Category: Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

What Star Wars Can Learn From Glee

Posted on April 1, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

As we’ve said over and over on this site, D-Day didn’t just mean more Star Wars movies—it meant a new paradigm entirely for the franchise. The old ways of attracting new fans are slowly but surely producing diminishing returns. It’s time, I believe, for Star Wars to expand its horizons, and take lessons not just from other successful “geek” franchises, but from all sorts of broadly popular media, so as to attract new generations of people who aren’t already lining up for Comic-Con every year.

One great example of a franchise that’s phenomenally successful, critically beloved, and primed for crossover pollenation with Star Wars is, of course, the TV series Glee. Allow me to extrapolate. Read More

Escape Pod: Hoojibs

Posted on March 18, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

As I’ve mentioned before, my first exposure to Star Wars was the Special Editions. When they were released in a VHS box set later in 1997, each tape began with a little 10-minute featurette detailing some of the changes made to that particular film. Being brand-new to the franchise, these featurettes were my first exposure to George Lucas, Rick McCallum, Dennis Muren, and so on, and the behind-the-scenes world of Star Wars as a whole—and as such, they’ve stuck in my head in a way that weirdly eclipses their actual importance as early “bonus content”. Case in point: my op-ed category title here at Eleven-ThirtyEight, Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks, comes from a quote by Mark Hamill referring to the Death Star battle in A New Hope.

Another line that’s always stuck with me comes from a little later, when Lucas is discussing the dewbacks—whose presence on Tatooine was scaled back due to the limitations of the physical puppetry at the time. The formative ingredients of Star Wars’ universe, he said, were plot, naturally, his own “psychological eccentricities” (no kidding, right?), and finally, whimsy: “I wanted to give a kind of random, real-world feel to everything.” The dewbacks, he explained, were there for whimsy. Read More

Checks and Balances, Part II – What the Force Wants

Posted on March 10, 2014by Feature Articles, Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

In Part I of Checks and Balances, I speculated that Anakin Skywalker’s true purpose as the Chosen One was not only to kill Darth Sidious, but to “prune” an ineffectual and misguided Jedi Order down to a lower number which could more easily evolve to meet the challenges of the modern galaxy. Not everyone will agree with a perspective that doesn’t necessarily see the Jedi as positive actors in the Force’s interests, but it was important to start there so that you might understand where I’m coming from here in Part II.

A few years back, while reading a book on demography called The Coming Population Crash, I started wondering what the Jedi Order would look like if unchallenged for its entire 25,000-year history, given what we’ve seen of Force sensitivity’s heritability. From there, it occurred to me that perhaps the Sith were meant to exist, from a cosmic point of view—that widespread, high-level Force use was something of a threat to the general galactic population, and the fact that both Jedi and Sith—in service of the Force’s natural dualism—were constantly trying to wipe each other out was in reality a form of population control, baked into the galaxy’s natural state, to keep it from ending up with a civilization comprised entirely of dangerous and unpredictable Force wielders.
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Checks and Balances, Part I – Son of the Suns

Posted on March 7, 2014by Feature Articles, Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

obi-chosenone

This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.

—Revenge of the Sith, by Matthew Stover [1]Per the introduction, all quotations in this piece come from Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover.

In my ongoing feature The Expanded Universe Explains, I go out of my way to maintain a lighthearted, conversational tone to add a little flavor to what is essentially just a recitation of secondhand information—book x said this, which was expanded upon by a stray line in reference book y. It’s all fairly absolute, to the extent that made-up information can ever be absolute.

What I mean to say is, I originally thought about covering this topic in an EU Explains piece, but I have to admit that as clear as it may seem to me, there are few things in the Star Wars saga that are more subjective than the Prophecy of the Chosen One. Reasonable minds can disagree on the following, but this is How I See It.

What does it mean for Anakin Skywalker to have brought balance to the Force?

When those blades met, it was more than Yoda against Palpatine, more the millennia of Sith against the legions of Jedi; this was the expression of the fundamental conflict of the universe itself.

Light against dark.

Winner take all.

Like most things of any significance in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, the history of the Sith is long and convoluted. By the time you read these words, the final thirteen episodes of The Clone Wars will have made their debut on Netflix, including an arc revolving around this very subject. But while the details are constantly evolving (to use a charitable word), what we can say is this: the dark side has always been with us.
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References
↑1 Per the introduction, all quotations in this piece come from Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover.

The Expanded Universe Explains, Vol. VI

Posted on February 18, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

yoda escape pod concept

13. How did Obi-Wan know where Yoda was?

First, some background.

Dagobah, while not being at all noteworthy in a political sense, is a fairly noteworthy planet as far as the Force is concerned. It was “discovered” and subsequently forgotten multiple times over the years, and one survey team actually found that life there was abnormally ripe for genetic and medicinal research (remeber Luke’s “massive life form readings”?). Likewise, one of the reasons Yoda chose to hide there was because it was so choked with myriad other life forms that his own Force presence would be largely subsumed and harder to detect. Whether the strong Force signature caused the biological potency or vice-versa is pretty much a “chicken v. egg” situation, so it’s easier to just look at Dagobah as the Amazon rain forest of the Star Wars galaxy—teeming not just with life, but with an abnormal variety of life with abornally unique properties.

One thing that tends to bug hardcore Expanded Universe fans is the unusual amount of important events and/or people on Tatooine—a planet that’s very explicitly stated to be the ass end of space, but is constantly revisited due to its iconic status. Dagobah has a similar problem, relatively speaking, but its role as a major waypoint in the Force-User’s Guide to the Galaxy is, as I’ve discussed before, the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card where coincidental arrivals are concerned. As such, there are a couple options for the origin of the dark-side cave, but the most likely candidate these days is a duel between an errant unnamed Dark Jedi Master and the Jedi Knight Minch—who was sort of a wink-wink, nod-nod stand in for a younger Yoda himself—in 700 BBY. The Dark Jedi was killed, leaving a stain on that location around which the cave eventually evolved. The origin of this story was a reference all the way back in Heir to the Empire to Yoda killing a Dark Jedi there; Lucas gospel, however, maintains that Yoda had never been to Dagobah prior to Revenge of the Sith, hence the stand-in. The death of a major dark-sider leaving a mark like that is pretty standard fare; in fact, one of the more creative fan theories going around in the early days of the prequels was that Naboo would somehow become Dagobah, and the cave was the spot where Darth Maul had died.
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