| R2-E2
PROJECT #399 "R2 units are called astromech droids. They help pilots fly their ships and can even make repairs in flight." Preamble: Not too long after I saw The Phantom Menace in theaters, I set about creating my own little compliment of astromech droids as seen aboard the Marie Celeste. There were a finite number of them in the movie (we see five, including R2-D2) and they all got enough adequate screen time that, with some help from the Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Movie Scrapbook, I was able to paint them up before the movie was ever released to video. (I didn't actually get any of the prequel films on DVD until Episode III came out and I was able to buy them all together.) Anyway, imagine my shock and surprise when I loaded up the extras disc one day and I saw two brand-new droids on the very edge of either side of the screen. They were never in the movie, or any of the peripheral media for that matter; you probably can't even see them on the fullscreen version of the film. My guess is that somebody created them specifically for the DVD menu screen (it looks like they cut-and-pasted the image of R2-D2 and tweaked the color scheme to create R2-E2), but at the same time, I couldn't just pretend that they didn't exist. I mean, they're right there in the astromech storage bay. (R2-E2 is on the very left side of the DVD menu; R2-F2 is on the extreme right.) Construction: I started with the Episode I version of R2-D2; I could have gone with a better sculpt, but I wanted this project to match the rest of Queen Amidala's droids on my display shelf. The mold required some minor modifications to make it a little more accurate to the movies, so I added the third holoprojector to the top of his head and built new power cables for his feet. I knew painting over the panels on his dome would be difficult (his head is perfectly smooth; all the blue panels are tampographed, not sculpted) so I also took the added step of scoring grooves around the outer edges of these panels to serve as guidelines for the painting process. I painted his dome with gold enamel paints, and used acrylic paints for the dark blue trim (which appears to be darker than the blue used on R2-D2). Comments: Even after doing extensive research online, I can't seem to find either of these guys listed on any web sites, official or otherwise. This is strange for Star Wars characters, even obscure ones, who are usually very well-documented. Anyway, since it didn't look like anyone had assigned names to these guys yet, I took it upon myself to do so. |
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This Page Created 9/18/2006
Last Update: 10/12/2009
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