What is "My Two Bits?"

My Two Bits is the official editorial page for the editor of Techtite.com. Techtite will accept reader submissions, for reviews as well as any editorials deemed well written and pertinent to this web site's audience.

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---My Shining Half-Star...

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No sidebar comments for this review. Yet.

My Two Bits for May, 2005 is titled :

The Indomitable Gadgetry of Artoo!

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Again; another Star Wars movie shows us that Artoo was the Swiss Army Knife we always heard he was. Sadly, again, naysayers are saying that this cannot be so. Again, I say: oh yes it certainly can.

Let's look at the original trilogy as a template --A New Hope (ANH), Empire Strikes Back (ESB), and Return of the Jedi (ROTJ)-- seeing as how that trilogy is often used as such in the message boards. Here's a short taste of everything Artoo had under his metal plating, in those three films alone:

• A holographic projector (ANH, ROTJ)
• A periscope (ESB, when in Dagobah swamp)
• A small radar dish (ESB, used to "search for" Luke on Hoth)
• A fire extinguisher (ANH; used during Tie fighter chase)
• A claw that can repair a hyper drive (ESB)
• A tazer sort of electro...thing (used on "Salacious Crumb," in ROTJ)
• A light saber holder! (ROTJ; though that was a cool scene wasn't it?)

...so, it's safe to presume that a little dome-headed droid that can do all that, can also have rocket jet packs (Attack of the Clones) and a super-charged electro-thing (Revenge of the Sith), right? Right...?

Sorry, naysayers; that was a rhetorical question. The truth is that Artoo could've had a whole lot of gadgets put into him when first built, only to have Princess Leia, and the rebellion, put even more gadgets in him later on. It's a fact, kids. Don't lose much sleep over it.

Yeah, I know the mantra: if he had rocket jet packs in Attack of the Clones, why didn't he use them on, say, the forest of Endor...? I can think of two reasons, both with their own base presumption. The first base presumption is that he no longer had rockets in his legs. Keep in mind that by the time Luke took him into custody, Artoo was a minimum 30 years old! This is based on the first time we saw him, back when Anakin was just 9, right up to when Anakin was old enough to have kids, only to see him again when Luke was roughly 18. Now, I ask you: if you have a 1980's car floating around, how often do you really care if the 8 track casette player is working? Exactly! The rebellion saw no need for a droid to have rocket jet packs, so upon the next repair job Artoo needed, they simply didn't fix them. They had better things to do with their rocket fuel, don't you know!

Okay, maybe that presumption is weak. Maybe Artoo did still have rocket jet packs. Coooooool...! So why didn't he use them? Simple: he didn't need to. There's a big difference between needing to fly across a pit in a droid factory, and risking being swept to who-knows-where, if you did something similar on Cloud City. There is no place he could've used rocket jet packs in the original trilogy, could he...? Send me a letter if I'm wrong, but I'd say he never used rocket jet packs because he didn't need them...presuming he still had them.

Which brings us to the "who cares" mantra. Yeah, I know; it's no big deal. Furthermore there is the little matter that new movies have new FX and the old movies did not. Artoo does cooler things now because LucasFilm couldn't achieve such FX back then. Yet the even bigger truth is: he can do more now, because these are the first episodes of the story. Artoo was a brand new droid, right off the assembly line. This is when every jet pack was fueled and every electro-tazer-thingie was fully charged. Upon the older trilogy he was, quite simply, older. He was probably even suffering a bit of a mid-life crisis at the time. I say give the little toaster oven a break and stop picking on him in the message boards. He probably couldn't perform as well in the older years than he could in the very beginning. We can relate.

As Always: I'm Techtite, and these are My Two Bits...