star wars

“The Lost Prince,” the fifth episode of the Droids cartoon, tackles questions about droid rights in the Star Wars universe, and the answers are exactly what you hope they aren’t.

We left C-3P0 and R2-D2 floating in space, but since then they’ve landed on yet another desert planet that isn’t Tatooine. Star Wars LOVES desert planets that look like but aren’t Tatooine. This one even has a guest appearance from Jabba the Hutt’s band! But nope, it stubbornly refuses to be Tatooine.

Anyway, the droids are in search of a new master, and have been sent by an agency to a diner. Yes, an agency – that’s the only description we get, but it feels very much like a temp agency. They screw up their new food industry jobs in comical ways, of course, and are fired by the diner’s owner. The whole first act of this episode treats droids as employees of their masters, rather than possessions. It’s a good kid-friendly way of handling the thorny ethical issues about seemingly sentient beings being owned that the movies tend to gloss over. Well done, Droids!

Until act two. 3P0 is distraught, saying they can’t function without a master. The implications of this are not explored, but they’re worrying. Does he mean they legally can’t function? Does galactic law require droids to be owned? Or does he mean it literally? Is there something in droids’ programming that will shut them down if they go too long without an owner?

It gets worse. Out of options, the droids put themselves up for auction. On an elevated auction block, with a crowd of people gathered around making bids. The money paid for our title characters, though, doesn’t go to them, it goes to the auctioneer. And they have no say in who they’re sold to; they have no choice but to go with the highest bidder.

I’m trying not to take this essay about a kids’ cartoon to too horrible a place, but you can connect the dots for yourself. These dots are not very far apart. This is perhaps not imagery that should have been served up to kids on a Saturday morning, especially when, while we’re supposed to care for the droids’ plight, the circumstances themselves are not presented as in any way morally wrong.

It’s funny, that the droids can’t find a good master. Uh-oh, they were almost sold to a silly-looking abusive alien! Isn’t that hilarious?

It gets worse. Again.

Let’s assume that these droids we love so much aren’t people. They’re not sentient. Forget that they have emotions, they feel pain, they interact with each other even when non-droids aren’t around. These are nothing but extremely sophisticated versions of ChatGPT encased in robot bodies. Fine. If that’s true, then the auction here is no worse than selling paintings at Sotheby’s. I don’t buy that, but let’s go with it, just for a moment.

This episode introduces a new kind of being to the Star Wars universe – an android. We don’t get a clear definition of what an android is, exactly, but there are a whole lot of context clues. Androids and droids are definitely NOT the same thing. Droids are entirely mechanical. Androids are living beings with cybernetic parts. What we usually think of as cyborgs. Most definitely people, in other words.

An android is sold at the auction, alongside all the droids. Okay, it turns out not to be an android, it’s the titular lost prince in disguise, but nobody knows that when he’s bought by Jann. Jann’s our new hero of the story, the droids’ new master, who is unequivocally a “good guy,” who helps our droids take down the evil gangster and save the poor lost prince. And Jann doesn’t have any problems at all with buying and owning a living being.

So if androids are people, and they can be owned, then we really don’t have any grounds to think that droids aren’t people too.

It’s probably good that Disney owns Star Wars now. This episode of Droids will fit on the vault shelf nicely, right next to Song of the South.

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Next: Ewoks S1E6 – “The Tree of Light” (1985)

Capitalism requires indoctrination to perpetuate itself. Objective analysis of capitalism shows it to be an ultimately destructive force, and so to survive it must avoid analysis by the laboring class, who sacrifice their happiness so that capitalists might enjoy ever greater profit. As David Foster Wallace pointed out, fish don’t know they’re in water, so indoctrinating laborers into taking the systems and beliefs that support capitalism for granted is a great way to keep them from asking what the hell kind of muck they’re swimming through day after day.

“The Travelling Jindas,” the fifth episode of the Ewoks cartoon, puts Latara in the spotlight. She’s part of Wicket’s gang of friends, and all we know of her so far is that she plays the flute and flirts with Teebo. It’s her flute-playing, not her flirting, that’s important to this story, as she’s frustrated that nobody wants to listen to the new song she’s written. (Her song is identical to the music that plays over the closing credits, so maybe nobody wants to tell her it’s a little derivative.) As if her friends’ rude avoidance wasn’t bad enough, her father wants her to clean the hut, and her mother wants her to babysit her younger siblings. Latara’s had enough! Does no Ewok appreciate true artistry?

Fortunately for her, the Jindas, a travelling troupe of performers, have passed through the village, and she runs away with them, making her friends promise not to tell. Hilariously they immediately break this promise, telling shaman Logray where she’s gone off to. Sadly, the Jindas are notorious on Endor for always being lost and never being able to find their way back to a place once they’ve left it, so Latara is in danger of never being seen again. Her friends set out to rescue her.

The Jindas being perpetually lost is a pretty good summation of how this episode presents them. They’re nice enough folk, but a little dim, a bit irresponsible, and very egotistical. They live off of the charity of others, or at least that’s how we’re meant to see them. Freeloaders, Aunt Bozzie calls them; never mind that they’re skilled artists and the Ewoks universally love their show. They can be allowed to provide a night’s distraction, but Chief Chirpa makes it clear that this is a one-night-only event, and these vagabonds need to be on their way in the morning.

To Latara, the Jindas’ life is initially an attractive one, but she quickly finds it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Travelling with them, she has to do even more drudge work than she did at home, and she never gets a chance to practice her music, let alone perform it. After the Jindas help her friends rescue her from the Duloks, she bids them a fond farewell, having learned an important lesson. The life of a performer is okay for some people, but responsible little Ewoks know that chores come first, art second.

The other Ewoks don’t learn any lesson at all, and will presumably continue to dismiss Latara’s artistic talent and passion.

If you want to perpetuate generational capitalism, you must indoctrinate not just current laborers, but future laborers as well.

Previous: Droids S1E4 – “A Race to the Finish” (1985)
Next: Droids S1E5 – “The Lost Prince” (1985)

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!

Previous: Ewoks S1E4 – “To Save Deej” (1985)
Next: Ewoks S1E5 – “The Travelling Jindas” (1985)

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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Next: Ewoks S1E4 – “To Save Deej” (1985)

There’s an odd tonal difference between the Ewoks’ two primary antagonists. The Duloks are all, “We’re going to play pranks on those dumb Ewoks,” whereas Morag the witch is all, “I will extinguish the verminous Ewok race by means both foul and bloody.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

I understand the Duloks’ motivations, mostly. Their lives are horrible – they live in a swamp, they’re stupid, they’re covered in bugs all the time. The Ewoks look like they’ve got it all going on, and the Duloks are jealous. It’s pretty standard cartoon fair. They’re threatening but not too threatening. When Wicket and his buddies are captured by the Duloks in this episode, we know it’s bad, but we also know they’re not going to be slaughtered. A ransom and maybe some light humiliation are all the Duloks are after.

It’s equally obvious what Morag wants – Ewok genocide, she’s very clear and persistent about it – but less obvious why she wants it. Apart from a throwaway line in the first episode hinting at some past encounter with one of the Ewok elders, we’ve gotten no reason so far as to why she hates the cute little teddy bears. She doesn’t want to eat them, like Gargamel does the Smurfs. She’s not searching for greater power, like Skeletor fighting He-Man for control of Castle Grayskull. She just wants all the Ewoks dead.

There’s a lot of continuity in this seemingly simple cartoon – seriously, they’re still introducing new major characters – so maybe this hasn’t been ignored, maybe Morag’s motivation is being held back for a later climactic reveal. I hope so. She’s supposed to be the big scary evil, but without knowing why she’s doing what she’s doing, it’s a little hard to get invested. Whenever she pops up, it’s less, “Oh no, Morag!” and more, “Oh, it’s her again.”

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Next: Droids S1E3 – “The Trigon Unleashed” (1985)