Mix fanboys, LucasFilm, and conspiracy theory, and you’ve got something of a perfect storm, which is what’s been brewing over at Harry Knowles’ Aint It Cool News site. Readers have been sounding fury ever since Knowles’ pan of the upcoming animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars was pulled from the site.

Actually, “pan” is pretty gentle – a copy of Knowles’ review was re-posted in the forums over at fark.com, and after some dilly-dallying and a lustful aside about Hasbro’s new Millennium Falcon toy, he finally gets down to business: “I hated the film. HATED IT. REALLY HATED IT.”

The famously un-self-censoring TalkBackers (commenters in AICN’s online forum) speculated wildly about the review’s abrupt disappearance, and the story quickly caught on in the blogosphere. AICN’s Moriarty responded yesterday evening, saying that Knowles pulled the review voluntarily after he was “was contacted and told about the embargo by [distributor] Warner Bros.” Another review, this time by Massawyrm, was posted Tuesday morning, and it too was pulled shortly afterward. Moriarty chalked the situation up to “poor communication behind the scenes” and stressed that, as he understood it, “LucasFilm did not directly contact the site.”

While Moriarty makes, in my mind, the perfectly reasonable point that, even if trades like Variety have chosen to ignore it, an embargo is an embargo (“Welcome to the world of playing by the rules,” as he puts it). However, some readers seem to have a problem with his “no big deal, let’s move along” attitude. As one talkbacker, ribbitking, put it in a post titled “My problem with your post….”:

“…Is the attitude that you are so ‘professional’ that the normal AICN user just can’t understand why something like this would happen. I would quote your post, but pretty much all of it has pointless superiority all over it. Reviews got posted, Reviews got pulled… the average reader wants to know why = us blowing things out of proportion? Thx dad”

Whether you call it a minor kerfuffle or a full-blown crisis, it’s doubtful AICN’s readership will take a hit – but I wonder if it will magnify a divide in the public perception of AICN, between those who love the site for its chummy insider status and those that want it to tip away from backscratching.

This article appears in August 8 • 2008.

A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands.

SUPPORT US

A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Kimberley has written about film, books, and pop culture for The Austin Chronicle since 2000. She was named Editor of the Chronicle in 2016; she previously served as the paper’s Managing Editor, Screens Editor, Books Editor, and proofreader. Her work has been awarded by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia for excellence in arts criticism, team reporting, and special section (Best of Austin). The Austin Alliance for Women...