​Since 1977, George Lucas licensed companies like Del-Rey, Marvel, Dark Horse, and Bantam Publishing to sell you paper with the words "Star Wars" somewhere on the cover. He's also allowed several companies to make videogames with "Star Wars" on the title screen, and then created LucasArts to churn them out more efficiently. And it was only a year later that the first Star Wars cartoon came out, although they got significantly better after 2002. In all of these, we've seen epic tales of bravery, joke stories about the droids, and some truly wonderful little tales that, for one reason or another, you might have missed (shame on you). The good news is that there's a lot of badassery there, and in this age of trade paperbacks and DVD sets, you can catch pretty much all of the best ones. For the purposes of the article, we're sticking to the eras of the movies; surely you can find other nerds who can  direct you to Kinghts of the Old Republic if you're looking for a Star Wars adventure minus anyone from the movies. This way, we get to show more really awesome stories about Boba Fett.

​Let's be honest gang, much as the 12-year old-versions of ourselves who got stuffed into lockers by guys in letterman jackets might hate to admit it, there aren't that many differences between comic book/sci-fi fans (from here on known as nerds) and sports fans. Plus, if you think about it, it's not the jocks who can tell you that former Detroit Tiger Ty Cobb held the record for most stolen bases at 892 until 1977 when Billy Hamilton came along and broke that record, but the guys who watched all the games at home or played team manager for the school team. Heck, some of us collectors even got our start with sports trading cards before moving on to those rad Marvel Super Heroes cards and eventually comics. So, with that in mind, we'd like to not only bring people together, but also make insulting broad generalizations about both by looking at the six ways nerds and sports fans are alike in increasing levels of obsessive nerdiness.

Daily List suggested by Guphynda.

​Every March 17th, everyone is Irish. We watch parades, drink green beer and toast St. Patrick for apocryphally banishing snakes from Ireland and other wonderful feats we assume happened. And like Christmas and Easter, St. Patrick's Day has its own colorful mascot -- the tiny leprechaun, clad in green, obsessed with gold, and talking in rhyme like a bad Irish stereotype. He's a trickster character, but doesn't really mean any harm... most of the time. For some reason, most leprechauns that end up in pop culture are invariably kind of evil. I mean, there are some leprechauns you nae wanna mess with, no matter how big their pot of gold is. Here are the 8 nastiest of the bunch.

​Game Informer magazine ranked Kingdom Hearts as one of the top games of all time, and in almost every sense, it is. No one knew ahead of time how wonderful it would be to combine Square Enix's popular Final Fantasy games with the sure-fire hit of Disney properties in one mega action-RPG, but the result worked together like chocolate and peanut butter, except sold for $50-60 a pop. Disney fans, Square Enix zombies, and even regular gamers loved the result

The series has already based levels off classic Disney worlds like Wonderland, Atlantis, and the Beast's Castle, but also oddballs like Tron, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Monstro's gastrointestinal system. So what's next? Surely the series won't end with only two major games (no need to count the many, ridiculously named handheld games), and Square will need some new lands for Sora and crew to explore. Where should the Kingdom Hearts franchise go? We have a few ideas.

​"I'm from a little place called England, we used to run the world before you lot." - Ricky Gervais

Much fuss has been made over how the British mine comedy from the uncomfortable moments that pepper everyday life. There has been equal attention paid to how the stiff-upper-lippedness commonplace amongst the English after World War II affected their comedic sensibilities. Yet one facet of British comedy that never seems to get enough attention is the role that music plays in some of the country's funniest TV exports. Just as John, Paul, George and Ringo changed music; Monty Python -- frequently dubbed "The Beatles of comedy" -- forever altered their countrymen's approach to getting laughs by frequently mixing their trademark absurdity with music. This is a trait that many subsequent Britcoms have thankfully followed. Obviously, American shows have gotten plenty of laughs from featuring goofy songs too. But somehow it seems more inspired when the Brits do it (you know how calling an umbrella a "parasol" seems classier? Same basic premise). So the time has come to analyze which songs from British comedy shows are the funniest, catchiest and overall best. A quick word: In the name of fairness and because so many Britcoms rely heavily on music, only one song per series was allowed (otherwise there's a good chance this list would have been 75% Python songs). Now, let's see if your favorites made the cut...

​Over the last couple of decades, movies based on comics have become the mainstream. Superhero films have become the fuel that powers the summer box office, stylized war epics and crime stories have made Frank Miller a franchise all to himself and more and more comics miniseries seem more or less written to be film pitches (I'm looking at you, Mark Millar).

But not every movie based on a comic or a graphic novel is so clearly defined by its source material. For whatever reason -- maybe the movie's trying to appeal to an artier crowd or the producers want to sell it as a more straightforward thriller--- some comics films don't get promoted as such, and without the colorful characters and themes most people identify with comics, it's not obvious that they're the source material. Like, for instance, these (mostly) recent movies right here.

Matt Wilson is ruler of the website The ISS and author of the new book Hate You Forever: How to Channel Your Rage into Effective Supervillainy. If you're contemplating a life of evil, why not check it out?

​Nerd actors have it all. Their own signing booth at Comic-Con, their own fan-made action figures, and all the sweet nerd ass they can handle on a regular basis. But sometimes they get itchy. Sometimes they try to branch out into other avenues of entertainment like literature, or painting, or even... music. Oh, the music. Too many actors have assumed that dramatic skill translates to golden pipes, and, with a few notable exceptions, they've all been proven horribly, horribly wrong.

The problem is, these guys don't learn from one another. Just because a beloved nerdy TV star in the '60s made an inappropriate and terrible album, they never assume total singing failure will happen to them as well. Indeed, the whole Golden Throats CD collection from Rhino spotlights these misguided warblers The lesson? If you're on a popular nerdy TV series or movie franchise, don't suddenly assume that makes you some kind of a vocalist, people. It doesn't, and here's 10 chilling examples as proof.

​Twilight sucks. Anyone with at least a quarter-brain knows this to be fact. But we're not here to argue the literary merits -- or lack their of -- of a book series completely devoid of anything even remotely close to resembling a well-put-together story or character depth. No, instead we look at Twilight's greatest detriment to pop culture: the complete and utter butchery of the vampire mythos.

Vampires drink blood. Human blood, specifically. They don't get to just drink animal blood, go on their hunky dory way without any type of drawback and then make idiotic jokes about being "vegetarians." Vampires stay out of the sunlight lest they burst into flames. They certainly do not sparkle as though somebody blasted them with a shotgun full of rhinestones. Those are called pixies. And as for vampire baseball... fuck you, Meyer. The vampires on this list certainly do not represent the cream of the crop themselves. However, despite their relative lameness they still kick the shit out of Twilight's sorry excuse for the bloodsucking undead.

Dudes, Final Fantasy XIII comes out today. I could give a shit about today's DVDs releases even if they were good, which they're not. So instead of bothering with the meager DVD offerings today, why not just watch the above video of FFXIII's trailer history?

• Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone
Hey, did you buy the Evangelion 1.01 movie DVD when Funimation released it four fucking months ago? Would you like to buy it again with some of its lighting issues fixed? This isn't double-dipping, this is pure fuckery.

• Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn Vol. 1
This series is noteworthy for two reasons: 1) it's the Universal Century Gundam story in forever, and 2) it's an Amazon exclusive. Apparently Bandai has finally realized that less a thousand Americans like Gundam (besides Gundam Wing) and more or less given up.

• Tremors: The Complete Series
There was a Tremors TV series? Weird.

• Wrath of the Titans
This is a motion comic based on a supposedly Ray Harryhausen-"guided" sequel comic to the original Clash of the Titans movie. That seems... unlikely. However, the company that made the comic is Bluewater Productions, who made that Stephanie Meyer bio comic, so... it's probably even more unlikely.

• Dino Squad: Mutant Mayhem
what

​Thanks go to Topless Robot reader The Great A'tuin, one of the winners of the TR Daily List Suggestion Contest, for making everyone feel dirty.

Anime fans do love their special vocabulary. "Anime" sounds more exotic than "Japanese cartoons," just as "manga" seems better than "Japanese comics." And it's much more dignified to say "fan service" instead of "naked cartoon women, giant robots, and other nonsense that panders to people who are way too into this stuff." Technically, the term "fan service" can be applied to any frivolous thing that courts hardcore followers, whether it's a sly in-joke or some cameo by an obscure character. But let's not lie: most of the time, anime fan service refers to animated tits and ass.

But what are the worst kinds of fan service? There's certainly no shortage of anime dedicated to showing boobs and underwear and heaven knows what else, and that pool gets even larger and filthier if you explore the anime-porn market. And we'd just as soon not explore that. We maintain that the most damaging fan service comes from non-pornographic anime that goes above and beyond the usual silliness, whether it's an exceptionally shameless display or a bizarre case of slobbery-nerd-bait dragging down an otherwise straight-faced production. Join us if you like, but you probably won't want to do it at work.