Playing through the game's adaptation of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones this week, I often found myself suffocating a snort or two at Skywalker Saga's gag-a-minute approach to Star Wars. The famous Amidala scene at the end of The Phantom Menace, where she announces that the Padm, made me laugh so hard. It's the same in Lego Star Wars.
The random bearded Lego dude in Padm is absolutely delighted by the gag. Skywalker Saga keeps committing to the bit beyond this moment. He is the decoy that shows up in the palace to Nute Gunray during the battle of the movie, and even funnier when Padm lands his ship on Coruscant.
That was his contribution to the entire game, maybe a few minutes at most, but it was the one consistent thing that kept me chuckling like a child whenever I was playing. Lego Star Wars has always leaned on the silly side of things. The rest of The Skywalker Saga is going to be just as funny. It was the one thing that reminded me that Star Wars is at its best when it knows how much to take.
Star Wars fans tend to get defensive if someone pokes fun at something we love. Someone doesn't take this world of space ships and magic seriously enough. We are inclined to take Star Wars as deathly serious to prove that it is. Even if we mock it ourselves, anyone else doing so is disrespecting what we have built around this thing.
Lego Star Wars ignores everything. Padm's handmaidens should have a bearded guy in them. Have Obi-Wan wonder why his lightsaber doesn't have two blades when he encounters Darth Maul? He should punt the Sith apprentice's head through a basketball net before it crashes into Naboo's reactor. It loves Star Wars so much that it can't help but joke about it. In good and bad ways, Star Wars is often absurd. Sometimes we don't want to admit that ourselves, but it's often quite funny. Lego Star Wars doesn't try to hide that part of the story, even when it is portraying the moments of the story that we hold high. It is in those moments that it is the funniest, as if to pull us down from haughty highs and remind us to take the joke. Even though we love Star Wars at its most serious, and even though we want better from it, it is still fun.
Padm dude's most consistent bodyguard should be a Santa-bearded man who loves to dress like a monarch. Why not? It makes you laugh because it's like all the lightsabers, X-Wings, bounty hunters, and Empires in the world.
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