 501st Legion!
Finally, we’d also like to give a shoutout to the people at Disney for inviting us over to join them for the festivities! It was a REALLY awesome event!
See you guys again next year!
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
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