Cleanliness Is Next to Impossible

The Great Heep

Writer: Ben Burtt

Medium: Television

Air Date: June 7, 1986 

Timeline Placement: 15 BBY

 

A 45-minute TV special set between the second and third story arcs of the Droids cartoon. We're now entering the portion of the series that I have no familiarity with and no childhood nostalgia for. Despite owning and having watched the DVD that cobbles together the four Mungo Baobab episodes into a terrible "film," I remember absolutely nothing that happens in them. The Great Heep is a prequel to those episodes, but does little to set the stage for them. The special begins with R2-D2 and C-3PO already in the service of their new master, the space merchant Mungo Baobab, heir to the Baobab Merchant Fleet. We don't even get to see how they met!

 

That's okay, though, because once it gets going, this special is awesome. If you've been reading my Droids retrospective up to this point, you may have found yourself thinking, "This all sounds like dumb kiddie bullshit, why would anyone waste their time watching this crap in the year of our Lord 2025/26?" To that, I say: if you only ever watch a single episode of Droids: The Adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO, make it The Great Heep.

 

This has it all: fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles. R2-D2 gets a girlfriend, and it's the cutest thing ever. Would you believe me if I said that there is a non-zero chance that known Star Wars fan Takashi Yamazaki, writer-director of Godzilla Minus One, ripped off the ending of The Great Heep for his Oscar-winning kaiju film? Would you believe me if I told you that C-3PO, a mechanical automaton, sheds a tear, and it not only makes sense but is a genuinely moving and artful scene?

 

Wuv, twue wuv, will fowwow you foweva.

 

For the most part, the animation in the special is only slightly better than that of the regular series, the same low-detail designs and stiff character movements suggestive of low-budget Saturday-morning '80s fare. I say "for the most part," because about halfway through the special, for no reason at all there is a single shot of Admiral Screed's face reflecting the flames from an explosion that looks like it was animated by an entirely different studio or dropped in from a real animated movie. It looks awesome and it's bizarre seeing it in this cartoon. 

 

In summary, The Great Heep rocks, go watch it. But now let's talk about the Great Heep himself, and his weirdly significant place in Expanded Universe canon. Countless aeons ago, in another galaxy, lived the Yuuzhan Vong, arch-villains of the 19-book New Jedi Order series published by Del Rey Books between 1999 and 2003. A key cultural trait of their people was their species-wide religious technophobia, a prejudice developed when they were almost wiped out in a galactic war waged between the two advanced droid races of their home galaxy: the starfish-shaped Silentium, and the evil Abominor, massive mechanical monsters of varying shapes and sizes.

 

The war nearly destroyed everything, but ultimately the Yuuzhan Vong  drove the two robotic factions out of their native galaxy. Like the Yuuzhan Vong themselves eventually would, some of the surviving Silentium and Abominor ended up in the Star Wars galaxy. The former appeared in L. Neil Smith's 1983 trilogy The Lando Calrissian Adventures, while EU lore mentions eighteen known Abominor encounters, although only two were ever depicted in fiction. One was Ronyards from the Alan Moore Devilworlds comic Rust Never Sleeps, a junkyard world populated by droids who believed their planet was the body of a living god. The other was the Great Heep himself!

 

When the Great Heep arrived in the Star Wars galaxy, his batteries were dead and he ended up in a museum on Coruscant for 300 years until he was found and reactivated by Admiral Terrinald Screed of the Imperial Navy, with their subsequent partnership kick-starting the events of the Droids TV special. It's fun to watch this goofy '80s cartoon and think about R2-D2 and C-3PO fighting an ancient evil machine from another galaxy, the progeny of whose warmongering would arrive to trouble them forty years later, and being none the wiser to the broader significance of their adventure.

 

The war to end all wars.

 

(It should be noted that all of this is pure retroactive continuity established in The New Essential Guide to Droids (2006). The words "Silentium" and "Abominor" never appear in The Lando Calrissian Adventures, The Great Heep, or Rust Never Sleeps, nor did the authors of any of those '80s stories intend them to tie in to a book series that wouldn't be written for another two decades. But this is the connective, reinforcing beauty of EU continuity. Some fans balk at the esotericism of retcons like these, but my feeling is that as long as the original stories aren't being diminished or compromised in some way, they don't do no harm.)