Welcome to the second of our nine days of covering Star Wars: Visions! Some notes up front: we’re not going to be talking much about the studios that created these short films, both because of my general ignorance of the various producers involved, and also because I want to attempt to take these stories at as close to face value as possible. Also, you’ll notice that this installment is only 4 thoughts, and not 5. Due to the brevity of these episodes, I don’t want to belabor the same points over and over if there isn’t much to say. So, fire up your lightsaber microphone, and let’s get to it!
1. A totally different tone
Having watching “The Duel” and “Tatooine Rhaposdy” a day apart, the whiplash in tone between the two did not send me to the hospital, but had I watched them back to back, it very well may have. This is not a knock on either’s tone – I love that Star Wars: Visions has the breadth of anime under its umbrella that it odes – but it’s hard to imagine two more different 14 minutes of animation.
2. Why is it always Tatooine?
I understand that for a lot of people, Tatooine is the Star Wars planet. While I can respect that, I vehemently disagree. George Lucas wrote it as a backwater of close-minded people and nothing to do buy shoot rats for fun. We are shown Tatooine because we want to see that Luke is suffocating there and needs to get out. Now, I get that unless you’re a real Star Wars head, you think that if you need to tell a Hutt story, it has to be on Tatooine, but that just isn’t true.
Also, this is a clean slate, blue sky project. If they want the Hutts to now live on the planet equivalent of the Santa Monica Pier in the 1980s, that could’ve happened! I’m not implying that I didn’t enjoy this episode, or that the setting ruined it for me, I’m just encouraging producers of shows like this to leave this podunk planet alone for a (long) while.
3. Truly funny music, vis a vis Star Wars
This episode is all based around a band, and when we finally get to hear that band, the music cracked me up. This is one time where the tone went full on anime, eschewing the galaxy far, far away. While I didn’t expect these young folks to play “Cantina Band,” I thought we’d get something more Max Rebo-ish, especially as we are outside of Jabba’s palace.
Instead, we got faux-pop punk, full of emotion and longing. It is just so unlike what we’ve seen from Star Wars in the past, but it fit the tone of this story perfectly. I’m a sucker for any story of a band trying to make it, and the episode had a lot of heart in it, so the music, tonally, fit. It’s just very funny to me to imagine that this is the music that Luke was bopping to while cruising Tosche station with Biggs.
4. Who thought there could be a fun Hutt story?
Many of us have likely seen the inaugural Clone Wars film, where Rotta the Hutt is kidnapped and must be saved by Ahsoka Tano. This is the least enjoyable of the Clone Wars arcs, in part because the attempts to make the story cute or playful veer into cloying territory. And so, I was reluctant to see another story where there was a ‘fun’ Hutt, but “Tatooine Rhapsody” proved me wrong and allowed the Hutt connection to enhance, not hurt, the story.
