Those of us who grew up with the original Star Wars trilogy and collected the Kenner toy line remember how real those action figures felt compared to the images we caught only occasionally onscreen.
Now, with the movies available on demand and elaborate documentation available online and in print, we’re asked to come to terms with a canonical “reality” that differs in some completely unacceptable ways from everything we’ve ever known and believed about some of our favorite characters.
At some point, a fan just has to draw the line. Are we really meant to believe that…
4-LOM is actually Zuckuss
Having looked at a lot of action figure packaging, I can tell you who 4-LOM is: he’s the beige bug-eyed bounty hunter with a long pleather coat. He means something special to me, because I actually owned his figure — unlike the obscure Zuckuss, a shadowy figure who looked something like a goth Death Star droid.
It was in the dark years of the late ’80s, when it seemed we’d never get another Star Wars movie, that role-playing game developers discovered Kenner had made a mistake — one Lucasfilm, having no time to police the names of minor characters, didn’t notice. 4-LOM does sound like a Star Wars droid name, and it was intended to correspond to that character.
So not only did the objectively far cooler character lose his longstanding name, he was given the name originally designated “Tuckuss” before someone who knew Yiddish pointed out the connotation. I’m sorry, no. He will always be 4-LOM to me.
Max Rebo plays with his feet
This one is especially maddening, since the toy and the screen depiction actually match up. Max Rebo, the bandleader in Jabba’s palace, is clearly seen playing his Red Ball Jett keyboard with his hands. We don’t see his feet, but could well imagine they looked something like they did on the action figure, which was given a little blue loincloth for modesty.
Even the Special Edition, with its copious atrocities, didn’t make Max Rebo play with his feet. That notion only started to gain traction in the Disney era, when creature shop stans became drawn to an early Phil Tippett concept maquette that had Rebo playing with prehensile feet — something like the configuration that would later be used for the podracer Sebulba in The Phantom Menace.
Wookieepedia now insists Rebo plays with his feet, despite the entry itself having multiple images apparently demonstrating the contrary. It’s backed up by Pablo Hidalgo himself, one of the core Lucasfilm staffers maintaining Star Wars continuity.
In a post on the official Star Wars website, Hidalgo exhaustively demonstrates that the puppet seen onscreen in Return of the Jedi was indeed conceptualized and built to be sitting on a cushion at keyboard level, possessing no arms and playing with his feet. However, as even Hidalgo acknowledges, the way the costume was operated made it appear onscreen as if Rebo had arms and presumably unseen legs.
Yes, that’s actually a more interesting concept than Rebo being a “diapered humanoid,” as Hidalgo puts it. At the same time, we all know what we saw. The Kenner designers know what they saw. Let’s just go with that.
Mini-Rigs aren’t real
Before my family bought a VCR in 1987, my knowledge of what exactly appeared on screen in the Star Wars trilogy was limited to what I could remember from my few precious viewings, plus what was documented in the novelizations. I knew there was a lot I had missed.
So it never occurred to me that my CAP-2 and INT-4 were not actually in the movies. Only in adulthood that I realize the entire line of Mini-Rigs had been invented as vehicles that plausibly could have been “just out of sight” in the films. In my mind, they are absolutely there.
This was such a missed opportunity in the Special Editions. We got Greedo shooting first, when instead we could have had Imperial Shuttle Pods swarming around the Emperor’s Lamba.
Nothing brings me more delight than writers and illustrators sneaking these vehicles into Disney-era canon. The Shuttle Pods, for example, have definitely popped up in a comic book. Grand prize, though, goes to Adam Christopher, author of Shadow of the Sith — in which none other than Lando Calrissian is trapped by what is unmistakably the unwieldy CAP-2 Captivator.
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