Star Wars Videos Explore Cantina Band Auditions And Han Always Shooting First
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As a franchise, Star Wars has always been ripe for fan tribute and parody. The subject is wildly popular enough that a wide segment of the population with get whatever joke you’re putting out there into the world, and we’ll watch just about anything that has anything to do with that far, far away galaxy, so you’re almost guaranteed an audience. Now that the key cast is in place for J.J. Abrams’ Episode VII and the process of making a new movie has begun in earnest, this tendency is going to make the jump into hyperspace. The next 18 months is going to be full to overflowing with everyone’s pet Star Wars project, good, bad, or otherwise. Just to get you prepared for this deluge, here are two spoof videos that both have their ups and their downs.
Replacing a band member is hard. It totally changes the chemistry and dynamic of the group, and even in the situations this goes well, it takes some getting used to. Mos Eisley may be a hellhole of debauchery, full of intergalactic sociopaths and criminals of all varieties, but the band and the local bar sure does play a mean tune. And in order to maintain that integrity, you can be sure that the give all of the applicants to fill a vacant slot a thorough vetting. This College Humor video imagines what that process looks like.
There are some really funny bits here. That Chris Darth-try song is absolutely epic, and his double guitar is nice touch, but even though the whole video is only five-minutes long, it’s about two too long. Everyone who shows up is famous—Liz Phair, Lisa Loeb, Rick Springfield, Weird Al, Mark McGrath, Boba Fett, and more—and I’m sure it was hard to say no when a sort-of-celebrity wants to be in your video, but it really needs to stop about halfway through.
Video number two tackles that most heated subject for Star Wars fans, Han Solo shooting first in the Cantina scene in A New Hope. When George Lucas went back and messed with the holy trilogy in the late 1990s, one of the things he altered was to have the bounty hunter Greedo pull and fire before Han. This sticks in the craw of the fan base because this one moment, this one action, tells you everything you need to know about Han’s character and personality up to this point. It perfectly encapsulates who he is and how he lives like few other moments in film history. Changing that indelibly changes the movies and his arc in them. I’ll stop now, this has all been said time and time again.
Again, while this 8-bit style video from Dorkly starts out strong, it runs a bit long, which is bound to happen with this sort of artifact. It’s still pretty funny, especially Lucas groveling for fan approval at the end.
