The Clone Wars trailer includes one brief shot of a general and a politician talking via hologram to Mace Windu and Yoda — and the politician certainly looks like Governor Tarkin, who is destined to rise to the exalted rank of Grand Moff. Tarkin was a key ally of Senator Palpatine in his rise to imperial power, so it makes sense that we'll see more of him in Clone Wars, which takes place before Revenge Of The Sith.

And since the live-action Star Wars show takes place between Revenge Of The Sith and A New Hope, it may include Tarkin's rise to power. This is the era when Tarkin goes from being just another local ruler, of the Seswenna sector, to being the grandest of all the moffs. And who better to portray the scheming Tarkin's slow power grab than Scorpius himself?

The Tarkin-spotting exercise comes as part of an amazing post over at TheForce.net, where a designer compares screenshots from the Clone Wars trailer with the original designs from super-designer Ralph McQuarrie and the other designers who created the look of the original trilogy. The cool light patterns, weird arches and domes and other shapes look directly lifted from some of the original trilogy's drawings — including some concept art that was never used in the original films, such as the original Boba Fett armor. And one hallway scene from the trailer looks awfully like the inside of the original Death Star — could we see the Death Star under construction? [TheForce.net]

(Note: If I left someone out, chances are it's because I couldn't find any data. Feel free to add your own in the comments!)

The Enterprise-D, from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Power source: matter-antimatter reactor.
Energy output: 6.8 x 10^16 joules, based on the amount of energy it would take for the Enterprise to do significant damage to a Borg cube, according to this guy.

The Narn's Q'Guan Heavy Cruiser, from Babylon 5.
Power source: nuclear fusion.
Energy output: 7.08 x 10^22 joules, according to this site.

Omega Class Destroyer, from Babylon 5.
Power source: four General Fusion 650 high-energy fusion reactors, using gelled deuterium as fuel.
Energy output: 1.83 x 10^23 joules, according to the Cycrow site again.

Colonial Battlestar, from Battlestar Galactica.
Power source: Tyllium reactor.
Energy output: 4.6 x 10^24 joules, according to the Battlestar technical site.

Babylon 5 Station, from Babylon 5.
Power source: eight fusion reactors.
Energy output: 2.5 x 10^24 joules, according to several sites.

Zero Point Module, from Stargate.
Power source: Vacuum energy, from a pocket of subspace.
Energy output: 10^28 joules, according to this guy's back-of-the-envelope calculations.

The Death Star, from the original Star Wars.
Power source: Some kind of "hypermatter" fusion reactor.
Energy output: It would need to generate 2.4 x 10^32 joules of energy to destroy a planet such as Alderaan. Upper estimates of its power run to around 10^38 joules, or as much energy as our sun generates in 8,000 years, according to this site.

Ringworld, from Larry Niven's Ringworld novels.
Power source: Solar energy, collected by "shadow squares."
Energy output: To keep the whole shebang spinning at 770 miles per second, you'd need 1.6 x 10^39 joules, or our sun's output over 130,000 years, according to this site and a few others. We have a winner!

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• The Hatch System On Lost: If you're going to conduct secret experiments, keep people quarantined, and then spy on them, what better than to do it through a series of mysterious hatches that lead to a series of interconnected lairs which look like they could have been built by the Viet Cong with a budget? Plus some of them come stocked with products that look like they come from Amway, old school computers, a workout area, an armory stocked with weapons, and Mama Cass albums. Fully furnished.
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• The Batcave From Any Incarnation of Batman: If you're rich enough to own a giant manor out on the edge of town, and you're a secret vigilante, then of course you're going to want to build a giant lair in the cave system underneath your house. It could house your sweet custom car, your supercomputing computers, and a big giant penny. Of course, you'd have to deal with your crime fighting friends and foes building things like the Arrow Cave (Green Arrow) and the Cat Cave (Catwoman), but it would be a small price to pay.
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• Mr. Universe's Satellite Broadcast Station from Serenity: If you're a reclusive techno-geek who intercepts signals and watches television 24 hours a day, then you'd want your own giant, orbiting headquarters that could snag signals down from everywhere in the universe and rebroadcast them whenever you felt like it. Sort of like your own personal intergalactic YouTube. Plus in your spare time you can build a hot love-bot to marry and get busy with. All the comforts of home. Of course, it wasn't that "secret" of a place, since no one seemed to have trouble finding it.
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• Any of Doctor Evil's secret lairs from the Austin Powers movies: Okay, he's built himself a moonbase with a giant laser, a secret volcano lair, and perhaps the most insidious of all, the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. Inside he has his lackeys working on everything from time travel to death beams to air fresheners, and you have to admit they are always quite roomy and accommodating. The only caveat is that when you build a secret volcano lair to hide your evil empire, it's probably not best to carve your visage on the side of it.
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• Superman's Fortress of Solitude: When you really need to get away but don't want to head off-planet, you can't go wrong with the North Pole as far as isolation is concerned. However, what about construction problems? Not an issue when you just throw a crystal into the snow and it grows itself. It might look like a crystal palace in the movies and on television, but in the comics Superman built the place himself, and it had everything from a giant dinosaur robot, to a machine that could synthesize any food he could think of. Hey, he couldn't let Batman outdo him.
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• The Death Star: If you're thinking going overboard when you build your secret lair, don't half-ass it. Once the scales are tipped, just go ahead and go balls out and pour your limitless funds and manpower into the construction of a base so big, it gets mistaken for a small moon. Add fleets of ships, massive armies, and trash-compactor monster, and a massive planet-destroying weapon, and you've got a base that'll make people crap their pants. Until some insolent farm boy comes and fucks with your ventilation system. Jackass.
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After a brief intro during which the retards at FOX are merciless slagged, killed and ground into a fine pink powder, the real action begins. Creator Matt Groening's old cast is fully revived, but the plot is built primarily around 20th-century refugee Fry, one-eyed love-interest Leela and, of course, Bender the alcoholic misanthropic robot. A time-travel storyline pushes everything forward (and back, and forward, and back-back, and... well, sometimes you just want to slap a guy like writer David X. Cohen), as a trio of nudist aliens enslave Bender and use him to raid the treasure-chest of human history. A subplot involves Leela, Fry, a guy who works at a museum of preserved heads, and a narwhal in a romantic quadrangle.

Thankfully, it all culminates it a magnificent battle sequence in which the Futurama crew takes to space and puts a hurt on the nudists aliens' fleet of solid-gold, jewel-encrusted Death Stars. Unfortunately, a late time-travel joke involving an infinity of Benders kicks off a cascade of temporal paradoxes and, we guess, initiates the obliteration of the space-time continuum. Har har!

Futurama was always kinda fun, but its was weighed down by show-offy writing, as if its staff needed to prove that they could be oh-so smarter and somehow more Harvardy than The Simpsons staff. Its overall ideology of humor had worn thin when it got the axe. Now, revived and strung out, it verges on embarrassing.

Boy, does that Futurama crew ever think Fox is a band of imbeciles! The first ten minutes of the movie is an attack on the network suits, with retribution for premature axing of a show that never had good ratings to begin with meted out in classic, knee-jerk gag-writer fashion: The execs are ground into a fine pink powder that has a multitude of uses, from weaponization to soothing jock itch.

The plot exerts, overexerts, and then overexerts some more. It's a time-travel conceit, with the Bender the alcoholic robot sent back and forth across the continuum by nude aliens to steal Earth's most lucrative treasures (the Mona Lisa, the Guttenberg Bible, heaps of precious metals). The head nude space alien talks like Paul Lynde. Fortunately, the animation is awesome, culminating in a legitimately thrilling space battle in which the Futurama cast wins back the planet by decimating the nude aliens' fleet of solid-gold-and-jewel-encrusted Death Stars.

The best part of the whole evening was when the projector went haywire and the actors, led by voice-of-Bender John DiMaggio and Groening himself, were forced to do some improv group standup. Afterwards, our correspondent fled before they turned on the booze spigot for fear that Katey "Voice of Leela" Sagal would have one too many Heinekens and want to start feeding him miniature chocolate merlot cupcakes.

Not surprisingly, almost everyone involved with Futurama thinks citizens of the future will study the show. "This show get more right than previous depictions of the future," said Phil "Voice of Hermes the Jamaican Bureaucrat" LaMarr. "They're gonna say 'Those guys were pretty close,'" said Maurice "Voice of Morbo" LaMarche.

Head writer David X. Cohen was a tad overawed by the bright lights. "This is return in style!" he said of the release, which is the first of four full-length Futurama DVDs to be produced. He also tossed props of a haughty sort to the Internet faithful: "It's a great example of the DVD age and rabid fandom coming together."

Rabid indeed.

Groening rolled up late to the carpet in a stretch limo and, not noticing that he had missed a button on the fly of his jeans, said that if he could go back in time like Bender, it would be the Disneyland of the Eisenhower Era, when creative geniuses of immense net worth such as himself could get in and not have to wait in line for 17 hours to check out the new Nemo ride.