by John Booth
26. The Executor – As the opening of Star Wars established, Star Destroyers are awfully damn big and scary – which is what makes it so awesome when we see one early in Empire and it’s absolutely dwarfed by the shadow of Darth Vader's flagship.
Next we’ve got Empire’s new minor characters. They’re just glimpses, really, but they do add spice to the galaxy:
25. You can’t ignore John Ratzenberger. Before he carried the mail as Cliff Clavin, he gave orders on Hoth as Bren Derlin.
24-20. The also-ran bounty hunters: IG-88, Dengar, Bossk, Zuckuss and 4-LOM – Their get-together on the Executor bridge is Empire’s brief callback to the Star Wars cantina scene, but it’s all business this time around.
Empire also introduces some big players. They never steal the limelight from the heroes, but here in Act II of the original trilogy, these four are crucial game-changers:
19. The Emperor – We finally get a glimpse of the guy who bosses Darth Vader around, and he’s a freaky monkey-eyed puppetmaster working from the shadows. He’s almost scarier here as a mellow-voiced hologram than he is the next time we see him, all cackling and finger-lightning and such.
18. Yoda – Counterbalancing the Emperor with his understated power and patience and backward talk, Jedi Master is at his wisest and funniest, and when 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not.
17. Lando Calrissian – Card-player. Gambler. Scoundrel. You’d like him.
16. Boba Fett – Don’t tell me they didn’t know this guy was going to be a favorite from the start. Why else was he the sole Empire action figure to show up on an original Star Wars Kenner package? He’s got the brains to stay a step ahead of Solo, and the Hoth-cold soul to ask, “What if he doesn’t survive? He’s worth a lot to me.”
Empire’s got some great shuddery, tense moments:
15. Force Choke – Vader used it to make a little point in Star Wars, but in Empire, he drops underlings without hesitation. Worst. Promotion. Ever, Admiral Piett.
14. Luke’s Phantom Duel – I’ll admit that as a kid, most of the meaning behind this scene escaped me. I got that it was a sort of test which he failed, but it was only as I got older that I realized the deeper aspects of what was going on, and that’s one of the reasons this scene works so well.
13. Beneath the Helmet – I remember hearing from other kids about seeing the back of Darth Vader’s head, and it pretty much made my nine-year-old brain go Thermal Detonator. Skin-crawlingly fascinating, this glimpse that both enhances and preserves mystery is another great reason to watch Episodes IV-VI first.
Probably thanks to the screenplay input of Lawrence Kasdan in many cases, Empire stocks a bowcaster bandolier-full of quotes, including these half-dozen:
12. “Laugh it up, fuzzball.” (Han Solo)
11. “Never tell me the odds!” (Han Solo)
10. “It’s not my fault!” (Han Solo and Lando Calrissian)
9. “I love you.” / “I know.” (Princess Leia / Han Solo)
8. “I am your father.” (Darth Vader)
7. “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” (Yoda)
Where Star Wars involved establishing a universe and Return of the Jedi wraps up the trilogy’s plot points, Empire is where the main characters shine in their development.
6. R2-D2 and C-3PO – The droids spend most of Star Wars joined at the servo-hip, but separated in Empire by circumstance, they get to stretch their programmed personalities a bit.
5. Chewbacca – We saw him mostly as a loyal sidekick in the first movie, but this time around, we get to feel our favorite wookiee’s moments of genuine despair and rage and melancholy.
4. Princess Leia – Sure the sarcasm and the spunk are still there, laser brains, but now we find out just how Alderaan’s last royalty feels about a certain flyboy, and wait – what’s that? A Force-call, you say? How interesting…
3. Luke Skywalker’s still got a whiny moment or two, but he’s not the farmboy from Tatooine anymore. From the moment he summons his lightsaber across an ice cave to his headstrong decision to try to save his friends, we get a hint of possibilities both dark and light.
2. Han Solo –The smart-aleck pilot is actually torn, and we get to see it unfold. He knows the Rebellion’s worth fighting for, but he’s got this whole price -on-his-head thing, too. He’ll get the hell out of Dodge in a heartbeat – just as soon as he runs back to make sure the Princess is safe. He quick-draws on a Sith Lord but knows when to tell Chewie “There’ll be another time.”
1. The ending – Empire’s greatest asset is nothing short of the greatest one-two cliffhanger punch in movie history. Vader’s revelation to Luke coupled with the Slave I heading into the sunset with Han on ice in the cargo hold. I was recently asked if the downer of an ending disappointed us as kids. Are you kidding? Now they had to make another one!
III.
In early August 2010, I returned once more to Star Wars Celebration. This was the fifth iteration of the convention, held in Orlando. Jim and I once again attended as members of the press, although this time around I was working for GeekDad. One morning, I did three interviews with guys who had been fans of the original trilogy as kids and were now working for Lucasfilm: Dave Filoni, supervising director of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon series, Dee Bradley Baker, a voice actor on the series, and, in a very cool bit of circling back a few years, Matthew Wood, Lucasfilm sound editor and voice of General Grievous.
Talking Clone Wars With Supervising Director Dave Filoni
Luke Skywalker: “You fought in the Clone Wars?”
Ben Kenobi: “Yes. I was once a Jedi Knight, the same as your father.”
Back in 1977 — and over the quarter century or so which followed — that’s pretty much all we learned about this galaxy-wide conflict that predated everything we knew (or thought we knew) about Star Wars.
Thirty-some years later those once-untold stories are a big hit with a new generation of fandom, and with Star Wars: The Clone Wars heading into its third season on Cartoon Network, the series’ supervising director, Dave Filoni, sat down for an interview with GeekDad.
John Booth: You’re a first-generation Star Wars fan –
Dave Filoni: I was about four when it came out.
JB: – so, what’s it been like creating something that works in that gap that when we were kids, there’s this passing mention of The Clone Wars, and now you are filling in that gap, you’re playing in that playground.
DF: Very bizarre. It’s hard to comprehend. When I watch that scene now in A New Hope, it takes me a moment to realize, “Wow. That’s my job.” My job is describing in great detail what Obi-Wan Kenobi is actually talking about.
The reason I can actually deal with it is that George Lucas is the one that’s working with me to come up with the stories and guide everything that we do. I know it sounds strange, but I wouldn’t be as thrilled about it if it was just me doing it on my own. Because I grew up with the respect for Lucasfilm and for everything George has accomplished, I’m so glad that he’s so involved in this show. Star Wars is his, and I firmly believe that he’s the only one that knows that secret formula for getting that effervescent action feeling of comedy, drama, and thriller that Star Wars really is. I’m just trying to learn from him as much as I can about how to get that feeling so that I can pass on to kids and families now what it was that, when I sat in that theater in ‘77, just grabbed all of us.
And remember: We didn’t know what the Galactic Empire was. We didn’t know what Jedi were. An X-wing, a TIE fighter, a Rebel Alliance – none of it really meant anything other than Good Guy and Bad Guy.
But there was something about that first film, especially to me, that when Luke is going down the trench and he hears Obi-Wan say, “The Force will be with you,” I mean, people got up and cheered. How many movies have you been to in the last ten years where people did that? It’s so rare, and that moment, you know, that’s really driven everything that came after it, even to have us all here this weekend, gathe
red to celebrate Star Wars.
That moment, and the moment where Obi-Wan talks about the Clone Wars to Luke, that moment resonated with everybody, so much so that people wanted to see a series about what that time period was, because it made us think, “Wow, there’s a much bigger universe here.”
It’s like growing up and hearing a story about your dad that he was a war veteran or something. And around the time when I was a kid, a lot of dads were. And again, you look at cultural touchstones and why Star Wars resonated, and I think it became a talking point for a lot of families and kids, and a way to relate.
That’s a long answer for you, but I think you’ll find I’m very long-winded. But I think it all figures in to why the Clone Wars series is effective now, and how I approach what I do.
JB: I’m glad you went in that direction, because that’s one of the things I was wondering: You’ve got kind of this interesting challenge of this balance between the Star Wars universe and kind of crossing over (generational appeal). When I went to see Phantom Menace, I knew I wasn’t six years old anymore. I wasn’t going to be seeing it with the same eyes as that kid who was going in to see this for the first time. But you’re making a show that six-year-olds and parents who were six years old when they saw Star Wars are going to be watching.
DF: Yes. Very difficult.
JB: What’s that like, trying to think, you know, on the one hand, a six-year-old is going to love this, but I know his dad’s a Star Wars fan, and he’s going to be watching it too.
DF: It’s funny. The way that I’ve dealt with that is to go back to A New Hope, because there is something about that movie, which is the first one – not chronologically, but you know – it’s the first one that captivated six-year-olds and 45-year-olds. My dad liked Obi-Wan Kenobi. He wasn’t a super fan, but he liked opera, and there were a lot of things that related to him and related to me.
For us to be successful with this series, I keep trying to keep the crew in the mindset of, “You’re developing a show the year before Star Wars comes out. Don’t count on people knowing what a Jedi is. Don’t rely on them understanding how the Republic works. And that’s something I tell the writers, too. And something George has really impressed upon me is that you should be able to watch any episode of The Clone Wars, whether you’ve seen every episode of it, or hardly any episodes of it, and be able to follow the story we’re telling and enjoy it.
I think that’s the key to everything in Star Wars. How come all six films did so well in the theater? What is the magic George has of captivating an audience? You’ll find fans that are super-critical of those prequels, and yet you’ll find fans that are super-devoted to them as well. And you know, that’s hitting exactly what you’re talking about. These older fans and the new fans, and the older fans now coming at it from an older perspective, and they want all the things to be aged up and darker and more violent, and I have gotten on this show, “Dave, why do you make it so much for kids?” and I say, “How old were you when you first saw Star Wars?” and they’ll say, “I was six,” and I’m like, OK: I’m not making this directly for kids, I make it for everyone, but it is a fantasy world of laser swords and TIE fighters, and I think kids love that stuff, like you did. But as a fan myself, and older, I have done admittedly, some things I think are intense and exciting in a way that we’ve all evolved as a storytelling society.
JB: Without getting too specific, as far as coming up with individual stories and story arcs, is there a larger arc you’re always working within, or do you take them piece by piece and then say, “Where can we fit this into (the big picture),” or do you come from the perspective of “This is what we’re looking at, and right now, we are at this point here.”
DF: I have two points: Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. I know that’s where we’re starting and that’s where we’ve got to hit. The story ideas are all generated by George Lucas directly. He comes in and says we’re going to do this story and we’re going to do this story. George has a way of being so expressive with the stories he wants to tell. He’s never afraid to say, “Let’s do this kind of story. He’s almost experimenting with style. Like the Zillo Beast episode: I never thought we’d do an episode with a Godzilla-sized monster attacking Coruscant, and yet we did.
JB: And it was a pretty good episode.
DF: It was fun, right? And that’s the thing about it that I’ve learned from George. You know, would that have been the first choice of many fans, to say, let’s put that in the Clone Wars? I would say probably not: They would think, no, it’s going to be a constant battle between the droids and the clones. But George has this way of seeing through that and just telling great stories, and we work very hard to tell those stories.
Now, I do have a timeline where I’m constantly placing episodes and saying “Here’s this one and here’s this one, and we’re about this far into the world.” And the way I measure it constantly is with Ahsoka and (Captain) Rex. And some episodes, you might have noticed, have aired out of sequence. We’ve had prequels air and sequels air, and the further we go with the series, we actually get away from that. We start moving in a very linear fashion with the characters.
But you can tell mostly where the series is at by paying attention to Ahsoka and how she behaves. Is she being really bratty and using a lot of nickname-y things and driving Anakin nuts, or is she becoming more respectful and saying “I’m sorry,” and “I’ll try to do better, Master,” and becoming a more capable fighter? These kind of things really show you – that’s how I keep measuring where we are at. And eventually the fans will become very aware of the timeline that we have.
It’s a complex arrangement, The Clone Wars, to be sure, but I’m glad that it’s become way more than just battle droids versus clones. That could only get you so far.
And you know, to look at it a different way, I could do a whole series just about Captain Rex, Cody and the clone troopers, like a Band of Brothers. I could do a whole series just on the different Jedi, and how they react to the war. I could do a series just about the bounty hunters, and how they’re trying to survive during this massive warfare, like Hondo and the pirates, that could be its own series. Boba Fett could be his own series. Within this one show, we have all these awesome characters fighting for screen time, and I think what that does is keep the series fresh all the time, and alive, and people are always wondering: Who am I going to see next? And in season three, you’re going to be surprised who you see. I’m very excited about that.
Voice of a Geek: An Interview With Dee Bradley Baker
Dee Bradley Baker needs no disguises.
By voice alone, the actor leaves Fletch and his list of aliases in the dust, and his credits are stacked with geek power: From roles in the Halo and Gears of War franchises to regular parts in animated standouts like Batman: The Brave and the Bold to GeekDad favorite Perry the Platypus on Phineas and Ferb.
Baker’s also the voice of Captain Rex and every other clone trooper on Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which is how he wound up at Star Wars Celebration V this month in Orlando – though you get the sense that as someone who meticulously took a marker to his Star Wars soundtrack as a kid to match the sleeve listings with the movie sequences, Baker probably would have been here anyway.
In an enthusiastic interview at the convention, the father of two talked about his career, raising his kids and being a geek (and >ahem!< a GeekDad fan!) as well as teasing some neat insights into the next season of Clone Wars and Nickelodeon’s upcoming cartoon spinoff of its animated Avatar: The Last Airbender series.
Before we even sat down, we started chatting about geekdom and fatherhood, and the conversation was off and running before I had my recorder switched on, which is why the interview starts right in the middle of things:
Dee Bradley Baker: I’m a middle-aged dad, which means I have no social time or life to speak of, and so I connect with my buddies with my Xbox. We play, actually, two of my favorite games which I’m on, which are Ge
ars of War 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. I’m three new creatures on Left 4 Dead 2, so we kill me while catching up a little bit.
John Booth: So, how many kids do you have?
DBB: Two. I have five-year-old and 10-year-old daughters. And actually, we watch a lot of my cartoons. My 10-year-old loves Clone Wars and Phineas and Ferb, and my five-year-old loves Phineas and Ferb as well.
DBB: I am a geek dad, believe me. I’ve got my iPad with me; I’ve got my iPhone 4; I’ve got my Xbox. I love technology and I want to feel like I’m living in the future, and these devices help me feel that way.
JB: When you talk about being a geek dad and having those kinds of interests, does it just happen that you get this work and a lot of it has that geek appeal … or do you naturally gravitate to those projects?
DBB: The way that I’ve followed my life is actually more of the latter. When I was a child, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist because I loved dinosaurs. I loved monster movies and sci-fi, and then Star Wars came out, and I was completely out of my mind with that, with Close Encounters, and then I thought maybe I was going to go into special effects makeup, which I thought was awesome. But really, instead of drawing monsters or studying dinosaurs, I just continued doing things I liked to do. I didn’t really target how it was going to pay off. And so, because I just followed these things that I liked, it led me to producing sounds for these things, and being involved with them in that way. It’s from a pattern of me continually doing things that I really loved to do, and then trying to get money while doing that. And it’s led to this.
I mean, I cannot tell you how ecstatic I am to be involved with Star Wars. I Twittered yesterday about how sad it is that a kid now can’t see Episode V and not know up until that moment when Darth Vader says, “I am your father” how it rewrites those two movies with one sentence. They can’t know that surprise now, and I think that’s a little sad. You go to a movie, and you’ve seen it already. The trailer shows you the whole thing, you’ve read all the reviews, you can pretty much know every single twist. But back then, when I saw that, I remember sitting in that theater in Denver, where I saw it, and just the electric feeling of right up to that moment.
