Disney is trying *anything* to gin up interest in Star Wars in hopes of recouping their costs (as previously discussed, they are a *long* way from making their money back). The latest schtick is “Star Wars Kids,” a YouTube channel that will be populated by short (slightly over one minute) animated sequences. The first few have been posted; some are redone scenes from the movies, some are all new tiny little stories, but all use dialogue cribbed directly from the movies. Some are interesting, some are odd. One of the odd ones shows a still-on-Tatooine Luke being introduced to the lightsaber; in the original movie, his response to it is to, essentially, go, “huh, interesting,” turn it on and wave it around a little bit. In the new animation, it blows his hair back and he turns into a gymnastic ninja. I disapprove of that: the whole point was that Luke started off as an innocent chump nearly devoid of combat skills; it is a lot of hard work and training to get him to the point where he could face Vader. That made the payoff worthwhile, unlike with Rey… she was roughly equally skill-free at the beginning, but with no training whatever she was able to best a trained former Jedi with a weapon she’d never wielded before.
But one of the most head-scratching inclusions in this series – which has the explicit purpose of trying to introduce Star Wars to children – is a recreation of the penultimate scene in “Rogue One” where Vader slaughters everyone in a hallway. Kids! Amirite? Even odder, Vaders dialogue here is taken from “Empire Strikes Back.”