You thought the Galaxy of Adventures series would peak at turning Darth Vader’s Rogue One massacre into a kid’s animated short? No. No, it did not.
Lucasfilm’s Star Wars Kids initiative has, so far, been a cool way to introduce not just the world of the galaxy far, far away to young audiences but, through ancillary material beyond these flashy shorts, encouraging critical thinking and analysis at a young age. The latter is always a noble goal, but the former is making the non-thinking part of my brain shriek with delight at the wild re-imaginings of the Skywalker saga’s action sequences.
Not all the Galaxy of Adventures shorts are like this, but two recently released ones—depicting Yoda’s battle with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones and Vader and Luke’s duel on Bespin from Empire Strikes Back—that simply focus on the action of the movie’s fights are, well, really bloody cool.
While the Yoda and Dooku encounter is pretty faithful to the over-the-top choreography of Attack of the Clones’ original version of the fight, Galaxy of Adventures’ take on the Vader/Luke duel especially is a pretty radical re-interpretation of what we saw in the film itself.
The speed of it, all those Force-flung scraps of metal, the dodge rolls and the acrobatic nature of it—even if it doesn’t go too far into that direction, it’s something that’s much more in line with the style of combat we saw in the prequel films, which will no doubt rankle a few people. But frankly I can put aside a few quibbles if it means getting something that looks as rad as this:
In fact, seeing these shorts go all the goddamn way in on these fights makes me wish we’d get entire adaptations of the films in this style at some point. It wouldn’t replace the movies of course, before you holler at the mere idea of an alternate version of these classic films existing. It’d just be a way of interpreting them that retains all the dialogue and story, but in a flashy, cute, and occasionally very badass animated style. It’d be Star Wars from a certain point of view, if you will. That point of view being hype as hell.