The Best Of Everything 100-day 100-question Star Wars Blogathon, Question 19

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Here was my guess for yesterday's question about what model landspeeder Luke Skywalker had: a T-16.


I thought that because of this quote:





Wait. That's not quite right. Try this:




That clip was from Star Wars Uncut, which might be the greatest crowd-sourced project ever: A remaking of Star Wars by hundreds of filmmakers in small clips using little to no budget.

But about that T-16: I remembered that clip, and I remembered Luke's Landspeeder, in part because I had the Landspeeder, too, but I'm mostly going to quit talking about all the Star Wars toys I had when I was a kid because when I do, people like Rusty start commenting about how poor they were when they were kids and how they had to give up their tiny souls to get one single toy, and then I mention that to Sweetie and she reminds me how she was so poor that when she was a little girl her family couldn't afford dolls and she had to play with marbles, so I'll just shut up about the toys.

Except for this: I always thought that Luke was talking, in that sound bite, about his landspeeder. It never occurred to me that Luke owned two things that would fly, but apparently, he did, because when I first looked at yesterday's question, I was certain the answer was T-16 and then Grumpy answered the question with X-34, and he seemed pretty certain, and I was about to comment and say "Nuh-uh," just like they taught me to in law school, only I thought I should check the answer first (they taught that in law school, too) and Grumpy was right and Luke Skywalker owned two things that could fly: his Landspeeder, and a T-16.

This, supposedly, is a T-16:



And, like I did with the claim that Lucas originally intended there to be sequels to Star Wars, I'm calling bulls**t.

(I don't know why I do those asterisks, except that it seems to make things a little better. I'm generally not opposed to swearing if it isn't overdone. I don't myself hardly ever swear, mostly because Mr F and Mr Bunches are likely to pick up on it if I do and so I've learned not to swear... out loud... and so it feels weird when I do swear aloud, and it feels weird if I type a swear, but it feels okay if I asterisk out a small portion of the word. I could keep a team of psychologists occupied for decades)

That T-16, according to Rebelscum.com, was released in 1997. Another site I read yesterday said that the only time you see the T-16 in Star Wars is when Luke is playing with the toy version of one.

Which all feels sort of velociraptor-y to me. Longtime readers will know that I have long suspected (and ultimately proved) that velociraptors didn't exist before Michael Crichton made them up and then "scientists" just sort of Brontosauri-ed them into a "real" thing, and since then, people have been reverse-engineered into thinking that there were velocirapti, even though there never were.

I think the same sort of thing has happened here with the T-16. I have no way of proving it today, but I'd be willing to bet that if I could go back to the time when Lucas wrote that line, he meant Luke to mean his landspeeder.

But until I can find some book that was printed before 1997 and which claimed that the T-16 was the landspeeder, and therefore can prove that in 1997 Lucas decided to milk more money out of making toys that people like Rusty couldn't afford and subsequently people like me would feel guilty over having and decided that the Landspeeder was a "X-34" and the "T-16" was a whole 'nother thing, I'm going to have to just fume and stew and fret and try to use logic to convince people of the correctness of my position, logic like how I was going to use information about womp rats to suggest that it would be stupid to try to stun them with a T-16 flyer way up in the air, while it would make more sense to be in a Landspeeder and shooting at rodentlike creatures in a canyon (how are you going to see down into a canyon from way up high, and if you're not flying through the canyon then that experience is not very much like flying an X-Wing in a trench on the Death Star, is it?)*

... but then I came across this:

Womp Rats were also very fast and stealthy. They could have had the ability to cloak themselves with the Force since Ki Adi Mundi and Aurra Sing both found out that they could barely sense them with the Force aiding them.

So, really, being a Jedi is pretty much nothing. You have a bunch of bacteria in your system that lets you manipulate an energy field, a quirk of fate, and, now, a quirk of fate you share with rodents.

The more I learn about The Force, the less I like it.

Here's today's question, worth 6 points:

Who was the Sith Lord who could use the midichlorians to create life?

Bonuses today: In addition to the usual bonuses (listed on the standings page, here), you can get 10 extra points for naming the ship in the picture at the top right of this post and 10 more for naming the person it belonged to.

Plus: Commenter number 6 gets the 10 extra points today -- but remember, you can't be both commenter 5 and 6 and get the points.

*A lot of this is after-the-fact griping. One thing I've learned about almost every movie, book, or TV show is that you can almost always pick apart the logic of the story given time. What separates good stories like Star Wars and The Matrix from bad stories like Battlestar Galactica or The Lincoln Lawyer is how quickly you can pick them apart. If you're reading/watching and you instantly think "that makes no sense" the story is bad. If you can only do it when you're sitting around on a Saturday afternoon watching the movie for the 33rd time, it's not really that big a plot hole, and while it's fun to pick holes in it, at times, it doesn't take away from the fact that the story was really good.

But not that stuff about The Force. I'm serious about that. It was a cool concept until I learned that basically Jedi have rat DNA.

Tomorrow: the drawing for the weekly prize! Every comment is an entry, so comment away!