The 501st came by today, and we were pretty glad to have the help with the launch of our Star Wars series, "The Spirit Awakens." You can see Madison in her Star Wars shirt, and Daddy wearing his Sith tie as well. There's a sandtrooper and a stormtrooper, a Jawa, and yes, R2-D2 was there with us as well. The jedi who hung around with R2-D2 is just off camera at the moment, but for while, this group was out there posing with many, many kids and kids-at-heart. There were a lot of grown-ups posing with these iconic characters, such is the popularity of Star Wars right now.
We had a lot of fun today. You can see here a lot of the kids having a "lightsaber battle" using foam noodles - the object was to knock the balloons off of each other's hats.
And we had ourselves the start of a story with some scavengers landing on Hoth in order to pick up anything useful that was leftover from the battle there. Of course, there's something super important left behind by the Rebels, and they're wanting our scavengers to find it.
The Empire is around too though, as you can see. Here are a few of the stormtroopers, walking in front of a shield generator, and talking about the T-16. This is a running joke from the Star Wars movie, so we thought we'd do it here as well. Daddy, Josh, and Chris lent their voices to a pre-recorded conversation, and Chris added a filter to it, and we sounded just like Stormtroopers!
And how amazing they looked on our stage. This is in fact the first time we've had Stormtroopers on our stage at KidPak, although we had them wandering around at Fall Festival last year. But their costumes were fantastic, and the kids made a whole lot of noise when these guys first showed up on stage. It was such a surprise!
But Mommy did a great job with the other costumes too, cobbling together things from thrift shops and, along with costuming pieces she's gathered over time. Our main characters are scavengers, so they didn't exactly have uniforms or anything like that.
Here's another shot of our stormtroopers talking about the T-16, just before they're ordered off the ice planet in order to scour an asteroid field not far from there. We're attempting to treat things as if they are canon, and actually happened within the larger story of Star Wars.
Ah, here's a group shot of some of our characters, including R2-D2, a Jawa and a Jedi. Only the Stormtroopers appeared in the skit, as the other characters were outside greeting. The 501st is a huge, gracious organization full of volunteers who dress up as characters that go out and do volunteer outings. They visit hospitals, ball games and museums in their costumes, and make quite an impression. In fact, these two you see above were at a "Night at the Museum" event at Tellus Museum just last night.
We have a wookie costume, so we had a wookie on stage this series start. Madison named this character Chubba Wukka, a name that struck her as funny one day when we were trying to name Daddy's character something on "Battlefront II," instead of "Player 1."
You can see the scavengers here, including a smaller character to our brave captain's left. That's a Jawa, and inside that costume is Madison! Here's a closer look at her out in the lobby when it was time for greeting.
She's on stage again, although she's obviously all covered up. We haven't come up with a name for her yet, but we're working on it. She's going to be a main character in this series, and we'll have fun with a Jawa on stage. It makes sense that if you have a team of scavengers, you'll have a Jawa, right?
Hopefully the Empire won't find them though. The Empire was just finishing their last sweep of the area, looking around for prisoners and things of value, to no avail. All of them, it seems, were off the planet Hoth and on their way - or so it may seem.
Here's our Stormtroopers again, and notice the square GNK droid there to the left. Daddy was walking to make his own GNK droid for this series, and then he discovered that the 501st already had one, a prop that stands on its own - they're letting us have it for the series, which is fantastic. The GNK droid will stay there by the turret for the next few months.
You can see Madison at the center here, a smarty-pants sort of character that speaks Jawa all the time. We pre-recorded several bits of conversation from wookies and jawas, and have them up on our 360, a device that lets you press buttons to get sound effects and music tracks going. Daddy is up in the Soundbooth, and when it is time for a Jawa to say something, Daddy presses the button: "Utini!"
We've got a lot of pictures on this day, but we're big Star Wars fans, and some of these look so great. The kids were so into this from the beginning. Outside, the Stormtroopers were posing for photographs with kids, and the line went back a long, long ways. It wasn't quite as long as Elsa a few years ago, but the line was filling up the room and blocking the exit in a way. It was surprising!
Here's another shot of the set, which came together rather quickly. The designer was a bit rushed, and isn't as impressed with it as we are, but the two pieces there - the shield generator and the turret - are so iconic that the set lets you know that we're definitely on Hoth.
Ah, the communicator device! Daddy couldn't find the one he had from Episode One, which looked just like the one Qui-Gon was holding. But I did find this other piece of electronics that was some sort of computer encyclopedia that had digital information about all the characters. It's from 1999 or so, and it fit well for our tech character to be using. Also, she's wearing those spy glasses we found yesterday.
Our other character is here to the left - we found her a white wig, and white lipstick too. We got those silver boots yesterday too. You can see her talking with Chubba Wukka here, who generally just lumbers around. Poor Isaac inside - his vision is limited quite a bit!
It all went well this morning. One Stormtrooper in particular knows that the scavengers are there, so we'll see next week what's up with that. We've got a general story to tell for the next few months, one with some new characters next week. It should be fun to see what happens. I am literally making this story up as it goes along, but I know a lot more about Star Wars than even some of these Stormtroopers, which I find ironic.
Some day, we might even find ourselves as a part of the 501st Legion. It's a good group of people, and it's kind of fun to dress up as a Stormtrooper for the kids. There were so many smiles this morning. It was funny to see kids go up and hug a Stormtrooper too!
As for the message, today we talked about the message of new hope within us all. It paralleled the idea of a message inside R2-D2 that could save the galaxy, but of course our message is that of salvation for all mankind.
Afterwards, we took a trip over to Wal-Mart: in honor of our new series, we got Season 4 of "Star Wars: Rebels." Madison earned another gift card today for last series, and so we used that, and of course we got home and watched about four episodes. I imagine there will be much binging this week.
The rain was heavy today, and loud too. The forecast mentioned dryer weather, but the clouds above seemed to disagree with that assessment. It was dark, dark rain in the middle of the day. Lots of thunder and lightning too.
Tonight we read from our book, and yeah, we visited Hoth in "Battlefront II." We prayed, and were quite thankful for the great start to our series. The rest of our day was a bit of rest, with a tiny bit of homework. Madison got her new piano book yesterday, but we didn't even look at that yet. These new series starts really wear you out!
Anyway, it was a great morning, and a great day. There were so many pictures taken, especially of R2-D2 upstairs with the pastor's mom and tons of kids beaming with great big smiles. We have great big smiles as well tonight, all of us resting really easily after a very successful day.
May the Force Be With You
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