This is an idea for a next logical evolution of David vs. Goliath / Indiana Jones' gun vs. swordsman scene / missile weapon vs. melee story structure.
Queen Padmé Amidala (Star Wars Ep. 1) is in a corridor with the young Obi-Wan Kenobi and his jedi mentor ( Qui-Gon Jinn ) guarding her with light sabers. On the ends there are two armored but unarmed Klingon (Star Trek) warriors who fight against a metric ton of "throwaway" lightsabered jedi warriors who rush from the middle to try to take the malevolent Klingons out of the equation somehow. The Klingons have immense strength, agility, and stamina, and use basic and advanced martial arts tactics: kicking the jedis in the crotch; poking their eyes out, stabbing them with their own lightsabers, pushing them onto each other's laser swords in cascade, etc.
Eventually the lesser Jedis are all dead or wounded, and the Klingons rush towards the trio screaming battle cries. The queen looks startled and frightened while Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are trying to prepare tensely and without much hope to win.
The queen's face becomes tense and focused, she pulls two small crossbows from her waist, looks to her right, aims, and shoots an arrow at the Klingon warrior's forehead; then she turns her head to the left, aims and shoots. The crossbows' arrows pass through the two Klingons' warriors foreheads, who quickly faint and fall forward, dead.
The two Jedis protagonists are relieved, laugh, disable their lightsabers' laser blades, high five and huggle the queen. The queen smiles, hands them the crossbows to study and they examine one crossbow each, discussing them with the queen.
A tagline appears on the screen as a mock commercial:
PersonalQrossBow's 2-in-1 Pocketbow kit. Why not have both? ( https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexlee/porque-no-los-dos )
PersonalQrossBow is not a real firm as far as we know, and while being a fan of some tacos, I have not tried the ones in the original commercial, nor did I receive money from Old El Paso. Nevertheless, I respect and admire their good marketing, and believe that marketing has been unnecessarily demonised, as it is essential for the success of your "product" (for lack of a better word) or digital work. Hearing about the meme has proven a catalyst for writing this story.
In addition, I hereby request Old El Paso to not sue me, and if they wish to compensate me for the free publicity, to donate instead to any one or more of the following organisations:
- Organization for Transformative Works
- Creative Commons
- Free (and open source) Software Foundation
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation
- The Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy NPO
- Hamakor - The Israeli FOSS NPO
- Mozilla
- Any of the non-commercial FOSS operating systems .
Other people and organizations are welcome to pay me directly using either PayPal or SWIFT.
CC-BY-4.0 by Shlomi Fish ( https://www.shlomifish.org/ ) 2020,
but uses characters and concepts from proprietary franchises.
Share, enjoy, relicense, build derivatives or do whatever else you want, as long as you provide attribution.
The original sources can be found on a GitHub git repository.
This story is dedicated to the memory of Christina Grimmie (1994-2016), a remarkable singer and youtuber, who was killed at age 22 by a fan who was obsessed with her, who almost immediately committed suicide himself.
I think almost every young-at-heart lady (of almost any age) can be the queen and, after some amount of hacking, also every young-at-heart gentleman (e.g: by replacing her with young Anakin Skywalker).
That put aside, I'd love to see the queen played by Tiffany Alvord, who is a singer, songwriter and budding actress, who has testified to be shy in real-life and has a good girl image (while often being spectacularly bold and magnetic in her music videos) play Queen Amidala here. I think she has a "badass asskicker" side to her personality (e.g in this video and this one) and you can kick ass non-violently and non-destructively.
A friend noted that some people may be angry by mixing up Star Wars and Star Trek, but he was amused. If you want to be even angrier, see this image macro.
The ironic thing about the story is that any of the expendable jedis could have thrown his lightsaber like a spear at his respective klingon's necks. I'm planning to use this fact at a self-rebuttal in which Amidala handles the situation using Saladin-style benevolent psychological warfare without any bloodshed.
I decided to use crossbows instead of Star Wars' laser blasters for the ranged weapons for the extra "back-to-basics" effect. An online friend agreed that it is a good idea, but your kilometrage may vary.
This is likely not going to be the final word in the missile-vs-melee theme. You can read my interpretation of the significance of the original tale in a section of an essay.
Now that I have the foreknowledge, reading the original tale courtesy of sacred-texts.com (in the original Biblical Hebrew) makes it read better.
If you believe I should not have used elements from 3rd party franchises, or that I should have only used elements from the Jewish "Torah" , I advise you to read and follow the links from my "make your own kind of music" mini essay. That put aside, if you think you can make better music, either based on mine or not, then go for it.
I am well aware that the Indiana Jones Gun scene was motivated by an accident.
However, to quote Master Oogway
from the film Kung Fu Panda (1)
(which I can recommend), "There are no accidents". Often they happen because
we planned or desired them or were careless, hubrisful, or foolish. One of
my factoids reads
Chuck Norris round house kicks doors open instead of using their keys. Summer Glau makes sure doors are open using her mind.
.
Judging by duckduckgo reddit searches, there has been an unwritten taboo against Star Trek and Star Wars crossovers. Fuck that!. Why can't we have both? 😉.
In my opinion, the David vs Goliath / etc. story is more about how being a hero implies hacking/rule bending, challenging your premises and keeping deciding to think. I play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game) to lose, and I lost it again now! You don't have to announce (tweet/etc.) every loss though.
Bandali for introducing me to the "Porque no los dos" (= "Why can't we have both?") meme, which was one of the final catalysts for writing this.
jeffreyw's original "Mmm...Tacos" photo
- under CC-by 2.0. Thanks!