if you have pay cable channels, like hbo, showtime, etc., you've noticed that the star wars movies have been on a lot lately. i grew up in the heyday of george lucas and the force, and as such, i will usually watch parts of the first three movies when i can catch them. of course, i'm talking about the first three made; star wars - a new hope, the empire strikes back, and return of the jedi.
of the subsequent three, only the last one was worth a squirt of piss, so this entry will pretend that they do not exist, especially that little cocksucker who played anakin skywalker in the phantom menace.
one thing i've noticed now that i'm viewing the movies as an adult (well, maybe almost an adult) is that a lot of characters/structures/machines meet their demise in particularly pussified ways. back when i was a street tough keeping it real, this was known as Going Out Like a Bitch.
the prime example, and one that is too obvious to list here, is boba fett. ask any star wars geek (which i'm not really) and they'll tell you that boba fett was one of the coolest characters in the original trilogy, which made it that much more painful when he screamed like a sissy girl after accidentally getting hit in the back, causing his jet pack to malfunction and propel him to his death. lucasgeeks will really get irate about this. i'm too lazy to do any research, but i think i remember reading that lucas actually took the scream out in one of his many re-release edits. scream or no scream, getting killed due to a wardrobe malfunction ranks up there with dying from a infection caused by getting your sack caught in your zipper in terms of least noble deaths.
so what i've decided to write about today are the other (less obvious) people who got "taken off the motherfuckin set", in rather bitchly fashions. they are presented here in reverse order, with #1 being the most shameful.
(5) the planet of alderaan - this was princess leia's home planet. in star wars, during the parts where leia is still using a british accent, there is a scene where darth vader and that other old dude are interrogating leia about the location of the rebel base while aboard the death star. they threaten to use the death star's mondo weapon to destroy alderaan if she won't fess up. well, she gives them an answer...and they blow the planet up anyway. the reason the planet makes the list is that it just sat there and let itself get blown up. a hardcore planet like tatooine would have at least put up a fight. shit, those little jawa dudes could probably scrap pretty hard. the verdict here is that alderaan whimpered out like a wee girl.
(4) AT-AT Imperial Walker - if you click on that link, you'll probably remember what these are. during what was one of the coolest scenes in the coolest movie, the empire strikes back, these giant things were bearing down on the rebel base, blowing everything up in their path. they were awesome and appeared unstoppable, just relentless monstrosities intent on the destruction of the undermanned rebels. and do you know how two of them went out? the first one tripped on his own shoestrings and fell over. yes, like my three year-old. ok, so it wasn't shoe strings, it was a cable being wrapped by a fighter ship, but still. why couldn't its powerful legs snap that shit like me walking through a cobweb? and the other one allowed just one guy to hoist himself up to its belly and drop some kind of grenade in it, blowing it to hell. come on, this beast could have withstood that. rest in peace, bitch-like walkers.
(3) the 2nd death star (return of the jedi) - ok, so the first massive imperial base that could destroy entire planets got blown up by a lucky shot down a ventilation shaft by a farmboy turned fighter pilot. gotta chalk that one up to bad luck and a design flaw. so if you're the engineer of these badass motherfuckers, what do you do with the 2nd one? that's right, you build it so that entire fucking spaceships can fly all the way to its center and blow it up with a couple of shots. now i know that this 2nd death star wasn't complete, but wouldn't you expect them to have better security on it, knowing full well that it was a target, and that the first one already got blown the fuck up? they could have built it so that entire fucking spaceships couldn't pass through the perimeter to get to the fragile parts and blow it up. and i'm not thinking they had a lot of volunteers to work on that one anyway, what with the history of the project.
(2) the emperor - he got thrown down a shaft. down a shaft. like how you might kill off a character on a soap opera. this was the most powerful dude in the whole trilogy; the guy that darth vader had to bend over for, and he couldn't get out of that one. just the movie before, luke jumped down a similar shaft and ended up just fine and dandy (albeit missing a hand), hanging on to some antenna on the underside of the cloud city. and i know i said i was going to ignore the last three films made, but couldn't the emperor pretty much fly? i'm not 100% sure on this, but i know the motherfucker could flip around a room and whoop ass. why couldn't he alter his fall to a large enough degree to catch his old ass hands on something? even ignoring the fall itself, the reason he went over is because darth vader threw him. just picked him up and threw him, like some fake ass wrestler on WWE. couldn't he use his dark powers to subdue vader when vader started treating him like a quadriplegic grandfather that he was carrying to his bath? fucking sith lord my ass. emperor? you went out like a bitch. which brings us to...
(1) darth vader - i'm not a conspiracy theorist, but something ain't right here. i don't believe darth vader is really dead. i think he's somewhere with elvis & tupac, making music and going on about that time he crushed the galaxy or the time he used the force to fuck a chick with a lightsaber handle from across the room. my reason for thinking this is simple; tell me what killed him. you can't, can you? why the fuck did he die? the way i see it, there are basically three things that happened to him at the end of jedi. first, i think luke might have caught him in the back with a glancing blow. it seems like, and i'm going off of memory here, that during their duel, luke hit him and caused some smoke, like his cape was singed. hardly a killing stroke. second, luke cut his hand off. well tit for tat; luke owed him that one. again though, wouldn't kill him. third, he got a pretty good blast of the emperor's blue super-duper dark side juice. (heh, the emperor's juice - told ya i wasn't an adult). but i call banta shit on that one too because luke had just received a much larger dose and we didn't see him bitching up and throwing in the towel. so you tell me; if none of those injuries were fatal, there must have been a second shooter, er, i mean, he must not have died. i think luke just loaded his old man up in his ship, cruised the hell out of there, and burned an empty vadersuit to collect on the dark side life insurance. then i think the two of them went out, got loaded, and jedi mind-tricked a couple of jabba's old whores into giving them inter-galactic hummers.
but the way the movie ends, vader is really dead. the best villain in modern movie history just decided to stop living i guess. no big bang, like the one where vader took out obi wan; just a sad little impotent fizzle. so for this post at least, i'm saying that dying of non life threatening injuries constitutes going out like an exceedingly frail bitch who probably wet himself in his big bad vadersuit.
do you have any to add?