Review: Star Wars: Droid Tales – “Flight of the Falcon”

R2-D2 has been kidnapped by a mysterious figure. C-3PO, Chewbacca, and Nien Nunb follow a signal from the little droid in order to save him. On the way, C-3PO tells Nien the story of the planet of Hoth.

As with all Lego-based properties, there is quite a bit of humor injected into the story. The majority of this episode is the plot of The Empire Strikes Back. We start out on Hoth with the Empire searching for the Rebels. Luke Skywalker gets kidnapped by a wampa but he manages to escape, no thanks to the quips of ghostly Obi-Wan Kenobi. Han Solo rides up on his tauntaun to save Luke but the two literally bump into an Imperial probe droid, who alerts the Empire to the Rebel base. As the Empire attacks the base, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and C-3PO ride off in the Millennium Falcon. On the way out, they manage to set fire to Darth Vader’s feet. Unfortunately for him, the Snowtroopers are terrible shots and can’t manage to hit his feet with snowballs.

Luke, in one of the Rebel fighter ships, fights the AT-AT Walkers. He manages to down one walker by wrapping wire around the legs, though the walker does set down some funky moves before finally falling. As the walker falls, Luke flies right into the up-ended feet, resulting in his own ship crashing. Now shipless, Luke runs up to the next walker and uses his climbing gear to get up to the bottom of the main cabin. He slices open the bottom with his lightsaber and throws a grenade inside, before falling back into the snow. When the Walker explodes, it rains Lego bricks on top of Luke, who quickly rearranges the bricks into a nice house. Unimpressed, R2-D2 picks up the Jedi in his X-Wing and rushes him off to Dagobah.

Still trying to escape the Empire, Han finds that the Falcon’s hyperspeed drive isn’t working. Instead of running, they end up hiding inside an asteroid, which ends up being a giant space slug. The gang runs from space slug and heads to Bespin to get help from Han’s friend, Lando Calrissian. Little do they know that they are being trailed by Boba Fett.

Once at Cloud City, Han, Leia, Chewie, and C-3PO quickly find out that Lando turned them into the Empire. Darth Vader, who keeps getting interrupted by a waiter, has been waiting for them to arrive. Vader tosses Han into the carbonite and sends him off to Jabba the Hut via Boba Fett.

Meanwhile, Luke trains with Yoda. During one of the training sessions, he sees his friends being chased by the Empire. Of course, he rushes off to save his friends. He arrives at Cloud City as Boba Fett is flying off with Carbonite Han. Leia, Chewbacca, C-3PO, and Lando escape in the Falcon, leaving Luke to face Vader alone. Vader confesses that he is Luke’s father and Luke responds by throwing himself into the air shaft. Hanging onto an antenna underneath the city, Luke makes a telepathic plea to Leia. She hears him and convinces the others to go back to save him.

Even though Lego-Luke did not lose his hand like Movie-Luke, the gang still ends up on a medical frigate, where they reflect on all they have lost. Well, except for C-3PO. He is ecstatic that he has been reunited with R2-D2.

But! This is just a flashback! Back to the real story! C-3PO finds the exact planet of origin for R2’s signal. They land on the desert planet and find that there is an unused battle droid robot factory nearby. The golden droid, along with Chewbacca and Nien, rush into the factory to find his friend. The mysterious figure who “kidnapped” R2 turns out to be Lando Calrissian. He claims that he didn’t kidnap R2. Instead, R2 stowed away while he was collecting other robots. He read an ad offering to buy old droids. Lando wants to rebuild his mining colony and needs to funds to accomplish his goal. For some reason, he didn’t realize that it was the Empire behind the ad. An Imperial officer appears to melt down the old droids and rebuild them as battle droids. Though all the machine is doing is sticking a battle droid head onto an existing droid. Soon, the officer is going to rebuild C-3PO and R2-D2.

I love the Lego games. I love that the writers always find some way to add humor to the story, no matter how serious it seems. This is no different. While it was a little weird seeing an entire movie boiled down to a half hour time slot, it was still rather good. It hit all of the main plot points of the movie and still had enough time to get back to the original plot. Too bad there is only one episode left. I will be sad when the show is over.