The CNN/Star Wars Connection: More Than Just James Earl Jones

Ahh, election day news coverage. The one time of year when The Daily Show/Colbert Report’s potent blend of absurdity and silly pomposity is somehow less funny than actual cable networks.

CNN and MSNBC seemed to be having a Star-Wars-Off.

There’s Wolf Blitzer, talking to a hologram of a correspondent. Why? Because CNN likes to imagine the future of news the only way they know how: through the lens of a child's imagination in the 1970's.

Wouldn’t it have been cheaper and less goofily bizarre to simply do a satellite interview like they do every other day of the year? Of course. But on Election Day, audiences expect something new. Something with "zazz."

Or something that’ll at least make audiences instinctively answer, “Obi-wan? D’ya think she means ‘Old Ben’ Kenobi?” to their TVs.

Not to be outdone, MSNBC stuck their people on a set that was made almost entirely out of CGI effects.

You know how the Star Wars prequels were kind of hard to watch, like, on a conceptual level? It was because your eyes were constantly telling your brain to pretend that something that simply wasn’t there was real and interacting with the actual humans standing in front of it?

You shouldn’t have that happening while trying to hear some election results.

And if you’re asking, “Well, what did Fox News have?”, the answer is: an existential crisis.