The Morning After: Disney reveals a better kind of lightsaber

It's amazing that the Star Wars juggernaut (enabled by the Disney industrial complex) has managed to ringfence one entire day each year to peddle new shows, movies, toys and the rest. If you survived yesterday without seeing Gandalf doing the Spock salute with some white text saying May The Fourth Be With You, you're living a better life than me. Sneering aside, I got something out of May 4th -- the briefest glimpse of a'working' lightsaber that extends and retracts a blade of what looks like light. The device definitely looks far more expensive than my double-edged Dark Maul saber from 1999, and there doesn't appear to be a plastic tube in sight. Patents unearthed after Disney showed off the saber suggest the blade is composed of LED-illuminated plastic, bright enough to obscure the fact it isn't actually a laser that could cut a robot in half.