I love Star Wars. I love how Star Wars impacted the USA, a fact I get to teach in my American History class. The movie really did hammer home some critical philosophical ideas that touched a nerve in the country, particularly for my generation. I still remember as an almost 13 year old driving 60 miles with my dad to see the movie. Many of my friends had already seen it and it wouldn’t get to my hometown for months to come. My father had worked in the early Space Race down in Florida back in the early ’60s, so he was eager to see it too.
We were both mesmerized and spent the entire ride home talking about what could possibly happen to Darth Vader and how cool the robots were and a million other things that caught our attention. Of course, remember this was in the days long before DVD, even really before “home video” would take hold, so you only saw the movie in the theater; then you were left to your imagination.
Well, everything wasn’t perfect, however, and Science Fiction columnist John Scalzi provides a hilarious take at the major design flaws from the movie. Some of the funniest include this take on R2-D2: “Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness.”
Stormtrooper Uniforms? — “They stand out like a sore thumb in every environment but snow, the helmets restrict view (“I can’t see a thing in this helmet!” — Luke Skywalker), and the armor is penetrable by single shots from blasters. Add it all up and you have to wonder why stormtroopers don’t just walk around naked, save for blinders and flip-flops.”
Or the Death Star, perhaps the most notable design error–“An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can’t get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.”
But speaking of the Death Star, check out how the movie should have ended:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzoeEdW-EDQ]