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EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE

This, without a doubt, was the most worthless, disappointing, wretchedly poor theatrical feature film in Star Wars history. (I don't count The Clone Wars and neither should you.)

And why? Why the backlash? Because not one person lost a hand onscreen. That’s right. No hands were harmed in the making of this motion picture.

And this pisses me off. I mean, we got a 1138. We got a "bad feeling" line. Why no hands? Why, cruel master of black fate?

Instead there were a bunch of lame replacements for the loss of hands. And this is why we didn't beat Titanic at the box office.

For example, Darth Maul’s lightsaber was chopped in half—a poor copy of a hand loss. And when Darth Maul himself got chopped in half, the message was clear; Darth Maul wanted to lose a hand so badly… but it just didn’t happen.

Perhaps Obi-Wan was too much of a sadistic, revenge-filled psycho that he ignored the noble art of hand-cutting and went for the whole shebang.

Now Jar Jar Binks. People would have liked this movie a lot more if his hand got chopped off and he screamed: “Aggh! Aggh! Mesa get hand cut off!” or something along those lines. I’m just trying to entertain the mainstream here, George.

Bear in mind, there was a hand-chop during the events of Episode I. Just not onscreen. And you’ll read about that later…

I must pause here. Like, once every couple of months or so, as regular as the misty moon over the lonely hills, I’ll get an e-mail saying “Hey Adam! I bet a battle droid got his arm chopped off in TPM!” Sorry, folks, but I’ll only count it if the hand/arm specifically gets removed from an otherwise fairly intact body. None of these chopped-into-twenty-pieces affairs. If you’ve got photographic evidence of your basic plain, simple hand chop, send it my way.

Until then, a moment's silence for what might have been.

On the up side, as greater scholars than I have noted, the Podrace was pretty cool.