Question: In this movie, the Death Star is barely completed. Until now, what motivated people, on multiple planets, to obey and fear the Empire? What stopped everyone from simply not accepting the Emperor and his organization? Similar to how Tattooine did not acknowledge the Republic during Anakin's childhood.
A nameless member
9th Aug 2023
Star Wars (1977)
6th Nov 2008
Star Wars (1977)
Question: If characters such as Luke and Obi-Wan are human, how come they are in a galaxy far, far away?
Answer: Well, it's also a "long time ago", so it doesn't rule out the possibility that the human inhabitants of Earth travelled here from there. Could also be a simple case of parallel evolution and the filmmakers refer to the species as "human" for convenience, in the same way that the standard Star Wars language is represented as present-day English, despite the fact that it obviously wouldn't be.
Answer: Why shouldn't humans be there? Maybe a god/gods created humans on multiple planets. Maybe humans have evolved and developed on multiple planets, multiple times. In the Battlestar Galactica series, it's established that "all of this has happened before" - the human race advances to a certain point, then they create the Cylons that destroy nearly all of them. The survivors find a place to start over and produce new generations, who will create Cylons again someday. You could imagine something similar about the Star Wars universe, or imagine any other explanation.
Answer: We don't know they're "human" as we understand it anyway, despite the use of the word which may be a translation, as mentioned already (their alphabet isn't Roman, for a start). Like The Doctor or any number of humanoid races in sci-fi who resemble us externally but aren't homo sapiens.
3rd Jun 2004
Star Wars (1977)
Question: While perusing an art book on this movie I came across several foreign movie posters where the Death Star is shown with the laser dish in the southern hemisphere rather than the northern (almost as if it were upside down). Anyone know why this is?
Answer: Judging from the movies, the laser doesn't seem to have much of an aiming system so the whole Death Star might need to rotate so the dish faces its target and in some cases this could mean needing to be "upside down". Just a hunch.
Wouldn't an upside-down Death Star be problematic for the countless amount of Stormtroopers, Imperial officers etc. on it?
No more than for any other large planetary body. Either artificial gravity or it's large enough to create its own.
No, as demonstrated on the Millennium Falcon and star destroyers, the Star Wars universe has some form of artificial gravity.
It's space, there is no up direction.
When there is gravity, there is an up and down. I think in terms of spaceships north is usually taken as up and south as down, relative to an astronomical body. But only because most maps are made that way. Determining an up and down helps with a sense of direction.
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Answer: One simple answer is that even before the Death Star the Empire still had vast amounts of firepower at its disposal, Star Destroyers, Storm Troopers, TIE Fighters/Bombers. A longer answer is that like a lot of fascist governments it wasn't an overnight thing - he invokes emergency powers, makes the Republic population feel threatened and like he's the only solution, etc. He doesn't announce to everyone at once "I'm secretly evil and you are my subjects". I suspect also a great many people didn't notice a huge amount of change in their day to day lives - if they felt they had nothing to fear from any government they wouldn't object to the rise of the Empire until it was too late.