Welcome to our Podcast about Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga in today's podcast we will be talking about Episodes 1-6 and exploring the topics of slavery and character relationships within the game and how it differs from the cinematic experience.
A podcast by students enrolled in Film Studies/Gender Studies 404. Students will discuss topics of gender and identity in In Sound Mind, What Remains of Edith Finch, and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.
Hey, guys, welcome to our podcast. I'm Preston,
I'm Stephen, and I'm Colin, and we're here today
to talk about the Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga
Video Game. It's remastered game of all nine Star
Wars movies in one Lego video game. And we're
briefly going to just talk about episodes one
through six in this podcast, talking about slavery
throughout the movies, in the video game and
character relationships.
So starting off with the topic of slavery, we all
started in Episode one and Episode one very early
on, once we got onto the topic of slavery in the
game on Tatooine, it became clear that it was not
as evident and not as clear that it was going on.
Now, we being familiar with the Star Wars universe,
knew going in that it was the thing. But if
someone who didn't know like a new player to the
game without any background knowledge, it all came
in and tried to play this. They would not getting
that at all. Now, in this game, the characters are
always presented in a pristine condition. And one
important thing, when taking a movie and making it
into a game is capturing the details that
moviegoers experience. And that can be shown with
dirt on clothes, dirt on the face. Stuff like that
show that a character's truly going through some
hardships. And that just was not really there in
the game in which kind of took away from the
experience. And in my opinion, another thing we
noticed was in Episode six, Jabba the Hutt, who's
a crime lord, he lives in his own palace, and
Princess Leia gets captured by Jabba the Hutt and
he puts her in a rather sexist outfit, a very
revealing clothing for a woman to wear. And one
thing we noticed was that in the video game, they
kind of made it more kid friendly with the outfit.
It wasn't much showing as it was in the movie. And
in the movie, we saw that Jabba the Hutt would
chain her down around her neck to his throne and
drag her around. And the only thing that really
stuck out to us while watching the game was she
was just next to his throne. The only person that
he really kind of heckled was see through
throughout the movie. So there wasn't really much
of the actual slavery being shown of how they
acted and treated the slaves. It was just present
that there were slaves in the game and that job on
them in his palace. Yeah, and just to go off that
a little bit. I remember in the movie there was
one scene where when it comes to save Leia and Han,
he gets thrown into the red carpet. But before
that, one of the slaves within Jabba's palace has
thrown down. She was also wearing a very revealing
outfit and had a collar around her neck. But that
was never depicted. Like slavery itself was a lot
lighter within this game, especially when we
compare it to other games such as Assassin's Creed
or in our case, Fallout three. There's a mission
that, as you're the protagonist within the game,
you are asked to either liberate the slaves or to
sell out the slaves and tell them, like, where
their location is. And within this day, within the
first six episodes, there's really no. No mention
of slavery. There's not a lot to do with it, and
you can't do much with it. There's only like one
mission on and I believe where you can free five
people that are captured in trees for a break. And
that's that's pretty much about it. Like, the game
does not touch too much on slavery as we go. Yeah,
that definitely makes a lot of sense.
But that said, we're going to move on to character
relationships within the first six movies. I think
we're going to focus on Anakin and Parramatta's
relationship within the game and how it is
different from that of the movie starting off with
like episode two when they first see each other
again after the events of Episode one. After
Anakin is fully trained, they first meet again and
Chancellor Albertine's office and the game, and
they don't meet until they're back at Panamas
Place on course and in the movie. But also there's
a lot more affection shown in the game when they
first meet again than in the movie. Padam has Lego
hearts around her. Anakin has little hearts around
him. When they first meet, they start talking. But
in the movie, it's kind of like a quick. Like,
glance over where Anakin says the same thing in
the game, but then it glances over, she moves on
to a serious topic because of the events that
happened on the platform before they meet again.
And that's just not prevalent within the day. Yeah,
and then we move into episode three, and it's
tough to really gauge too much how the
relationship has progressed until you get to the
one of the final scenes on Mustafah. And in the
movie in this scene, Padma confronts Anakin about
the killing of. Children will say. And Annacone
proceeds to get riled up, get angry and eventually
choke at padman to the point where she passes out.
Now, ultimately, this does end up killing, killing
her and yeah, but in the game, this was turned
into pad May goes to confront Anakin with a cake,
a wedding cake and. Anakin pushes past or tries
the cake. Um. And then proceeds to throw it,
causing pad me to faint, pass out, and then she
kind of moves on and now. This was like supposed
to be the culmination, the climax of this
relationship and kind of show the the watcher and
I guess the player in this case, what what like
how far gone Anakin has become and how far to the
dark side he has been drawn to and like. It's
tough when as someone who's familiar with the Star
Wars universe, you go in and you're expecting this
big, big thing to happen and then it just kind of
fizzles out and it's kind of disappointing. And,
you know, it's yeah, it's really it's just sad
almost and said, yeah. And just to elaborate a
little bit more, one thing that really stuck out
to me was just in the in the movie, obviously we
all know that they didn't have the most perfect
relationship, but the video game didn't depict
that at all. They kind of they made it out to be
very lovey dovey and peachy relationship or
everything was going great for them.
They didn't show any of the fighting throughout
the scenes in the Lego video game, we saw multiple
times where Padmanabhan can had conversations in
the movie where he got upset with her and that led
to some fights. And then, like I said, it wasn't
shown at all in the video game. It was depicted as
a very happy relationship where nothing went wrong
and the world was great for them. Yeah. Yeah. And,
you know, we get this is a, you know, a Lego game,
it's it's supposed to be marketed towards, you
know, children and. A little more, you know. PG 13,
you know, rated E for everyone type vibes with the
movie, and they're rather than the movie and but
it is a little.
I would say a little off putting, as you know,
players of a game to kind of expect a lot and then
just get crushed, obliterated, obliterated under
false expectations. And, you know, the little
games I've been a player of low games my whole
life. You know, I'm a big fan of them. And I'm not
going to say I don't like this game. But as a Star
Wars game, if you treat it just as a Star Wars
game, I'd say it wasn't a good game. But as a Lego
game, it's a fantastic game. So, you know. We'll
hope We hope you join us next time, we're going to
be talking about episode seven through nine and
you know. Thank you guys so much, we love you.