Star Wars: retold

If you haven’t already seen this video, do go see it, otherwise you’re in the same position as Amanda.

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) is a four-minute video (with animation) of a retelling of the Star Wars trilogy (the real one) by someone who says she doesn’t need to see it, since she already knows all about what happens. The video-maker recorded her description.

While it’s hilarious what she gets wrong, what I find amazing is how much she gets right. My Patient Husband said, “She didn’t get anything right,” and I found myself in the position of the mom in “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” and saying, “Actually, take a closer look.”

She names all the main characters of the series. She doesn’t waste time on characters who play only a bit part, like Boba Fett. 

All those characters are correctly identified with the correct sides they’re on.

While the timeline is a bit messed up, she’s organized it pretty well if it were one movie with a coherent storyline. (Don’t get into that: Empire Strikes Back and Jedi are both riddled with continuity errors and retcon.) 

She gets the heart of the internal and external conflicts.

In short, for someone who never saw the films, she’s absorbed most of the pertinent points of them, and one assumes that was all passive learning because she isn’t interested in actually seeing the movies.

My Patient Husband said, “Maybe she reconstructed the movies by looking at the action figures,” but I don’t see that to be the case for two reasons. One, that if she went to a rack of action figures, she’d find lots of minor characters and no Han Solos. We all know that song and dance, how there’s never any of the popular characters left because, well, they’re popular.

And secondly, she didn’t mention any vehicles, which have to be more than half the Star Wars toys. Other than the Death Star, there’s not any machinery mentioned.

What this tells me is that humans are innately keyed to “Story” and we like to fit things into predictable patterns and understandable bites. We like beginnings, middles and endings. And, as I’ve asserted before, that points to God as a story-teller.

But this is all a ton of overthinking. Just go over there and laugh your head off.