Every now and then, via secret and arcane channels, I’ll get a message that Ford is doing something fun or interesting. This time when I held the warm, vibrating pigeon in my hands and removed the message capsule I found a rather cryptic message awaiting me: “MUSTANG GTD HOLOGRAPHIC BLUE.” What the hell is this about?
Here’s what it’s about. A color. A color for the $300,000 Mustang GTD, which already has a history of interesting colors, and specifically colors with sci-fi inspirations. I’m extremely pro-good, real colors on cars, because at the moment the global carscape is being swallowed by a massive grayscale kraken that is relentlessly sucking all the real colors out of the cars of Earth. It must be fought.
The color in question, Holographic Blue, is definitely and thankfully an actual color, a nice vivid shade of blue with some shimmering highlights, and looks like this:
Now, everyone can see that out in the world and appreciate the cerulean blue-ness of it all, but I do happen to have a little more information, specifically about what inspired this color: the crappiest tech in all of the greater Star Wars universe.
The Star Wars movie franchise, a series about a series of wars and skirmishes over galactic trade routes and various arcane tax laws, all taking place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, features a huge variety of extremely advanced fictional technology, including faster-than-light travel and communication, anti-gravity tech, highly advanced, even sentient robotics and AI, blue milk, and so much more. The series also features holographic display technology which, interestingly, sucks.
I mean, look at this most famous example, when the droid R2-D2 plays back the recorded plea for help from Princess Leia:
Now, remember, that’s a locally stored message! It didn’t have to be broadcast from anywhere! There should be no transmission issues or interference or anything! This is the best it can look.
I actually wrote about how bad it sucks way back in 2015:
Let me clarify a bit: why is the image quality of the vast majority of Star Wars holograms so sucky? Most holograms we see have a heavy bluish cast that washes out any color that may have actually made it into the image, they flicker and distort, they have huge scanlines—they suck.
The image quality is almost exactly like the 1979 12″ Montgomery Ward CRT television I found on a curb off Wilshire Blvd., except with holograms, I could walk around and see how shitty the image quality is from 360° glorious degrees.
…
At first I thought maybe it was because of the vast transmission distances involved – holograms seem to be much, much faster than light, so perhaps we can forgive the shitty quality, right?
…
But that doesn’t explain why they look so shitty. Or, maybe more importantly, why everyone seems okay with how shitty they look. You’d think a control freak like Darth Vader would have flipped out at some point and wondered why the fuck he can’t get a hologram of the Emperor that doesn’t look like a glowing blue dildo is talking to him on a table.
The image quality of Star Wars holograms is just awful. There’s very obvious vertical scanlines, blown-out details, flickering, shimmering, image distortion, and, yes, everything gets washed out into this bluish color that inspired this:
According to my Ford source, it’s definitely those shitty holograms that are the basis for this color! And, yes, I think I can see it in that blue, especially in the highlights, which look like the blown-out parts of those crappy holograms!
So, what should you do with this information? I guess when you go buy your Mustang GTD, and you decide you want a nice fetching blue, you can do so knowing that the color was directly inspired by the Star Wars universe’s shittiest technologies.
And, yes, I’m including their robot-torturing tech, too:
Man, those sickos.
Love that color, a LOT. It’d look nice on a Maverick IMO. Or my old Volvo or heck, even my old NA Miata, though I’ve got more pressing pending expenses than vanity paintjobs.
Still, a great color. 🙂
Carrie Fisher will always be my favorite Star Wars heroine, but that’s hardly surprising given my (middle) age. 😉
I would guess that the original hologram being projected by R2-D2, which doesn’t need a fancy projector as a mechanic droid, could mean something. That doesn’t explain the other shitty ones though.
Friends, please help me remember something:
There was a TV show in which the phrase “cerulean blue” was used to hypnotize / cast a spell on someone, causing them to drive into an oncoming truck, or something similar..
Does anyone remember the details?
Thanks!
X-files, that was an interesting episode.
Episode was named “Pusher”, as I recall.
Many believe the root cause of the resistance was the Empire trying to enforce the low resolution NTSC holographic broadcast format over the superior PAL format. This dispute arrested progress for centuries. An interesting historical note, the obscure SECAM holo format was used only on Aldoraan, which may have led to its choice for Death Star target practice.
I worked directly and indirectly in the television industry for over 40 years, and this made me LOL! “Never Twice Same Color” was the true meaning of NTSC, a station’s chief engineer once told me. Preparing for the transition to HDTV, he lamented that they were spending all this money on new equipment at a time America’s Funniest Home Videos was one of the most highly rated shows and its content obviously was not shot with HD cameras. Now, a decent cell phone shoots far higher quality video than any $50,000+ camera I used back then.
I worked for a company that made high quality satellite and cable broadcast equipment. We would route the video around the world in high quality only for it to be final broadcast in 480 horrible interlaced lines. Glad I could tickle a few memories.
It’s a tradeoff. I’d say despite the colour and signal sync shenanigans old analogue standards got the better deal. A lot of what you guys got back then was straight hardware footage where you could edit the CSL and HSV values either on the fly or on the storage medium with no upper or lower limit for chromaticity. Modern digital formats have hard limits for luminance and chromaticity to keep you within the CCIR 601 range that absolutely suck to try and work around, both for shooting and playback (ask me how I know). Thanks to this professional equipment like Black Magic URSA Minis mess with the resulting image in some way via software because their digital conversion range is less than the analogue range of old film cameras, so you’re getting an altered image from what the hardware captured and there’s no way to retrieve the data that’s lost from the alteration. In many instances the supposed “RAW” files the cameras produce are a lie as a result. Cellphones, point-and-shoots, and even professional DSLRs get even worse by using noise reduction and luminance leveling algorithms to try and “fix” the footage frame by frame, resulting in all sorts of fuckery like blue flickering to white every other frame for a few frames because the two are similar in the additive digital colour range or dark areas looking like they’ve been posterized because the software’s trying to flatten out the luminosity spikes by averaging from the entire frame’s minimum value instead of the image section’s maximum value. I would so trade for colour reproducibility issues instead of irrevocably limited rasterized footage any day.
As you probably realize, you can’t project light into empty air to resolve an image—the light needs to be reflected off of something.
But some people cleverer than me realized you could spray water vapor into the air to be that something, and shine a laser on that to create a video display. And it works, kinda. But it also kinda sucks. So George Lucas probably didn’t know and didn’t care, but the low-quality Star Wars holo displays are perhaps the most realistic technology in the franchise.
There’s also an edge of gritty durability to a lot of star wars tech that the engineer in me really likes. High definition displays are fancy, but thanks to their densely packed components they are also fragile and difficult to repair. For a struggling moisture farmer on some backwater planet, or a big bad Sith Lord on his battleship in the middle of an active war zone you don’t need fancy high resolution display that might be knocked out of action by a stray laser blast or some sandstorm, you need something that provides basic functionality all of the time, regardless of conditions and can be repaired easily if necessary. Like, the stuff shown in the original trilogy is very plausibly stuff that will last decades of hard wear, instead of needing to be upgraded every few years because it’s battery life has gone to shit.
We have similar things in real life- NASA still uses 20+ year old CPUs for it’s Mars rovers, because they are far more resiliant to getting blasted by cosmic radiation whereas the transistor sizes on modern CPU dies are small enough that one cosmic ray can wipe out a whole CPU.
Remember when the Occupy movement was a thing? Nobody really knew what they were fighting for but for a stint there everybody was printing out paper signs explaining why they were the 99% and holding them up for their webcams. One night I got bored and printed out a statement and GIMPed it into a screencap of young Luke Skywalker and uploaded that to FB. I’ve lost control of that meme over the years but googling “Luke Skywalker 99 percent” will always find it somewhere. I just found it on this website, no idea who joeydevilla is.
https://www.joeydevilla.com/2011/10/18/luke-skywalker-is-the-99/
Maybe if Luke hadn’t done such a half-ass job cleaning out all that carbon scoring R2-D2’s playback system would be working more clearly. But no… he didn’t want those droids cleaned up and at work in time. He wanted to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.
Don’t even get me started on how unmotivated Luke was to put a new motivator into R5-D4. Had he just bought that droid and fixed it Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru would be a lot less crispy.
Everyone knows that was a domestic squabble:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5HO70-Rk3jE
Props for correct spelling of Tosche!
Always thought Luke’s desire to pick up ‘power converters’ was a euphemism for something else..
He was supposed to meet Biggs Darklighter!
Actually if none of you have ever heard it, they made a radio show version of Star Wars. A new hope is about 5 hours long and adds TONS to Lukes life on Tatooine. Luke is still played by Mark Hammill too.
I listened to some of that! It was pretty neat.
More obviously resembles the milk on Tatooine.
That was the first thing I thought of as well. Why would you make it the weird milk color!? It can’t be unseen. Its like the stormtrooper faced rear end on the old Dodge Durango.
I love the color.
I love stupid sports cars with wings.
I love Star Wars holograms being “shitty”, feels authentic.
I don’t love that black graphic in front of the door. What is that?
The carbon fiber vent?
OR it is inspired by Bo-Katan Kryse’s Night Owl armor, which is really cool.
It is, but not holographic.
Too bad the GTD isn’t a diesel. A diesel Mustang would be fun and have lots of torque for a burnout yet be less powerful and less deadly at the cars and coffee…
This is not the color you were looking for…
Looks like a sparkly, slightly lighter version of Ford’s Vapor Blue, currently available on regular stuff and quite nice.
As long we don’t see anything labeled “Ford x Star Wars collab”, I’m cool with this. I hate that branding laziness.
STAR FORDS!!!!
I think the shittiness of the holograms adds to the timeless feel. Some people have sentient droid servants but also live in mud huts with automatic doors and live as subsistence farmers. It’s a weird mix of really advanced and really simple technology that hasn’t changed much in thousands of years. I feel like hologram technology is one area where the galaxy collectively decided that super crisp full-colour HD holograms weren’t worth the trouble, and instead built their systems for rugged simplicity. The image might be a crude mass of blue scanlines, but I bet those holoprojectors could be repaired in a field by any idiot with a hydrospanner and a spool of wire.
Totally. It’s a universe where medical technology can basically reverse death, but the preeminent soldiers of the time wear armor that doesn’t provide any protection whatsoever from commonly used weapons.
Lucas’ mashup of things both existing in and extrapolated from our world is the genius glue that holds everything together, as it’s both familiar and completely alien at the same time.
Apologist.
The shittiness of the holograms is deliberate. Pre-StarWars the society was worse, just look at the prequels. But pre the prequels it was even worser because they had an internet. Instant communication of everyone’s bullshit in crystal clear holograms. That whole “midi-chlorians” thing is classic internet misinformation.
In a successful bid to free themselves from endless 3D internet the society as a whole agreed to make the displays incapable of sending readable text, and added all the built-in distortion and fluffiness.
The blue colour is an effort to make hologram porn less appealing, by masking flesh tones and subliminally reminding them of the blue milk, which is not a sexy drink.
There’s a reason it looks like an old TV… for the original films at least, they videoed the actors, played it on a TV, and filmed the playback. So any crappiness is purposeful.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Color looks closer to the blue milk than the holograms.
As Padame would say, “It’s a good look.” 😉
I suppose that Josiah Wedgwood and his Jasperware range of the 1770’s with the use of barium sulphate and ‘heavy spar’ as colourants was not the inspiration then. Do the black bits in just off white, maybe with the odd classical maiden, and you have the perfect car to go into auntie’s nick-knack cabinet.
I’d love to see one in “gonk grey”!
Great color.
Ridiculous car.