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Star Wars meets Risky Business and Harry Potter

Wine Country through rosé-colored glasses

Ever since Pixar alumnus and “Little Miss Sunshine” scribe Michael Arndt scored the screenwriting gig for “Star Wars 7,” the Internet has been abuzz with speculation about the next iteration of the franchise. Let’s hope the Oscar-winning writer has learned a few lessons from the last “Star Wars” threequel: Don’t use kids. Don’t use amphibians. And, given the sense of “ownership” fans have for the Star Wars universe, Arndt should somehow include a fan or two. A fan like me. To help out, I’ve written up some notes for you, Mike, to make writing me into “Star Wars 7” as easy as shooting womp rats back home.

  Obviously, anyone who’d pitch a “Star Wars” flick based on themselves would hail from the oilier side of the galaxy. I accept this. There you’ll find me as Lando Calrissian’s PR guy, having somehow discredited myself as a reporter at the Dagobah Post Dispatch (we’ll get back to that). I’d have my own humanoid protocol droid (“E-3PO,” the snarky silver one from “The Empire Strikes Back” that tells C-3PO to eat his heart out) and maybe a pet Ewok with a drinking problem (for comic relief).

  Things are copasetic, that is until house-sitting Lando’s bachelor pad gets out of hand. Let’s just say a small house party for a couple hundred close friends turns into mayhem when some wookies crash it. Meanwhile, Rivoche, the ravishing adopted daughter of Grand Moff Tarkin, seduces me and makes off with my boss’s prized Kyber Crystal, the ultimate McGuffin in that it enables practitioners of either side of the Force to raise the dead. But we don’t know this yet. No one knows this, which is why it’s just sitting on the mantle.

  So, I’m basically screwed when the boss comes back unless … Rivoche calls – she’s blackmailing me for the crystal. She agrees to meet me and my droid at some fancy Coruscant bar to discuss a price. And she brings her partner-in-crime, Boba Fett. Unfortunately, he’s all business. Our negotiations don’t go well (Boba doesn’t negotiate so much as nod his head a lot and shoot stuff). E3 panics and farts a smoke bomb. We run. They follow. We get in the Millenium Falcon (Lando left the keys) and they get into his Slave One. Space chase!

  E3 and I crash Lando’s beloved Falcon on some desert boondocks called Tatooine. There, we evade capture by Boba by disguising ourselves as Jawas. This leads to the inevitable line, “Aren’t you a little tall for a Jawa?” from the plucky slave girl and eventual love interest we meet at Bib Fortuna’s nightclub while on the lam (Mike, at some point, Boba should fall into the SarIacc Pit again and say something pithy like, “Deja vu all over again!”).

  I try to do something chivalrous for the slave girl, like unchain her from the stripper pole, but quickly learn I’m messing up her months-long investigation. Turns out she’s an undercover space cop for the New Republic. And a probably a princess. BUT NOT MY SISTER. She’s been tracing a Sith-led conspiracy to bring Darth Vader back from the dead. And they need the Kyber Crystal. Hijinks ensue in which I make the Kessel Run in 11 parsecs (that’s right, 11, take that Han Solo) and I blow up the third death star (“Third time’s the charm”) and then, you know, I defeat a reconstituted Darth Vader with – get this – Ben Kenobi’s lightsaber (the irony!), which the slave-girl-space-cop-princess gave to me. Also, she tells me … wait for it … it was her dad’s. Chills, man.

  At the end, E3 is shined up, the Falcon is repaired, my Ewok gets sober and I put the Kyber Crystal back on the mantle just as Lando opens the door. He walks up to the crystal, takes a hard look at it, then says to me, “Why, you slimy, double-crossing, no-good swindler.” Then he laughs and gives me a big hug. The Force is with me. Fade to black.

  Yeah, it’s basically “Risky Business” with the latter half of the “Harry Potter” series and some other crap I liked. But, you know, set in “Star Wars.” So, Mike, whaddya say? Help me, Michael Arndt, you’re my only hope.

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Daedalus Howell is a Jedi at DHowell.com.