Did not look for Star Wars Oulipo
posted by clew at 12:32 PM on November 30 [1 favorite]

Started watching The Acolyte yesterday and it definitely has a lot of knives
posted by rossmeissl at 12:37 PM on November 30 [2 favorites]

Now I'm wondering if the Star Wars videogames follow these rules. The last couple of games (Outlaws, Jedi Survivor) have been really good at evoking the feeling of being in a Star Wars movie. They must have access to the bible, but I wonder if they have to follow it in every detail.

Outlaws these super-cute cutscenes of eating street food with your pet. Kay doesn't seem to use a knife in them, just a space spork. The ginsu cooking droids are all about flashing knives though. For that matter don't the Kitchen Droids all have knives for hands?
posted by Nelson at 12:45 PM on November 30

OK, what about the mouse droid from Ep. 4, the one Chewie scares off? Maybe it had tracks, but I was always pretty sure it had wheels.
posted by lhauser at 12:57 PM on November 30 [1 favorite]

Mouse droid with wheels

I'm starting to think this clickbait article is HIGHLY INACCURATE
posted by Nelson at 1:01 PM on November 30 [12 favorites]

Jabba's henchmen had weapons with Blades. The Gomorrean Guards had battleaxes! Not knives, but.... same idea right?
posted by Liquidwolf at 1:02 PM on November 30

Also, according to "Wookiepedia" the Ewoks used knives.
posted by Liquidwolf at 1:05 PM on November 30

In Jedi Survivor, the restroom in Pyloon's Saloon has mirrors.

I think this list is a bit arbitrary. All of the objects in the list are missing in the original trilogy, because they were supposed to depict the "future", the way it looked like in the late seventies and early eighties. So, no paper (substituted by holograms), no wheels (substituted by "repulsorlifts"), no knives (substituted by lasers and "vibroblades"), and so on.

By the time of the prequel trilogy, our own technology already looked more advanced than that of the original movies, which by now are sort of "retrofuturistic", just like the Fallout series depicts the future the way it looked like in the sixties.

And even if we have computers in the palm of our hands that could have calculated the economy of a country in the seventies, we still have paper. And I still cut bread with a knife, no lasers around here. So Star Wars feels sort of quaint, in comparison. A bit like in the books of Jules Verne, flying to the moon by being shot out of a cannon.

But returning to Jedi Survivor, while playing I wondered if there was some sort of internal style guide that Star Wars media has to follow. To me, it looked like the level designers got some inspiration by looking at the architecture of the seventies. And Cal's room in Pyloon's Saloon has a coziness to it that reminds me of the evenings in the seventies when I was little, watching Sesame Street while comfortably sitting in the sofa covered with a blanket.
posted by LaVidaEsUnCarnaval at 1:14 PM on November 30 [3 favorites]

The Jawa’s sandcrawler ran on tracks which… incorporate wheels. I do not buy this list.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:25 PM on November 30 [2 favorites]

However, it is true that the Emperor banned listicles, proving that no one is entirely bad.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:26 PM on November 30 [15 favorites]

Guardrails. (The obvious item forbidden from this clickbait list.)
posted by paper chromatographologist at 1:34 PM on November 30 [8 favorites]

There was that whole Jedi tree library, so paper does exist in the Star Wars universe.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:44 PM on November 30 [5 favorites]

This may have changed with the explosion of related movies and stories and video games in the intervening time, but as pointed out by Paul F. Tompkins some years back, the Star Wars universe appears to have no books.
posted by rhizome at 2:13 PM on November 30

> [literariness:] "In second-generation electronic literature, not infrequently, not even the word but the letter becomes the unit of operation, as in Brian Kim Stefans’s “Star Wars: One Letter at a Time” (2006)"

in a galaxy way, wayback...
posted by HearHere at 2:24 PM on November 30

The Gomorrean Guards had battleaxes! Not knives, but.... same idea right?

Mince chives with one, then try saying that again...
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:42 PM on November 30

"If you bring that battleaxe to the table, you're going straight to your room, mister!"
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:43 PM on November 30 [1 favorite]

There are no tampons, toilets or pizza either.
posted by astrobiophysican at 3:11 PM on November 30 [1 favorite]

12:30 onward in Obi-Wan Kenobi episode 1, we see Middle-Aged Ben gainfully employed as a space-whale butcher. He and his fellow workers are all using very large metal knives.
posted by senor biggles at 3:33 PM on November 30 [3 favorites]

There are toilets in each cell in the prison complex in Andor. There's also a "refresher" on the Falcon but not sure we've officially seen that.
posted by biffa at 3:44 PM on November 30 [1 favorite]

as pointed out by Paul F. Tompkins some years back, the Star Wars universe appears to have no books

The sacred Jedi Texts!
posted by Jon Mitchell at 4:02 PM on November 30

Without having seen the series in question I would hazard the guess that Boba Fett either has a book, or one is written about him.
posted by Ashenmote at 4:08 PM on November 30

What I was expecting to see mentioned was "signage". In the original movies, if I recall correctly, there were no shop signs, street signs, warning signs, not even holographic ones. But this seems to have relaxed lately.

I wonder if the lack of mirrors is just to facilitate filming. Mirrors mean you have to build the back of the set, and keep the camera and crew out of the shot.
posted by zompist at 4:22 PM on November 30

Many videogames don't have mirrors for a similar reason, it puts demands on the game engine that can be hard to fulfill. The one linked above for Jedi Survivor is weird: there's a reflection but highly distorted both spatially and temporally. Kind of a neat effect.

Be sure to watch the Jedi Survivor video for a space toilet, too. It's credited as the first Star Wars toilet on a lot of websites but I think Mando got there first. It's hilarious too, a bunch of difficult-to-understand anatomical options. No doubt production designers have been sharing gags for decades about the plumbing in the Mos Eisley cantina.
posted by Nelson at 4:28 PM on November 30

Zippers !
posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:42 PM on November 30

And the writing is Aurebesh

So there’s signage everywhere but it blends in discretely
posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:44 PM on November 30

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