I guess none of us should be surprised.
After Jar Jar Binks, 3 crappy prequels, and endless tinkering with the original Star Wars trilogy, it was only a matter of time until George Lucas found another way to continue to simultaneously ruin and prostitute his franchise.
But that still didn’t prepare me for the shock of seeing Han Solo popping and locking to crappy R&B music.
Sacrilege.
The video game Kinect Star Wars was released on April 3rd and gives players the chance to “be the controller” and play as an actual Jedi.
It definitely sounds more exciting than it looks.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Kinect is a motion sensing input device that allows users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to use a game controller.
Kinect truly is a remarkable and groundbreaking device — one that has already impacted the world of gaming and begun to shape its future.
Which means I pretty much wasted a huge chunk of my youth shooting at ducks with this thing.
Apparently in Kinect Star Wars, one of the mini-games is a dance challenge.
I don’t care if the game was designed to be kid-friendly, because unless you’re playing as a busty blue Twi’lek dancer on Jabba the Hut’s barge, there’s no way to justify any dancing in the Star Wars universe.
Head tails are hot.
By approving gameplay where Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine literally have a dance off, George Lucas is basically just taking a giant piss all over every old school Star Wars fan that has yet to turn their back on the franchise.
Why else would Lucas allow villainous death-dealing Sith Lords to dance at all, let alone perform embarrassingly lame moves like the “Chewie Hug” and “Bantha Rider?”
The ability to shoot Force lightening out of your fingertips is a lot less menacing when you bust out the “jazz hands.”
But by far the most egregious transgression in Kinect Star Wars is what the game developers did to Han Solo.
I mean, come on. Han Solo is an intergalactic renegade. He blows away bounty hunters with impunity, offends and then beds princesses, and reluctantly helps save the galaxy without sacrificing any of his amoral and roguish charm.
But he doesn’t f**king dance.
If George Lucas signs off on a character like that making a fool out of himself, then what legendary badass is next? Rambo? Jack Bauer? Batman?
Spider-man didn’t make the list.
But it gets worse.
Not only did LucasArts take one of the most awesome anti-heroes in cinematic history and turn him into a gyrating clown, but they also had the audacity to make him shake his ass in the exact same setting that made him legend.
That’s right, in Kinect Star Wars Han Solo rises up out of the Cloud City carbonite chamber (the same one he was frozen in during the epic gut-wrenching scene in The Empire Strikes Back) and proceeds to bump and grind.
A little piece of my soul just died.
Oh, and that song Han dances to? It’s a cover of R&B sensation Jason Derulo’s irritating “Ridin’ Solo” — except with altered lyrics like these:
Time to do the things I like,
Gonna see a princess, everything’s all right,
No Jabba to answer to,
Ain’t a fixture in a palace zoo,
I’m so happy the carbonite is gone,
I’m movin’ on,
I’m solo, I’m Han Solo,
I’m Han Solo,
I’m Han Solo, Solo.
I wish I was making this up. You’d think after the outrage over re-editing Episode IV (in order to make Han seem less morally ambiguous by having bounty hunter Greedo shoot at him first), Lucas would have just left the character alone.
It’s still true if you believe it.
I swear, if I had to, I could probably accept everything else in the dance challenge, like R2-D2 or C-3P0 being inexplicably present, Lobot spinning records as the DJ, even Lando Calrissian showing up to get his Bespin boogie on.
Turns out dancing like a tool isn’t that big of a stretch for a douchebag in a cape.
But for God’s sake George Lucas, why oh why did you have to take a beloved and historic cinematic character, whose creation is one of the crowning achievements of your entire career, and completely and utterly humiliate him?
