December 2022 – Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy

Galactic Style Guide – Good Greeble Guidelines

Happy New Year’s Eve, and welcome to another installment of our ‘Galactic Style Guide counterpoint’ subseries, where we help you strengthen your ‘Star Wars eye’ by highlighting and remedying common costuming faux pas that can make an outfit look Not Star Warsy. As part of the GSG, the ultimate goal is still to help you create a more accurate ‘outer persona’ – but we approach the goal from the opposite direction!

Although notably absent in the original film (and the Prequels), the pieces of wearable technology discussed in this early Style Guide entry have become nearly ubiquitous in the post-Disney era and among the casual costuming/Batuu-bounding communities. These devices’ purposes have been inconsistently identified, but most sources suggest they are either communication devices or personal transponders—think a wearable ‘Personal Locator Beacon’. (These differ from the plaques worn by Imperial and Rebel officers throughout the Original Trilogy, which clearly served to denote the wearer’s rank, and about which this article is not concerned!)

Despite being fairly limited in the visual record, “jacket greeblies” are frequently relied on by costumers to add ‘GFFA spice’ to an outfit, and the proliferation of 3D printing in the last decade has unleashed a flood of fan-made iterations of these wearable doodads. However, not all fan-made greeblies are created equal, so I wanted to try and ‘crack the code’ to see what makes the onscreen examples ‘work’ and some fan designs work…not so well.

It is important to note that when they show up in Episodes V and VI, we really only see these devices worn by Rebel Alliance personnel (with one possible underwhelming exception). If we look at our samples, we note that those from Empire are constructed in a different manner than those seen in Jedi: while they were kitbashed originally, the pieces worn onscreen were resin casts (Alinger, 86), which is perfect for outfitting dozens of background troops but limits the amount of detail seen on the final product:

Continue reading to learn the secrets of designing good greeblies!

Diamonds in the Rough – Scott Bowen

Welcome back to our monthly spotlight series! In this feature, I interview Star Wars costumers who have ‘gone the distance’ and put in the effort to create solid, in-universe outfits or personas. This month we’re looking at Scott Bowen’s excellent original Rodian character, ‘Bossome Scow’:

As you might imagine, Scott’s initial inspiration for this character design was the ur-Rodian example, GREEDO! His goal had a challenge embedded, however: not only to create an original Rodian character, but also to try and stick to Greedo’s iconic orange/teal/yellow colorscheme. As we will see, he definitely succeeds!

read the complete interview!

Upgrading the Rebel persona: flak vest

As the name of the game in rigorous reenacting is ‘continual improvement’, I’m always on the lookout for things to help add some depth or otherwise level-up my impressions. While Rebel characters typically steer away from the plastoid armor side of things, I realized that the ribbed vests worn by various characters were probably meant to protect the vital organs and so would be perfect for a partisan persona as well!

Rebel pilots, BoShek, Bossk; 1313 mercenaries, Ruusan rebel (Dave Dorman)

A few months ago, my buddy Anders (of DT Blasterworks) sent me a link to a lower-priced rebel pilot-style flak vest he was thinking about buying. Since my initial impetus for building a SectorForces partisan/guerilla kit was to pair Alliance-issued materiel with local planetary style, I had initially considered including one of these vests. The only one I had looked into was produced by Wampa Wear; at $125, while it’s probably—if anything like their flightsuits—extremely well-made and screen-accurate, I couldn’t justify paying that much for a purely costume piece…so the idea returned to the back burner.

However, Anders’ link (and his report that it was decent quality) renewed my interest, so at about 1/3^rd the price of a Wampa Wear vest, I pulled the trigger. Out of the package, I could tell the vest fell in the category of “close enough”, about which I’ve written before: presumably, there are variations on the flak vest throughout the galaxy, and they’re not all produced identically. All the same, I still wanted to try my hand at ‘accuratizing’ the cheapo vest to see if I couldn’t get it a little closer to Alliance specs, as a few things stood out to me that could use tweaking: