found drama

get oblique

return to Return of the Jedi

by Rob Friesel

Today, The Boy saw Return of the Jedi for the first time at an otherwise rained-out birthday party. 1 Now it has probably been… 10+ years? Since I’ve seen RotJ, but a few things jumped out at me today:

  1. You could tell that most kids in the room had seen the films in episodic order. There was never a time where “the Clone Wars” as mentioned in the original film were something you could only speculate upon.
  2. One kid remarked: “Darth Vader is obviously an owl.” Where I think he meant “the Darth Vader costume design must have been inspired by an owl”; and I thought to myself: you know, that kid’s right.
  3. Did anyone else see those pasty looking dudes in purple robes attending to the Emperor in his Death Star throne room? Who are those guys?
  4. Since when did Ewoks have a dress sized perfectly for Princess Leia?

And this is just the stuff I remember from the theatrical (and/or original VHS) release. This is to say nothing of things either edited in for the DVD re-release or else “new information” from the prequels.

  1. Like the goofy celebratory montage they splice in at the end of this film. As if news of the rebel victory traveled that quickly around the galaxy. 2
  2. How could Vader not know that the mother of his children was pregnant with twins? When I was watching this as a kid (pre-prequels), I always just assumed that Vader’s wife or consort or whatever went into hiding when she found out she was pregnant. But Anakin knew that Padme was with child; so was prenatal medicine in the Old Republic really just that bad?

I was never when of the folks that described Return of the Jedi as awful. But like I said… where did the Ewoks get a dress in Leia’s size?

  1. Alas, he has not yet seen Empire Strikes Back; but I’m not completely derelict in my duty as a Geek Dad here. The Boy has already seen Star Wars for the first time with me, off an old VHS that was mine when I was a boy. So he saw “the real thing” already.[]
  2. See also: why would they be celebrating a rebel victory on Coruscant? the very seat of Imperial power? Crazy.[]

About Rob Friesel

Software engineer by day. Science fiction writer by night. Weekend homebrewer, beer educator at Black Flannel, and Certified Cicerone. Author of The PhantomJS Cookbook and a short story in Please Do Not Remove. View all posts by Rob Friesel →

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