There's a new Vader in town, according to not-quite-100%-certain news reports which say that teen actor Hayden Christensen has been cast as Anakin Skywalker in the next Star Wars flick.
Anakin, don't you know, becomes the vile Darth Vader later in the series. (Then at the very end he becomes a good guy again and floats into the sky next to Alec Guiness and a Muppet.)
Who is Hayden Christensen? He's a "Canadian hottie" and co-star of the TV show Higher Ground. Supposedly he landed the role last week after a screen test opposite actress Natalie Portman.
Six weeks ago Christensen got the same number of searches as grape seed extract and Nova Scotia real estate; last week he got as many as Ralph Lauren and New York Yankees. He's hot.
All of which makes us wonder if Star Wars is on the Lycos 50 to stay until the next movie comes out in 2002. Between video releases, DVD releases, and hype about the upcoming flicks, the series seems to have taken a permanent place in the public psyche.
Oddly, users seem more obsessed with the Star Wars villains and sidebar characters than with the heroes. Here are last week's most-searched-for characters, with the percentage of queries they received among all characters:
1. Darth Maul (28.1%)
2. Yoda (11.1%)
3. Jar Jar Binks (10.4%)
4. Luke Skywalker (10.3%)
5. Darth Vader (9.2%)
6. Boba Fett (8.9%)
7. R2 D2 (6.9%)
8. Queen Amidala(4.1%)
9. Princess Leia (3.4%)
10. Obi-Wan Kenobi (2.8%)
11. Oola (2.7%)
12. Ewoks (2.1%)
Oola, incidentally, is the gal who dances at Jabba the Hutt's place in The Return of the Jedi.
And among those who had zero user searches all of last week: Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3P0, Mace Windu, Emperor Palpatine and (my own favorite) Grand Moff Tarkin.
