{"id":611,"date":"2009-08-20T13:14:25","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T17:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=611"},"modified":"2009-08-20T13:14:25","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T17:14:25","slug":"it-must-be-a-slow-week-in-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/08\/20\/it-must-be-a-slow-week-in-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"It must be a slow week in movies . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

. . . so John Scalzi decides to kick over the hornet’s nest of Star Wars<\/a> geekdom:<\/p>\n

\n

I’ll come right out and say it: Star Wars<\/em> has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars<\/em> novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here’s ten.<\/p>\n

R2-D2<\/b>
\nSure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that<\/em> design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

C-3PO<\/b>
\nCan’t fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was<\/em> put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I’m still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he’d later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the “mincing gay man” module.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And the crowd goes wild<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

. . . so John Scalzi decides to kick over the hornet’s nest of Star Wars geekdom: I’ll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28],"tags":[122,193],"class_list":["post-611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","tag-movies","tag-starwars"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":612,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611\/revisions\/612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}