Palpatine Youth

Rising at the ungodly hour of half past nine this morning, I took full advantage of that rarest of treats: Saturday morning kid's TV. In this age of dedicated kid cable channels, terrestrial children's television has dried to a trickle in the UK. Original content is only really being produced by public broadcast outfits like the BBC and S4C. ITV et al ran a mile when Ofcom threw a strop over a marked increase in eye-catch product hawking. What can you expect now? Usually only the barest of US imports. If I'm lucky I might catch ten minutes of the latest faux sentai Power Rangers franchise or, like this morning, the dying minutes of a The Batman adventure.

This morning the Jackie Chan Adventures universe dark knight was crossing wits with a tech heavy Maxie Zeus - a pleasingly obtuse villain for a tot serial. The series has come a long way from the dreadful teen'd up first episodes. Still not a patch on the Timm years though. That's just opening paragraph dressing though. The real gold at this hour though, is the adverts that run in between each little snatch of martial arts motion. Featured heavily this morning was a child friendly version of this:



The Hasbro Clone Wars Clone Trooper Voice Changer Helmet. Don this lump of uniform oppression and your voice is presumably morphed into that of a disgruntled mutant Kiwi. This is the trail that ran with the product - very young boys hoisting featureless masks over their faces and running about shooting nothing.

Kids like to play soldiers, I did anyway, and getting franchise kitted out to boot woulda been swish. Clone Troopers though, aren't they the clean line jack-booting fascists who kill for the galaxy conquering Space Hitler Emperor Palpatine? In Episode III don't these identikit nought men betray their Jedi allies in several quite brutal Order 66 vignettes? Isn't this confusing for children? Isn't this confusing for adults?

Regardless of the loyalty position in now-current digital animation cop-out feature The Clone Wars, these are the dastardly dickholes that subjugate the stars. Parents want their children to play as them? Do people spend even a second thinking about their totemic plastic product before dumping it in the marketplace? Not wishing to patronise children, who I'm sure grasp this bizarre dichotomy more succinctly than their deep pocket carers, and quite enjoy the opportunity to play as a gang of total evil dicks.

It's an aspect of Star Wars fandom that I find quite strange. Sure, it's easier to play as a set of characters that require just the costume, and not good looks / hours in a make-up chair, but they are Space Nazis. They are Space Nazis that kill the shit out of whole planets just to put the shits up Princesses. Alderaan was a mega-holocaust, just because it was a pat annihilation doesn't make any less terrible than a half decade of shovelling a people into the cogs of a kill machine.

Dress up kids!

Dress up like an intergalactic National Socialist.

You're just following orders!