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Star Wars Fun Fact
Surprising and little known Star Wars tidbits, usually related to today’s Force Feature.Forget not knowing what Yoda’s species is, how about not knowing how many toes he has! In Empire, he has three front-facing and one rear-facing. In The Phantom Menace, there are three in front and none in the back. In Attack of the Clones, he has five toes arranged like a star! Revenge of the Sith gets it back to three in front and one in the rear, which Leland Chee of Lucasfilm says is the correct and official number and arrangement. Phew! Glad that’s settled.
Life on “Tweet”-ooine
A featured dispatch from the Star Wars Twitterverse!At the top of the dunes at Sleeping Bear Dunes … Francie using The Force. #SW7x7 pic.twitter.com/nfEasGxbkG
— Kevin Lane Skarritt (@skarritt) August 21, 2014
Star Wars Swag Bag
So many fun, quirky, and awesome ways to bring Star Wars into your daily life!Chewbacca Lunch Bag – click the pic to see more!
Trivia Time!
Test your knowledge of the Star Wars universe!Yesterday’s answer: Regarding Henry, released in 1991
Today’s question: What’s the name of the “other” Yoda creature seen in The Phantom Menace?
Force Feature: Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo, Yoda!
Exploring the many worlds of Star Wars, in the imagination and in real life!So let’s look at Yoda from an entirely different angle, shall we? Let’s check him out as a means of telling a story.
Here’s George Lucas, in 1977. Star Wars has become the biggest box office success of all time, so instead of using Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye book as the basis for a sequel, he works with Leigh Brackett to produce a treatment for Empire, from which Brackett writes the first draft of the script.
In that very first draft, Vader is not Luke’s father, and in fact, Luke’s father shows up as a Force ghost! But that’s a story for another day. The point is, at this point in 1977, the only Jedi who still existed was Ben Kenobi, and now he’s dead, too. So who’s going to train Luke to defeat Vader and the Empire?
Lucas had no problem referring to action off screen, like the bounty hunter on Ord Mantell who changed Han’s mind about leaving Hoth. So Luke could have shown up as a full-fledged Jedi in Empire.
Which means that the Force as a concept wouldn’t have to be fully developed, either. I know I didn’t question Luke’s ability to make a lightsaber jump into his hand at the beginning of Empire – what I’d learned from Star Wars and the toys and the now-non-canon stories in between Star Wars and Empire was enough to make me believe that Luke could use the Force to learn to do amazing things. Kids would buy into that with no problem!
But Lucas, deeper into mythology then than he is now, knows that a mentor is a mythological necessity. And what is the Force, anyway, but a myth? Hokey religion, ancient religion, sorcerer’s ways, mystical energy field…that’s how other characters refer to the Force. It’s all the same thing! It’s a living myth within the myth that Lucas is striving to create.
Lucas practically has no choice but to explain further what the Force is, and put it in the mouth of someone you’ll believe when he says it. As a result, Yoda is an absolute story necessity. Of course, you could write it without him, but without him, the story is meaningless.
Sure, there’s a lot to love about Yoda. The scene where we first meet him in Empire seems to get funnier for me every time I watch it. “Awww, cannot get your ship out!” he says, completely mocking Luke, which is even funnier when you realize that Yoda knows exactly who Luke is, and what he represents. The last best hope of the Jedi finally shows up more than 20 years after the utter destruction of the Republic and the Jedi, and Yoda isn’t grateful at all. He just messes with Luke’s head. How jaded has he become sitting in the swamp where he allegedly spent most of the first century of his life?
The lightsaber battles are incredible with him, and I know as I get older, I’ll let go of the last of my disbelief and truly buy into it being possible that, at 800+ years old, he could be spinning around like the Tasmanian Devil. Still, it’s almost exactly what I wanted to see, and the moment of him reaching for his lightsaber in Attack of the Clones still gives me a jump.
Personally, one of my favorite moments in the entire six movies is at the end of Phantom Menace, when Yoda’s outside watching the parade and celebration on Naboo. The wind in his hair and the smile on his face makes me so happy I can’t stand it sometimes. That’s the Yoda you’d want to be a Padawan for, you’d follow to the ends of the galaxy.
Most movies, if you tried to take them apart and put them back together, you could drop all but the top four or five characters, and you’d still be able to put together a decent movie. Without Yoda, though, I guarantee you that we wouldn’t still be talking about Star Wars the way we do, more than three decades later.