Speaking of Robot Chicken, there’s always…
*Vader: Luke… I am your father.
Luke: No! That’s impossible!
Vader: And Leia is your sister.
Luke: That’s… improbable.
Vader: And a bunch of Ewoks will defeat the Empire.
Luke: That’s… extremely unlikely.
(later)
Vader: And you get your Force powers from a bunch of microorganisms in your bloodstream.
Luke: Now you’re just making stuff up…
*
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. Sampiro, I did not merely spit out my soda just now, I expelled it with enough force to cause blunt trauma. Good thing I’ve got a laptop available to me right now, as my monitor is a real mess.
Thank you very much.
Ben: Luke, once you destroy the Sith and the dark side for good you will bring balance to the force.
Luke: Balance? Doesn’t that mean equal parts light AND dark?
Ben: Ummm… no.
Luke: Then what exactly is in balance? Balance means equal parts of two opposites.
Ben: Uhhh… yeah… like I said, you destroy the dark side and return balance to the universe, okay, on your way then, chop-chop.
Luke: No, wait. I want to know what will be in balance.
Ben: The force.
Luke: What about the force will be in balance? What two opposite but equal things will be in balance in the force…
Ben: JUST GO DESTROY THE DARK SIDE ALREADY!!!
Oh, they’ll use it. They won’t credit it or pay anyone or anything, but it will show up.
Annakin’s Force Ghost joins the spirits of Obi-Wan and Yoda.
ANNAKIN
Thanks for not telling Luke what a weenie I was as a kid, and then what a prissy bitch I was when I got older.
YODA
Welcome you are.
ANNAKIN
I mean, “more machine than man” and “evil” made me sound really cool. If you guys had told him about even one “Yippee!” or “NOOOO!” would have made me come across as a total douche and ruined that whole evil dude in the all-black suit of armor thing I had going on.
OBI-WAN
Right.
ANNAKIN
Much less all the sappy love poetry I wrote to Padme while we were separated. Man was that shit awful!
OBI-WAN
I know. I used the Force to read your thoughts while you wrote it. Cracked me the fuck up.
ANNAKIN
Shut up!
OBI-WAN
“How I long to romp with you again, my lover,
Over field of Coruscanian clover-”
ANNAKIN
SHUT UP!
[YODA’s force ghost is doubled over with laughter]
ANNAKIN
You know, none of this ever would have happened if you’d killed Jar-Jar Binks. Nobody would’ve thought twice about it.
OBI-WAN
Asshole.
[He disappears.]
Akbar: “It’s a trap! Curse my inability to see the endlessly repeated modus operandi of the Imperial leaders to make every seemingly easy victory turn in to a slaughter. Perhaps they themselves also haven’t learned that a seemingly irrelevant band of primitive natives will give them their comeuppance! All hail Saint Jar Jar, meesa say attack!”
Yeah, but the Jedi were not some obscure religious cult, which is the impression I got, but a major part of the power structure of the Republic only 20 years before. I have a hard time believing Jedi powers were unknown, if only because knowledge that a Jedi can come and whup your ass probably kept things in line. Solo’s words sound like someone today believing in the existence of nuclear bombs but not their explosive power. And its been twice as long since any were tested in the atmosphere (in the US and USSR) than since the Jedi flourished.
What I don’t get was the absence of news media, even around significant politicians like Padme and Jar-Jar. Maybe Han was in the dark since no one in this universe ever invented the concept of news.
Exactly. To steal a line from Terry Pratchett, it’s hard to have a productive debate on the existence of gods when lightning bolts keep flying through the window with notes attached saying “Yes we do”.
Did people really know that, though? We see all the crazy stuff Jedi can do because we’re the viewing audience, but there are trillions of laybeings throughout the Republic that only hear about Jedi. When you get far from the center of power, on planets like Tatooine, Jedi probably become more like a legend than reality. They were also pretty secretive; children who were Force-sensitive were bundled away from their parents to be raised in seclusion. Hell, the accepted reason that the Jedi fell along with the rest of the Republic was because they were ivory tower types and didn’t do much mingling with commoners.
Sometimes folks saw Jedi do crazy things, like Obi-Wan holding onto that hoverbot that delivered the assassin bugs to Padme’s room, but I’m willing to bet actual superhuman abilities didn’t get used that much in public. Consider the movies; duels that involved visible uses of the Force really only took place in private. Likewise, a lot of folks doubted just how dangerous the Jedi really were; the Neimoidians tried to gas Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, and although Jabba knew something of Jedi, his court was wholly unprepared for Luke’s abilities.
At best, most people probably thought the Jedi were a religious order with significant influence in the Republic who carried around deadly light swords. The “Force” they speak of that most people can’t sense or touch might just be their hocus pocus to retain said influence. Sort of like how Reagan had his private astrologer, maybe.
Vader: When I last met you I was but the learner. Now I am the master!
Obi Wan: Only a master of evil Darth!
Vader: You said something lame like that the last time we fought.
Vader: (High pitched, mocking tone) I have the high ground! I have the high ground!
Obi Wan: I still handed you your ass though, didn’t I weezy?
Uncle Owen To Jawa;
I’m looking for a few droids to help defend the place against sand-people… My step-mom was killed by sand-people, and now we’ve got the kid and all, it might not be a bad idea to get a few droids that could be good with a blaster… You know what would suit just fine? remember those battle droids they had a few years back? Geonosiam built, remember? You gotta have a few of those knocking around, surely. I mean, they mass-produced millions of those things. I’m sure they all got decommisioned after the clone wars, but hey; you guys are scavengers, right? You mean to tell me that droid-scavenging pikey midget rag-and-bone men, can’t rustle me up one stinkin battle droid? Was there a battle droid amnesty I didn’t hear about??
As the Death Star approaches, the Rebel General calls up General Tarkin.
Reb: You better get that thing out of here. We’ve got an entire star fleet that will blow you to smithereens. Would you believe it, an entire star fleet.
Tarkin: I find that very hard to believe.
Reb: How about 100 fighters?
Tarkin: No
Reb: What about bratty 17 year old and a droid? With father problems.
I had heard that there were maybe 6-7000 Jedi in the entire galaxy at their peak in Episodes I and II. Given that there are thousands of star systems in the Republic, the Jedi were probably still, on most of the outlying worlds, mythical figures, steeped in legend.
But as viewers of the movies, we see the Jedi serving as primary characters during the saga. We know what they’re all about. The 100 quintillion people who DON’T live Coruscant, probably not.
There are about 300 million people in the US, and a dozen or so top stars, but we know how often their damn babies burp. If the SW Galaxy had any sort of news service, don’t you think the Jedi would be on it? If they didn’t for some reason, then I can see the big mystery.
We know they have FTL communications of some sort, because the Emperor talked to Vader. But actually they don’t seem to have that technology well fleshed out.
ETA: not to mention the probe droid reporting in.
Jabba (a gangster boss on a backwater planet) and Watto (a freaking scrap dealer on the same backwater planet) both knew what Jedi could do. Jabba recognised Luke trying to do a Jedi mind trick on him, and didn’t express doubt that such things existed, just that they didn’t work on him. Watto said “You think you’re some kind of Jedi, waving your hand around like that? I’m a Toydarian, mind tricks don’t work on me. Only money”. Both knew at least some of what Jedi could do.
Yeah, on the other hand, the Jedi probably work to manage their media exposure as hard as movie stars do and in a slightly different direction - the aura of mystery could well be seen as an asset to the cause. Wasn’t there a scene or two at the start of ‘the phantom menace’ where the top leaders in the blocade were power-freaked at Qui-gon and Obi-wan showing up? Like “Oh no, we can’t possibly stand against two Jedi, we should probably give up now.”
On the subject of the news service and Jedi - I don’t think this was actually shown in the movie, but in the Novelization there’s a great bit at the beginning about how Anakin was galaxy-renowned for his war heroics, and little kids were saying to their parents, “Don’t worry about Chancellor Palpatine - Anakin Skywalker is gonna save him!”
Ha! Did you come up with this on your own, or were you referring to this?
At the time of the Clone Wars, a Jedi was someone who supposedly had vast poewrs but which no one ever saw. Whole sectors full of people had probably never seen a Jedi in their entire lives, certainly not in combat. Certainly, there was a Galactic News service, but people claiming Jedi fathered their babies or that a Force Prophet predicted the universe would end in five months isn’t going to help.
At their real height, the Jedi were vastly more commonplace but probably less powerful individually. In the movies, they were a dying order. Consider this: Yoda personally trained all the Jedi. Personally. Even though his initial involvement was not great with everyone, he made sure to leave his mark on every student. In addition to the war duties and the council work. That ain’t much time, and it ain’t many students.
Han Solo probably thought the Jedi were half-mythical. Sure, a lot of people did emember the Jedi and may even have wished they were back. Remember the air wing commander saying “May the Force Be With You,” and Luke specifically questioned that Han would not believe in the Force. Luke may not have really understood what it was, but he’d undoubtedly heard of it. Meanwhile, Han was a pretty cynical man and one not given to mysticism. People claiming to hve agic powers and be mighty warriors, except they all got killed off? Ha!
Although I hesitate to bring real world theology into it, you can make an analogy to God, with the additional idea that He occasionally shows up on Earth in the presence of major church officials to perform miracles. Everyone knows something about it, although it doesn’t really affect their lives in any meaningful way, but most probably believe to some extent, especially if, either through mandate or coincidence, recordings of God’s actual presence are never actually made. Rumors would be all over the place about what kind of miracles could happen, with some of it hitting close to the truth. Some, like Han, would be atheists and wouldn’t believe unless and until they saw the evidence with their own eyes. Jabba’s savvy, with contacts, and probably has reliable information about what God does or doesn’t do.
Now Watto, I admittedly don’t know about. Perhaps it’s accepted wisdom among Toydarians that Jedi can’t affect their minds, or perhaps he’s had first-hand contact with Jedi before.
Yes, but only from Obi-Wan. When Obi-Wan starts talking about the Force, Luke has clearly never heard of it before. Strange that he would consider Han’s unbelief in the Force weird a short time after he himself learned of the existence of the belief.