‘Star Wars’ — Or a Woody Allen Movie?

By Anne Cohen December 15, 2015

Let’s play a game. Take a look at the following quotes from the original “Star Wars” trilogy, and repeat them with a Woody Allen voiceover:

“I’ve got such a bad case of dust contamination, I can hardly move.”

“Where am I? Where is everybody?”

“With all we’ve been through, sometimes I’m amazed we’re in as good condition as we are.”

“Oh, my head!”

“I told you it was dangerous here!”

Amazing, isn’t it? C-3PO, chief neurotic officer of the “Star Wars” franchise, sounds an awful lot like the iconic filmmaker. All credit goes to for making the connection and creating this “Star Wars”/Woody Allen mashup which merges the opening credits from “Manhattan” with the droid’s many many complaints.

“The ‘Star Wars’ franchise isn’t known for its melancholy,” Diane Bullock and Mike Schuster write in the piece, which marks Day 14 of Vulture’s “Star Wars” Advent Calendar. “But if you focus on the only speaking character to appear in all seven of the space-opera flicks, it becomes a lot more neurotic. C-3PO is surrounded by adventurers and warriors, but he’s just a self-doubting nebbish, always worried and never satisfied. In other words, he’s much like a Woody Allen protagonist.”

If you really think about it though, it isn’t all that surprising — don’t all Jewish stories begin with some version of “A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away?”

Anne Cohen was the Forward’s deputy digital media editor. When she’s not looking for the secret Jewish history of Voodoo in New Orleans, or making lists about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she writes for The Assimilator. She graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. magazine concentration in 2012.

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