For a Saturday morning cartoon from 1985, Droids was surprisingly ahead of its time. For one thing, it’s serialized. There are a lot more Saturdays in a year than there were new episodes of any given show, which means animated series were going to be repeated quite a bit. This often meant that episodes were made to be shown in any order, for ease of scheduling. That meant episodes had to be self-contained, with the reset button hit at the end of each. (Kids’ cartoons were far from the only shows made this way – plenty of live-action sit-coms and dramas were made with no strict episode order, to make syndication easier.)

But the first four episodes of Droids form a neat little arc, telling the story of C-3PO and R2-D2 meeting new friends Thall, Jord, and Kea, helping them take down the Fromm crime family and win the Boonta speeder race. Both the gangster and the race plot strands come to a head in this episode; in the end, the droids choose to leave their friends so that they won’t have to pass up an exciting job opportunity (space capitalism!) that doesn’t allow droids. The episode ends with our mechanical heroes drifting through space in an escape pod, ready for a new adventure. 80s aesthetics abound, but the structure is recognizably modern.

And of course, there’s another aspect of Droids that’s much more common now than it was then – continuity! A very key element of the Star Wars mythos makes a surprise appearance in this episode: 3PO being a complete and utter dick to R2.

No, wait. That’s a key element of the Star Wars mythos, yes, but not very surprising. No, actually, it’s everyone’s favorite badass bounty hunter, Boba Fett! The makers of Droids knew their audience – kids obsessed with Star Wars – and they made good use of that audience’s knowledge of the films, and how that knowledge can be utilized to build anticipation. I imagine many a 1985 child staring in disbelief at their TV when the shadowed figure stepped out into the light, then screaming in delight when that trademark armor was revealed in all its glory. I mean, that’s what I would have done, if I hadn’t been so stupid as to pass up this cartoon the first time around for being kids’ stuff.

And of course, Boba’s appearance, apart from being oh-my-god-so-awesome, brings with it a cornucopia of continuity to sate the hungriest of geek appetites. We already knew this show took place pre-A New Hope from references to the Empire, but Boba – last seen being slowly digested over a thousand years in Return of the Jedi – showing up alive and well clinches it. And what’s more, the show trusts its audience enough not to spoon-feed them the timeline. Adults might need to think it through, but the kids get it.

And he references Jabba the Hutt! Oh my god so awesome!

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The Star Wars universe has television. According to Wookieepedia it’s called “HoloNet,” but I haven’t heard that word yet. I’m trying to take things as they come in this watch-through, and so far it looks like TV to me.

We already knew there was television from (shudder) The Star Wars Holiday Special. I don’t mean the programs that are stored on portable drives and played back on special devices, although those offer a wide range of entertainment options, from boring off-brand Cirque du Soleil to boring black light rock concerts to boring Wookiee porn. No, I mean the boring cooking show that Chewie’s wife Malla watches, in which Harvey Korman says words that are almost, but not quite, jokes. Malla tunes in to this program at a set time, and she can’t pause it or rewind it. Watch it, or miss it forever. She views it on a device that looks and works just like the televisions that the humans of 1978 would have been using to watch (shudder) The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Or the humans of 1985 would have been using to watch Droids, for that matter. In the third episode, “The Trigon Unleashed,” lots of plot stuff happens – they destroy the gangster family’s base, it’s really quite good – but what I found most interesting was that we get a glimpse of what C-3P0 calls R2-D2’s favorite program. C-3P0 has strapped an antenna to his head and gone up to the roof in an attempt to tune into the right channel, just like we used to have to do with pre-cable, pre-streaming, over-the-air TV. (We didn’t strap the antennas onto our heads, we just had to go onto the roof sometimes. Ask your parents grandparents.) Apparently R2 likes Westerns, because the show is about an astromech droid wearing a white cowboy hat and a sheriff’s badge fighting an astromech droid wearing a black cowboy hat. They throw rocks at each other. Later, one of the gangsters watches the same show, and a scene shows the white-hatted droid and another in a feathered headdress smoking peace pipes. (Don’t act surprised, we already knew droids could smoke.)

It’s just a throw-away gag, even if it’s a pretty good one. (Nevertheless, it’s canon, and I’d like to see the Empire-era HoloNet droid Western entertainment industry explored in a ten-part Disney+ series, please and thank you.) But the trappings of how the show is watched are what fascinates me, and shows us one of the limits of science fiction, or at least of some science fiction writers. Sci-fi tech is, mostly, the extrapolation of future technology (or long, long ago technology, in this case), and of course the writers only have the technology of today to extrapolate from. In the original trilogy, Lucas and the other filmmakers did an excellent job of bringing a timeless quality to the futuristic technology, partly by avoiding doing too much of that extrapolating I just mentioned. The people of Star Wars, despite the lasers and robots and hyperdrives, seem to live with even fewer technological conveniences than the people of 1977 did, and what they do have, we mostly don’t see. Aunt Beru’s kitchen was pretty cool, but we didn’t get a good look at what any of that stuff actually did.

As a result, the technology of the original trilogy doesn’t feel dated even decades later. Watch Rogue One (I’m getting ahead of myself, sorry) and see how closely the design hews to the first film, and how the only aspect of it that feels “retro” is some of the clothing. Compare that with the new Star Trek shows, and how much they had to modernize the Enterprise bridge from the original series to Strange New Worlds. (It’s a slightly unfair comparison, given the differing scale of budgets involved, but I think my overall point holds up.)

In Droids and (shudder) The Star Wars Holiday Special, the stakes are a lot lower than in a serious motion picture. These are kids’ cartoons and a family “comedy,” respectively, so, sure, throw a TV in for the sake of a joke. But, as I said, the writers are limited by what their imaginations can project from the technology of today, and in this case, their imaginations couldn’t see beyond television as they used it at the time. TV of the long, long ago future would work pretty much the same, but with a weirder antenna. Forget flatscreens or streaming. It was easier to imagine spaceships and aliens than the technological leaps forward that would happen in real life, within just a couple of years. Because of that, Droids, despite its unlimited scenic budget, feels far more dated than the older films.

It’s still a kick-ass cartoon, though.

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