Sci-Fi Recall List - Item #18: LightSabers

Yes, indeed, I am ballsy enough to slander your precious laser swords from the (half-good) Star Wars films. What, you ask, could I possibly find fault in with such “elegant weapons,” ones that meant oh-so-much to you when you were but a fledgling nerd, dork or geek? Plenty. That’s what.

I’m not going to simply plagiarize Red Letter Media’s brilliant critique of the fact that the lightsaber is in pretty much every single scene in the shitty prequels, and therefore completely loses any and all mystique and intrigue before the first act of Phantom Menace has even gotten underway to the confounding crapstorm of failure that it unravels into. Nor will I choose to focus on the seemingly impossible learning curve that would be necessary to learn to wield such a weapon without killing oneself as the really, really dangerous sabery part has no mass to it at all and therefore is totally not balanced or capable of absorbing any kind of inertia that would stop the weapon from bouncing back through the user’s skull. Furthermore, I am not going to talk about that scene in Attack of the Snores where the little Jedi children all have live lightsabers in their hands, are blindfolded and are not once prompted by Yoda to spread out a bit.  I guess the Jedi have great insurance.

What I do want to talk about is this: why wouldn’t you get one with a wrist strap or something?

Right? Makes sense, I think. Because if you are at all familiar with the general pattern of any lightsaber duel in any of the Star Wars films, ones I’d like to pretend never happened or otherwise, you will probably recall every single Jedi character at some point dropping their lightsaber during a very inconvenient time. Think for a moment. They ALL did it.

Over and over again.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “But, Dan, some of those characters had their hands totally chopped off. So wouldn’t a wrist strap then be no help?” And to that I reply, “It doesn’t have to be a wrist strap per se. It could be one of those straps that attaches to the handle and is on a retractable chain-thingy like the Canadian Mounties use for their guns. It would be up to the operator, really – a matter of personal Jedi preference.”

Just to kick up the safety quotient just a bit more, I have taken the liberty of thinking about what could go wrong with such a strap: lightsaber stays on when dropped and swings back, chopping off ol’ Obi Wan’s ween. Problem solved. Just make the saber so it automatically turns off when dropped. That wouldn’t be hard to do. I’m pretty sure whoever the Q character from James Bond movies is for the Jedi, the dude with the lovable accent who always comes up with wacky Jedi gadgets for Anakin to use to eventually kill everybody in the universe and therefore makes us not care anymore about him because he’s such a tremendous asshole, would be able to make a pressure switch. Think I made one of those for my guitar when I was like fourteen.