Large swaths of the Internet have fallen under the spell of Baby Yoda, and I guess I’m not immune to those charms either. (Yes, I recognize they’re not actually young Yoda, but the character doesn’t have an actual name and Baby Yoda has a satisfying lilt.) Actually, part of the charm is intrinsic to our biology and psychology as humans; certain features common to human babies, like big eyes and proportionately large heads, read as cute to nearly all of us across a variety of contexts. One might expect baby chimps and monkeys to elicit a paternal response, but even creatures like squids which have few features in common with mammals, or inanimate objects like Pop! vinyls, or puppets of fictional 50-year-old aliens can exploit our neural pathways to get an “Awww.”
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Sci-Fi Film Fest: Talking The Phantom Menace with Mike Beidler (Pt 2)
Welcome back to our Sci-Fi Film Festival. This week, I continue my conversation with Mike Beidler about Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (TPM) as we chat about canons and legends. You can find the first half of the conversation here, including details about Mike’s own role in the storytelling of Star Wars and his in-universe counterpart Myk Bidlor.
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Sci-Fi Film Fest: Talking The Phantom Menace with Mike Beidler (Pt 1)
Welcome to the first Emerging Scholars Network Sci-Fi Film Festival! I’ll be having a conversation here on the blog on various classic and current science fiction movies. Feel free to watch along and join the conversation. This week’s film is 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. I’m joined by Mike Beidler. Mike is a retired U.S. Navy commander who is active with the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) and BioLogos and who has connections to Star Wars stories that I’ll let him explain.
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Science in Review: A Droid in Every Garage
This week’s discussion covers some specific, spoiler-y details from Solo: A Star Wars Story. Proceed accordingly.
Last week we took a look at how Solo: A Star Wars Story interrogates the role of spaceships and interstellar travel in the Galactic Empire. The abstract concept of transportation (as opposed to specific transportation technology) is not an obvious theme for science fiction, but artificially intelligent robots are. What it does with ships, Solo also does for droids, taking a ubiquitous feature of the setting and giving them their day in the twin suns.
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Science in Review: Just Gotta Get Right Outta Here
This reflection on the themes of Solo: A Star Wars Story tries to avoid spoilers, but as always feel free to wait until you’ve seen the movie if you want to know nothing about it when watching.
“Fast ship? You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?” “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.” With those lines, Han Solo and ultimately George Lucas stirred up a controversy still brewing 40 years later. Han’s boast sounds impressive, but when you find out a parsec is a unit of distance, not time, you wonder how it’s meant to prove the speediness of the legendary ship. Hands have been waved at explanations, but now with Solo we get as much of an in-galaxy justification as we can likely expect. A trivial point to be sure, but the deep dives into astrophysics inspired by that dialogue represent about as much science as Star Wars is interested in. To be sure, all of the films feature technology far beyond our current capabilities, but mostly they are part of the setting rather than the theme.
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