Star Wars Rebels

Fan Art Friday: At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi

Mei-Mei6 Comments

Welcome back to our Star Wars coloring book club, where Kiri at Star Wars Anonymous and I color the same image every month to compare and contrast.

I have complicated feelings about Darth Maul.  How could such a cool character only get two lines in The Phantom Menace?  Why did The Clone Wars essentially replace him with his brother, Savage Opress, only to bring him back to life in a dumb way that is now canon?  Why is he from Dathomir, instead of the Zabrak homeworld of Iridonia?  Why did they bring him into Solo at all?

Yet despite all these questionable story decisions, I still have a fondness for the Sith apprentice with the awesome double-bladed lightsaber.  He has plenty of great storylines that have been told in books and on TV, and great actors behind his portrayal.

I had fun with this picture.  I didn’t have any grand plan for it, I just chose colors as I went along, starting with Maul’s portrait and working outward.

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In fact, I have reached the point where I need to sharpen my pencils again.  I discovered that the four colors I use the most are: jade green, aqua green, red, and golden yellow.  Obviously, I used several of those here.

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My shortest pencils

Check out Kiri’s subtle, dried-up color palette of Maul here.  As she points out, this was the very first page in the coloring book.  Kind of funny we’re only now getting around to it after a few years of doing this!

 

Reports of the EU’s demise have been greatly exaggerated

Mei-Mei6 Comments

I got very, very excited when I saw that this week’s episode of Star Wars Rebels was called “Idiot’s Array.”

Sure enough, the episode came through for me: sabacc is now official Star Wars canon.

Sabacc is a card game where players gamble based on their hands (kind of a mix of poker and blackjack).  “Pure sabacc” is when the hand cards total +/- 23; the only hand that beats this is the “Idiot’s Array.”

Idiot's Array beats Pure Sabacc
Idiot’s Array beats Pure Sabacc

This is about all the detail that the episode went into about the game, so the rest of the rules (suits, randomizers, skifters, neutral field, etc. [the Han Solo trilogy by A.C. Crispin provides good detail])  may or may not be canon.  Sabacc is apparently also mentioned in the Rebels tie-in novel A New Dawn, which I have not read so I don’t know what detail is provided there.

My point with all this is: the EU is not dead.  There are people involved in making franchise decisions that love Star Wars as much as I do, and they actually know more about it than I do.  Someone made a conscious decision to put sabacc in Rebels.  That gives me hope.

I would not be surprised to see small things from the EU continuing to appear in canon, whether it’s books, TV, or movies.  Now, will we see Mara Jade on the big screen? No.  Will Korriban henceforth be known as Moraband? Yes.  We are going to have to reconcile ourselves to this.

But let’s rejoice in the small things.  For every Darth-Maul-on-robot-legs The Clone Wars gave us, we also got a Selkath named Chata Hyoki.  Selkath are an aquatic species created for the Knights of the Old Republic game, and they are now canon thanks to the TCW episode titled “Pursuit of Peace” where Chata Hyoki appears as a bounty hunter (perhaps not a distinguished view of the peaceful species, but better than nothing).  The series goes on to include several other Selkath.

Chata Hyoki, Selkath bounty hunter
Chata Hyoki, Selkath bounty hunter

Heck, the very name of Coruscant, the most important planet in the galaxy, was originally named by Timothy Zahn in his novel Heir to the Empire.  It was made canon in The Phantom Menace.

Who knows what we’ll see next?