STAR WARS MEETS KEN BURNS: Dan Drezner and a couple of friends have put together a delightful parody of Ken Burns’s Civil War series, using the Star Wars civil war instead of the real-world one. It’s a happy reminder of a phenomenon I first wrote about in 1998 whose positive aspects have become too easy to forget in today’s grouchy environments. Dan writes:

But the above video should also remind us of one of the Internet’s glories: It’s the place to discover that there are other people out there who share your enthusiasms, and can help you express those enthusiasms in socially tolerant ways. Yes, LOTS of people are “Star Wars” fans, but only a small fraction of these people probably “get” the idea of mashing up “Star Wars” with a 25-year-old PBS civil war documentary. In the pre-Internet age, I suspect Rosenberg, Bunch and I would have just kept these quirky thoughts to ourselves, unaware that others might share the same goofball enthusiasm. Thanks to the Long Tail, however, we have discovered that we were not alone. And discovering that you are not alone is a pretty wonderful feeling in this galaxy.

I can’t figure out how to get PJ Media and the WaPo site to cooperate with an embedded video, but you can see the here.