Star Wars Celebration might be the only time in my life that I am put together enough to plan my outfit ahead. And, as it turns out, I set my alarm wrong last night, so when a random app notification woke me up at 9:15 (way, way later than I intended), I already had my lightsaber skirt and my Grand Moff sweater on hand, and I got out the door quickly.
Those with VIP tickets are supposed to be seated by 10:30 or their spots in the day’s first panel are forfeited, and the convention entrance was a fifteen minute walk away (or one train stop, if you feel like paying six pounds). I chose to pay six pounds, and slid into a seat at precisely 10:22. Either the crowds were more dispersed this morning, or security figured out their business, because the huge traffic jam at bag check didn’t seem to materialize this morning.
I knew I would be spending almost all of the day in the main Celebration stage, because there were a bunch of good panels there that I wanted to see:
First up: a closer look at the Ahsoka series that will debut in August.
First of all, Dave Filoni is a delight, and we must protect him at all costs. He talked about seeing Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka for the first time and just kind of, as Jon Favreau described it, “being somewhat creatively useless” for the next several hours after seeing his brainchild brought from animation into the real world. Filoni admits that Ahsoka’s lightsabers might have gone home with him. Favreau says the same about Dave’s hand-drawn storyboards.
I like the way Rosario Dawson talks about Ahsoka—it’s clear she’s internalized the character by now (including reminding the audience that she is no Jedi!) She talked about the technology advances that have allowed them to make Ahsoka look more like what she’s supposed to look like as an adult Togruta; in her first live-action appearance, they literally didn’t have a way of making her montrals (the things growing off the side of her head over her shoulders) look like they should and still allow movement. They’ve since figured it out.
Natasha Liu Bordizzo and Mary Elizabeth Winstead play Sabine and Hera, and when they took the stage, I had a moment of just realizing that ALL of the protagonists in Ahsoka are going to be female. I can’t think of another moment in Star Wars when that’s happened. There was one moment in season two of The Mandalorian when an all-female team (Bo Katan, that other female Mando, Cara Dune and Fennec) basically commandeer Gideon’s ship by themselves, but this will be a whole SERIES. It just feels cool.
They talked about the combat training they had to undergo (well, not Hera; she just has to blast things, and it sounds like she’s quite relieved she didn’t have to go through it). Rosario had to learn how to be ambidextrous, since Ahsoka wields two lightsabers. It never occurred to me that that’s a thing that would have to happen. The training was apparently lengthy and grueling, but both she and Natasha said they didn’t truly feel like their characters until they’d built up the physicality to do what their characters had to do. Natasha said, “I wanted putting on that Mandalorian armor to feel like putting on a regular shirt. It took a lot, but finally, one day it did.”
The fight choreographer was a woman who was basically given to a temple at nine years old and did nothing but train to do martial arts. She was, therefore, a bit strict. A compliment from her apparently sounded like, “watching that didn’t make me sick to my stomach.” The cast loved her, though.
Near the end of the panel, we got to meet the two main baddies, whose names we were told exactly once, and then Dave Filoni said, “welp, that’s about all we can tell you about them without spoiling anything, so—moving on!”
They ended the panel with a trailer—mostly the same stuff as yesterday’s teaser trailer, but with one major addition: THRAWN’S FACE.
Nobody was about to let that go without comment, so the audience pressed them for details. “Well, actually, he’s here!” Dave Filoni told us. And they brought out Thrawn’s live action actor: Lars Mikkelson, his voice actor from the Rebels series, will be reprising his role!
And with that, the panel ended, and after some lunch, I headed back into the stage for the 40th anniversary celebration of Return of the Jedi.
(During the preshow for this panel, DJ Elliot had volunteers from the audience play a game up on the stage. One of the volunteers had a service dog named Sky. Sky won the game.)
Ming Na Wen moderated this panel.
First, they brought out some current Lucasfilm production folks who talked about the differences in how they do special effects now, versus how they HAD to be done back in 1983. This led to the most hilarious part of the panel (which I didn’t get pictures of because I was too delighted). Directors use ‘pre-vids’ (I think that’s the word they used) during action scenes to decide what shots they want to get. Nowadays, this is done with 3-D modeling, and in the old days, they would just have to shoot, wait for the film to be developed overnight, and check in the morning to see if they could work with what they got. When ROTJ was being shot, video cassettes were just starting to be a thing, so the crew hijacked one and put together a pre-vid for the speeder bike chase on Endor using, uh, modeling. But they didn’t have 3D modeling back then. So they used models. Model planes, that is. And Barbie dolls.
And they sure did show us grainy videocassette footage of the entire speeder bike chase being pre-enacted by barbies on Micromachines around papier-mache trees. It looked like a low-budget version of that Thunderbirds puppet TV show from the 60s, with the vehicles bobbing past the camera on strings. The panel tried to talk over it but had to basically stop because the audience kept cracking up every time a toy plane hit a tree and the barbie riding it thudded to the ground.
Ming Na then invited out some of the OG cast of Return of the Jedi: Anthony Daniels (C-3P0), Warwick Davis (Wicket the Ewok), Ian McDiarmid (Emperor Palpatine) and Billy Dee Williams (Lando).
Anthony and Warwick talked about wearing their restrictive costumes and how much the technology for that had advanced since that time (prosthetics and character makeup being something of a running theme so far today), but they also gave each other a bunch of good-natured grief.
Billy Dee kinda seemed like he might have taken an Ambien before the panel.
Anyway, I just stayed in there after the panel ended and chillaxed a bit before the next one began. DJ Elliot said this panel was going to be the one everyone wished they hadn’t skipped, and he was right!
Neal Scanlan is the head creature dude for Pinewood Studios, the British base for all things Star Wars production. The costuming, makeup and fabrication department they have—dubbed the ‘Creature Cantina’—reminds me, from the short footage they showed us, a LOT of Entertainment Costuming at Walt Disney World.
Then came the part that made this panel crazy. Neal had met two cosplayers walking around the Celebration, and invited them to this panel. Little did they know how big a part they were going to play! Neal informed them that, with the help of his lead roboticist, fabricator, and several ‘suit performers’, they were going to get to BE creatures from Star Wars.
With help from Mike Quinn, the actor behind Nien Nunb for the past 40 years, Dino from Germany was going to learn to remotely puppeteer a creature face.
Marissa from the Netherlands was going to actually go IN a creature suit. They had her change into an undersuit and then, while Dino got his crash course in electronic puppeteering, brought out all the pieces and dressed her in front of us. It, ahem, gave me flashbacks.
When both were ready, the curtain lifted to reveal a cantina set, and Dino and Marissa were thrown into a scene with several other actors. It was a bit of a ridiculous pantomime, but for amateurs, they did a fantastic job.
Well pleased with how the day went, I went back to my hotel to finish the day with fish and chips, a sticky toffee pudding, and of course, a local beverage. It’s been hard to remember that I’m in the UK.
Laura Writes 