Dances with Banthas
Having
done 50s SF serials in the main trilogy movies, the streaming incarnation of Star
Wars has now moved on to remakes of 90s Westerns.
There’s
more space-western fun with Boba Tea (Tapioca Morrison) this week as he helps
his newfound Tuskerindian buddies defeat the Iron Horse crossing their lands. You
see, there’s this hover train that goes whooshing by the Tusken encampment, and the guards on the train take the opportunity to use the not-Bison-but-Banthas for
target practice.
Quite
why the mobile, nomadic Tuskens sit there and allow themselves to be shot at by
people on the train instead of nomading the fuck out of there is unclear, but
anyway, Tem who isn’t a white savior because he’s part Maori so that makes it okay organizes a raid
to take out the train and run the settlers off their lands.
The
action scenes here are serviceable rather than spectacular, but they do establish
one gaffi-stick-jutsu Tusken as the breakout star of the series. I bet you a
one-way trip to Alderaan it turns out to be a lady Tusken in the Big Reveal
before he leaves their camp to go and guest star in “The Mandalorian”. As we
watch from the outside, the badass masked and grunting one takes out a whole
carriage full of baddies, their progress being marked by screaming and flailing
henchmen being hurled out of windows. It’s great fun to watch, though this does
mean that Boba is now only the third-coolest guy in his own show.
We
also get a disjointed dream sequence where, to reward Bobby for his bravery,
the Tuskens stick a lizard up his nose and let him wander out into the desert,
where he finds and brings back a large stick, like the galaxy’s derpiest husky. It’s
touching to realize that the Tusken initiation ceremony is basically a big game
of fetch. I think finding the branch in the desert means at one point there
were forests and oceans on Tatooine, maybe. Subtle climate change reference?
But
first we have to sit through half an episode of “present day” Boba attempting
to set up an underworld empire with, near as I can tell, all of four guys,
including himself. He goes to confront the Mayor, then goes back to a casino we
saw in part 1, where he bumps into two CGI Hutts looking considerably less
realistic than Jabba’s 40-year-old practical effects, and a glowering Wookie
with a machine gun.
It’s
all a bit plodding and dull which leaves you time to wonder things like, why is
the keyboardist in the casino band the same blue elephant dude that was at
Jabba’s place in 1983? (Fun fact: The genre of music he plays is canonically
referred to as “Jizz” and I will never be too old to find that not funny).
Did
he escape from the detonation of the sail barge in Return of the Jedi through
some miracle (“Use the Jizz, Max!”)? Or is this some unrelated blue elephant
keyboardist we have not met before? Maybe it’s an extreme example of species
specialization, just like all Jawas are junk dealers or all Gamorreans are
guards, all blue elephants play keyboards in shitty dive bar bands. A necessary
ecological niche.
Also,
why is the word for criminal kingpin in the Star Wars universe “Daimyo”? The
greatest thing about Star Wars is that every corporation’s product-naming
committee is evidently staffed by overexcited 10-year-olds (“Death Star”,
“Turbo Laser”, “Speeder Bike”) so it’s jarring to suddenly have a Japanese word
thrown in the mix, particularly one that refers to the Japanese equivalent of a
feudal warlord, since I’d assumed that neither feudalism nor Japan
existed in the Star Wars universe.
Guess
that means Japan is part of the Star Wars universe. And you know what THAT
means?
Yep.
Space
hentai is CANON.
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