Since I only manage to restart The Star Wars Holiday Special reviews right around the time a new Star Wars franchise movie comes out, many of you may have forgotten it was even being reviewed. Well, it is. If you need to catch up, or have joined this blog after I began it years ago, you can head back to beginning to read about the plot and the analyses so far. It’s not pretty.
When we last left the Special, Lumpy was distracted from the Stormtrooper ransack of their home by watching The Faithful Wookiee. The 6 analyses of that film focused on the movie from a diegetic perspective, as if it were a movie like any other on this blog, dealing mostly with its own internal “logic.”
Picking up, we need to look at The Faithful Wookiee from a “hyperdiegetic” perspective, that is, in the context of the other show in which it occurs, that is, The Star Wars Holiday Special. Please note that, departing from the mission statement for a bit, these questions not about the interfaces, but about the backworlding that informs these interfaces.
- Who in the Star Wars universe produced this cartoon?
- Is it like TomoNews, from a neutral third party telling about actual events that happened in the Star Wars universe?
- If so, why is it aimed at kids?
- What’s the revenue model?
- Why did Lumpy look carefully both ways before playing it?
- Why did he later try to hide it from the Imperial Officer? It certainly seems like he thinks it’s incriminating.
- If it’s real news, where is the talisman now? Why isn’t someone searching for it in all subsequent films? Because it could still be the most powerful biological weapon ever seen in the Star Wars galaxy. It carries a virus that renders humans unconscious until they get an antidote. It is infectious. Rather than chasing Death Star plans or Small Jedi Life Coaches, they should be chasing that thing.
- If not actual news, is it fiction based on (their) real-world people? Like an early Mike Tyson Mysteries?
- Is it Rebel propaganda, trying to attract impressionable young minds to the Rebel cause?
- If so, why would it imply that general-AI droids are morons, only reporting mission-critical facts on the condition of a spoken data-type error?
- If so, why would it imply that the Falcon had life-threateningly bad door designs?
- If so, why would it paint Luke to be such a bufoon?
- Is it so aspiring Rebels would think, “Hey, if that farmhand goof can be a Rebel hero…”?
- And how did they know that Boba Fett and Darth Vader were in cahoots, when it would not be until Empire that they actually go from being not into cahoots to being, definitely, in cahoots?
- Do they have some means of predicting Empire behavior? You’d think that power would have been used every single other place ever.
- Or, if it’s not a Rebel thing, is it Empire propaganda?
- If so, why would it depict Vader as being terrible at basic infosec? (Recall R2 just happens across Fett’s report.)
- If so, why would it have the Empire involved in desperately-convoluted, prone-to-failure plot?
- If it’s a disinformation campaign, why aim that at kids?
- Are Wookiee children secretly running the Rebellion?
- And lastly, is the 1234 game, in fact, the first “boss key,” “panic button,” or ⌘-H ever seen in sci-fi? (Boss key: A technological means for quickly hiding questionable screen content from over-the-shoulder observation. You slackers are welcome.)
I’m sure no one at Disney has an interest in addressing how this thing fits canon, but, damn.
It raises questions.