Welcome back to our Star Wars coloring book club, where Kiri from Star Wars Anonymous and I color the same image every month to compare and contrast.
This month, we have one of the antagonists of Episode I, the Dug podracer Selbulba.
This one was not that interesting. Sebulba is kinda brown, and his headgear is kinda brown (ETA: apparently it’s actually grey, whoops). I didn’t have any great ideas for the background either, so I asked my husband what color he thought of when he thought of Sebulba (isn’t this the kind of question you ask your spouse all the time??).
He immediately said orange, because of Selbuba’s pod! Genius. So I did some orange tones for the flowers and the decorations.
And that’s about it. I’m happy with how it looks, but I wouldn’t say it was one of my favorites, which kinda jives with my feelings about Sebulba. He is a pretty one-dimensional character, a fine opponent for the podrace but not all that interesting.
This past weekend was my kid’s first Trick-or-Treat! Here is Wicket the Ewok with Leia (though it’s the wrong Leia costume for Endor haha). I got the official Wicket costume from the Disney store, and it was ridiculously cute. I mean ridiculously.
I watched The Empire Strikes Back again recently, though this time it was on a big screen with the Cleveland Orchestra accompanying it live–that experience is always a pleasure. We had left our toddler at home, but it felt like he was there with us as I watched the scene where Luke meets Yoda on Dagobah. If you are a parent or have spent any length of time around a toddler, you will likely recognize these attributes:
Likes sticks
Likes hitting things with sticks
Picky about food
Likes flashlights and will indiscriminately shine them in his own eyes
Short and cute
Speaks non-standard English that can be hard to parse
Yells “MINE” a lot, even for things that are not actually his
Yes, that’s correct: Yoda is a toddler.
In the scene where Yoda is introduced, he behaves exactly like a three-year-old. This had never occurred to me until I rewatched it as the parent of a toddler. It is interesting how being a parent sometimes gives you a new perspective on familiar things. I was immediately reminded of my kid, who this morning screamed “MINEEEEE” about a toy car and a banana peel.
But Yoda doesn’t maintain the toddler behavior for long. He begins to speak and act (more) normally in his hut when conversing with Obi-Wan’s spirit, and we don’t see Toddler Yoda at any other point in the movie, or any other Star Wars movie (though he does still have his quirks). So why the act?
I had never really thought about Yoda’s extra-peculiar behavior in this scene before. One theory is that Yoda’s quirks have become exaggerated after so many years of living in isolation on Dagobah. But I don’t think Yoda has gone completely around the bend. I think it’s strategy.
As many parents will probably agree, I find toddlers to be the world’s greatest test of patience. So upon meeting Luke for the first time, what better way to take his measure than go full on toddler and try to push all his buttons? I guess I wouldn’t advise this strategy when meeting new people in real life, but I would think you can learn a lot about someone’s temperament by seeing how they interact with misbehaving children. I’m certainly learning a lot about myself as I figure out this parenting thing.
Therefore, as soon as he concludes Luke is unsuitable (no patience, reckless, too old, as he says to Obi-Wan in the hut), he drops the act. The test is over, and Luke has failed. Although he does change his mind and agrees to train Luke, he was correct about Luke’s temperament, which is shown when Luke rashly abandons his training to save his friends on Cloud City, only to walk into a trap.
Yoda is shown in the prequels to be an excellent teacher of younglings and clearly has great respect for children. “Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is,” he says when one young student provides an answer that the adults could not see. So is it really any surprise to see him try to figure something out from the perspective of a child?
Welcome back to our Star Wars coloring book club, where Kiri from Star Wars Anonymous and I color the same image every month to compare and contrast.
This month I am welcoming fall with a Día de los Muertos themed picture.
I had so much fun with this one! I decorated the stormtrooper heads as calaveras in the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) tradition. This holiday is celebrated in Mexican communities on November 1, corresponding with All Saints’ Day. The Disney movie Coco is a good depiction of the Día de los Muertos traditions.
Calaveras are decorated skulls, often made of sugar, that are a symbol of the holiday. I love the idea of stormtrooper calaveras because the helmets look a bit like skulls. I had a lot of fun thinking up designs for the calaveras. The first one I did was the top right one, which started out a bit rough, but I got better as I went along. It was a nice change from the normal blocks of color that I do for these.
For the rest of the image, I wanted to represent the colorful spirit of the ofrendas, or altars, including the traditional marigold flowers. There is one spot that I colored blue and now I wish I had done red, but otherwise I like how it turned out.
The highlight of my trip to Ireland in 2015 was a visit to the rugged island Skellig Michael. I had wanted to visit for three reasons.
First, it is home to many species of birds, including Atlantic puffins, gannets, kittiwakes, and others. I was able to add some cool species to my life list and get very close and personal with these birds that are not afraid of humans. It was even puffin breeding season.
Second, the island is historically and culturally important, being the home of ascetic Christian monks for several centuries. They built the winding staircases up the rocks and also built stone dwellings. It is now a UNESCO heritage site.
Third, the island stood in for the Jedi refuge of Ahch-To in the new Star Wars films. They had been filming there the year before I went, and even though the movie The Force Awakens hadn’t even come out yet, I was excited to visit a Star Wars filming location. And I loved seeing and recognizing the footage of Skellig Michael on the big screen later.
But in the end, the reason that Skellig Michael is most memorable to me is the mental journey I took to get there. You can read the whole story of my trip here, but I will just say that I will always be proud that I was able to overcome my anxiety to enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
