Watch Stephen Colbert Defend The Controversial New Star Wars Lightsaber
This article is more than 2 years old
When the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens showed up online the day after Thanksgiving, it wasted no time becoming the most watched movie trailer of all time, racking up more than 58 million views in five days. Fans have spent the following hours dissecting every last frame, trying to squeeze out as much knowledge as we possibly can from 88 seconds worth of footage. One point that has inspired perhaps the most debate or outrage is that fancy new cross lightsaber. (I guessed the cute ball-rolling robot would inspire the most hate, and it has generated a great deal of ire, but the lightsaber seems to have topped it.) This particular element does have supporters, however, and one of them is Stephen Colbert, who took to his Colbert Report to stand up for the little guy. In this case, the little guy is the much-maligned Jedi weapon. Check out the video for yourself below.
Many have been critical of design of the new lightsaber, which is more like a broadsword, a heavier version of the weapon favored by the Jedi Knights. One big sticking point is that the smaller blades that stick out from the hilt, ostensibly to protect your hand, are useless because the first time you cross blades with someone and their blade comes down, it will simply slice through the base and provide little to no protection. (My biggest worry would be that I would screw up and hit myself with one of the little blades, severing some valued appendage. Then again, I’m clumsy as all hell and no kind of Jedi whatsoever.)
Colbert counters this by proposing a theory that it’s not three separate lightsabers, but one, single plasma stream, thus you wouldn’t be able to cut through it with another similar blade, and the new flourish remains a practical new development in lightsaber technology. He even has this handy dandy, high-tech diagram to illustrate his point.
But then there’s the argument that the two smaller blades erupt later than the main one, but don’t worry, because he has an explanation for that as well. And we just don’t understand because we’re all lagging two weeks behind him in terms of Star Wars fandom.
To be honest, it doesn’t really matter, because as Colbert says, this is “A lightsaber with two mini lightsabers on it,” and that’s pretty damn cool. We heard a report yesterday that another Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer may drop in May attached to Avengers: Age of Ultron, so we have a while to wait before we see anything new. The film itself doesn’t actually open until December 18, 2015, so we have to wait even longer for that.
