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Star Wars Fun Fact
Surprising and little known Star Wars tidbits, occasionally related to today’s Force Feature.Did you know? When Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie tied the knot recently, they didn’t ask just any old celebrity photographer to capture the event. No, they asked David James, a highly regarded still photographer who’s also currently working on Star Wars: Episode VII. If you want someone to do it right, get someone from Star Wars to do it!
Life on “Tweet”-ooine
A featured dispatch from the Star Wars Twitterverse!This Explains A Lot… #StarWars H/T @wolfcat pic.twitter.com/yhqwRPID2X
— Dorksidetoys (@DorksideToys) August 31, 2014
Star Wars Swag Bag
So many fun, quirky, and awesome ways to bring Star Wars into your daily life!Star Wars Air Fresheners – click the pic for details!
Trivia Time!
Test your knowledge of the Star Wars universe!Yesterday’s answer: Darth Vader
Today’s question: What’s the predominant environment of Yavin’s fourth moon?
Force Feature: The Insult King and Queen of the Star Wars Movies
Exploring the many worlds of Star Wars, in the imagination and in real life!I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Star Wars universe is filled with insults.
From the very beginning, when R2-D2 delivers the first insult of the films within the opening scenes of Star Wars, to Anakin and Sebulba giving each other the business (“slave scum,” “slime ball,” “Bantha poodoo”), the movies wouldn’t be half as much fun without the characters all being snappy and snappish with each other.
Incidentally, I like that Sebulba sinks to Anakin’s level in the name-calling. What, is he suddenly nine years old, too?
And even Chewbacca gets in on the fun. You know he said something about Ben Kenobi that wasn’t polite, because Han agreed with him before asking Luke where’d he’d dug up “that old fossil.” And he loves a good burn, too. The only time he laughs in the whole original trilogy is when Leia calls Han “laser brain.”
Speaking of Leia, you probably saw this coming, that she’s our Queen of Insults for the Star Wars movies. The Star Wars movies as they stand now suffer from a lack of feminine wiles, though Carrie Fisher is so awesome and powerful a presence in the movies, you almost wouldn’t notice that there’s barely any other women. In fact, we’ll be pursuing the women of Star Wars, or lack thereof, on a future episode.
That’s all a long way around of saying that she doesn’t have much competition for the Queen of Insults title, but she certainly earns the crown on her own merits. Here’s just a sample:
To Luke: “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?”
About Chewie: “Will somebody get this big walking carpet out of my way?”
To Han: “Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking Nerf herder!”
Taking on both Han and Chewie: “I’d just as soon kiss a Wookiee.”
Taking on both Tarkin and Vader: “Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought onboard.”
Anyone who can cause Han Solo to say, “No reward is worth this!” has to be a mistress of her craft.
Speaking of Han Solo, it would have been so easy to select him as the Insult King. From the “old fossil” line I’d mentioned earlier, to dismissing the Force as a “hokey religion,” to calling Jabba a “slimy piece of worm-ridden filth,” this is a guy who knows his way around the fine art of insulting people and creatures. It clearly comes naturally to him, as it should – him being a scoundrel and all.
Lando does his sharing of insulting, calling Han a “loser” and a “slimy, double-crossing, no-good swindler.” Yoda calls Luke “reckless.” Ben asks Han, “Who’s the more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?” Ben also refers to both Anakin and Jar Jar as “pathetic.” And these are the good guys! You’d expect Vader to say something like Admiral Ozzel is “as clumsy as he is stupid,” or the Emperor to call Luke a “young fool,” refer to his Jedi skills as “feeble,” and refer to the Rebels as a “pitiful little band.” But not the good guys!
Even Luke drops one or two, famously referring to Dagobah as a “slimy mudhole.” The words “slimy” and “scum” seem to come up a lot, including when then-Admiral Piett refers to the bounty hunters as “scum.”
But ultimately, I have to award the Insult King title to none other than C-3PO. Whereas most of the insults delivered in the Star Wars movies are meant to be, well, insulting, I think we can all agree that there’s a venom in the way Threepio delivers his insults that nobody else in the movies can match.
Despite his utter dependence on Chewie to be repaired, he calls Chewie
— a “flea-bitten furball”
— an “overgrown mophead”
— a “hairy beast,” and
— a “noisy brute.”
He’s no better to Artoo, calling him:
— an “overweight blob of grease”
— a “near-sighted scrap pile”
— a “malfunctioning little twerp,” and
— a “stupid little short circuit”
He also refers to Artoo’s “rusty innards,” tells him to “switch off,” and says, “I don’t like you either.” Which possibly makes him racist. Certainly to Wookiees, but I think to astromech droids as well, since at one point he says to Artoo, “For a mechanic, you seem to do an incessant amount of thinking.”
So there you have it – Threepio and Leia, the Insult King and Queen of the Star Wars movies!