Skywalker Ranch (NBp) - Tragedy struck Skywalker Ranch, the home of Lucasfilm, today. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which was largely produced using the latest high-tech computer graphics and editing technology, was accidentally erased. The movie, which is the third highest grossing of all time, was expected to be digitally transferred to videotape, and now those hopes are lost.

"We had been saving all of our work to AOL floppy disks," explained Lucasfilm intern Veronica O'Reilly. "George [Lucas] really wanted to keep production costs down, so we used the AOL disks which were free. We didn't have enough to make backups, though.

"We had them sitting by the loading dock, because someone was supposed to take them to the safe deposit boxes at the bank. When I came to see if they had been taken yet, I noticed that someone had delivered 25 cases of Jar Jar magnetotherapy wristbands and anklebands and set them right next to the floppy disks. Sure, those wristbands will soothe and heal people, but magnets and floppies just don't mix. We quickly tried to check out the damage and see if we could read the data, but only 5 of the 150,000 disks were readable."

Like many tragedies, this one was preventable. Had they just saved the files on their hard drives, they could have just recopied them. Or, had they saved them to CD, they would not have been erased by the magnets.

"Thankfully, the only computer model we planned to reuse on the next movie was Jar Jar. So, it was no big loss," said O'Reilly.