Russell Beattie

My son and I have been going through Star Wars for the past week or so, and it's been a blast. He watched the original movie (episode IV) for only the second time with me last week, and then we played Lego Star Wars together on the Nintendo Gamecube, going through the chapters in the first movie, bit by bit. Then we watched Empire Strikes Back today (his first time, can you imagine?!), and went through the second part of the game. We'll be continuing through Return of the Jedi during the rest of the week as well. It'll be kick ass, if I do say so myself.

Also, Santa seems to have known that Alex would be totally into Star Wars this week, and appropriately delivered on some choice Star Wars Lego Kits as well. But instead of the original movie stuff, he got Anakin Skywalker's bright yellow Naboo N-1 Starfighter kit, so in order for him to be excited about it (I thought), we had to interrupt the original movie trilogy to watch The Phantom Menace on Saturday. We both go through it okay, but barely... He was totally into the action parts, but the rest of it made him lay out flat on the couch with boredom and confusion. The first movies are soooo much better than the latest ones.

Anyways, as it turns out, R2-D2 came with the Naboo kit - which was part of the reason I got it, but I had *no* idea how much of a home-run that was going to be. Basically if there was nothing else under the tree, but a tiny little R2-D2 figure with a bow on top, Alex still would have been totally ecstatic. I honestly didn't remember how much kids responded to it. I sorta remember from my childhood (one of my earliest memories is seeing the original Star Wars before I was able to even read), but now I realize how central R2-D2 is to what makes the series so great. Which is why, I assume, Lucas made him so important to newer set of movies.

One other note, while I was helping assemble the various Lego kits, I was thinking about how nice it was to have instructions, as they always seem to do something I wouldn't have thought of doing myself. Also, we have various parts and pieces of old kits that could almost make up many of the new kits, if only I had the right set of step-by-step directions. Sure enough, looking online I discovered Picsel which has a catalog of 3250 instructions that have been scanned and posted. It doesn't seem to have been updated since 2003 [Update: see below], but it's got *tons* of great stuff to explore, regardless.

Hope your holiday has been just as fun!

:-)

-Russ

Update: Oh, actually, the "Peeron Instruction and Catalog Scan Library", aka PICSEL, actually self limits itself to scans that are three years old or older. That's very cool - useful, but also fair to Lego... So there's some scans that will pop up in just a few days from 2004. Cool!