Sandbox / Star Wars Narm

"George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it."

— Harrison Ford to George Lucas after reading his lines for A New Hope.

The galaxy far-far away is not just full of diverse planets, colorful species, creatures and people of all kinds, but also plenty of failed dramatic moments that just come off as funny.

Works with their own pages:

• Star Wars Rebels

All spoilers are unmarked! You Have Been Warned!

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The films:

Attack of the Clones

• The revelation that Zam Wesell is actually a Clawdite shapeshifter, with her randomly morphing her face into her truer lizard-like form while racing to escape Anakin on Coruscant. This ability is only shown again when Jango Fett kills Zam with a dart that causes her face to distort again as she writhes. In both instances, it comes off as unintentionally funny rather than the Jump Scare it was probably intended to be.
• The lofty, faux-poetic "I don’t like sand" speech in Attack of the Clones. As StickWars puts it:
  Anakin: I hate sand. It's so... Sandy. But you, Padmé. You're not sandy. And that is why I love you.
• When Anakin and Padmé are frolicking at the lake country on Naboo, Anakin tumbles off one of the animals he was riding and plays dead. The music turns serious and the alarmed Padmé runs to him as if she believes he is unconscious or dead, despite it being obvious to the audience he'd deliberately tumbled. This resulted in jokes along the lines of "Oops! Anakin's dead, the whole original trilogy has now been butterflied out of existence!"
• After Anakin brings back his mother's body, he goes on a tirade to Padmé about Obi-Wan:
  Padmé: You're not all-powerful!
  Anakin: Well I should be! And someday I will be... I will be... the most powerful Jedi ever! It's all Obi-Wan's fault! He's jealous! He's HOLDING ME BACK!
• Poggle the Lesser has sentenced Anakin, Padmé, and Obi-Wan to death. The Geonosian hivemind may sound menacing at times with all the insectoid chittering, but Poggle opening his speech with an elephant-like trumpet ruins the drama.

Revenge of the Sith

• Palpatine telling Anakin to "DEW IT" (execute Dooku) sounds like his evil voice inhibitor malfunctioned and let Darth Sidious out.
• As Palpatine blasts Mace Windu with Sith lightning, Mace Windu's replies to him and Anakin are interspersed with screams that are meant to reflect the strenuous effort of repelling the lightning, but they sound more like he's constipated.
• Palpatine's voice, lines, and acting throughout the battle with Mace Windu become distractingly throaty and cheesy instead of delightfully hammy, especially when he shouts almost incoherently:
  Palpatine: Power! Unlimited POWER!
• While Palpatine looms over Anakin while knighting him a Sith, the culmination of manipulating Anakin for many years, his line delivery looks and sounds like Evil Feels Good... in his pants. The way he creepily says "Good" adds to the impression.
  Palpatine: The Force is STR-R-R-RONGG with you!
• Palpatine has wanted to duel Yoda for decades, and when the moment finally arrives, he tells Yoda:
  Palpatine: I have waited a long time for this moment, my little green friend!
• When Obi-Wan tells Padmé that Anakin has turned to the dark side, Ewan McGregor struggles to deliver his lines, covers his mouth like he's trying not to laugh, and uses a distracting word that sucks out all drama:
  Obi-Wan: I have seen... A... Security hologram... Of him... Killing younglings...
• After the intensity of their conflict, Anakin expresses to Obi-Wan the tragedy of a great Jedi fallen to the deepest darkness with these last words:
  Anakin: I HATE YOU!
• When Vader learns that Padmé has died despite turning to the dark side to save her, he expresses his pain with a Big "NOOooOOOoooOOOooo!" The official Star Wars website once had a soundboard to play with this line in recognition of how unintentionally funny people found it.

Return of the Jedi

• Until the Blu-ray release, Darth Vader silently watched as the Emperor electrocuted Luke. Despite his masked facial expressions, Vader was visibly conflicted before deciding to save Luke with a Heroic Sacrifice. The Blu-ray release adds Vader saying a Little "No" followed by a Big "NO!", distracting from the heavy emotion the scene originally carried through the acting and score.

The Force Awakens

• The two gangs who come after Han Solo are treated as if they're serious threats, but cannot be taken seriously:
  • The Kanjiklub mobsters were hyped in promotions based on the guys who play them, but they have ridiculous hairdos, a gang name that sounds more like a high school anime convention than a menacing galactic crime faction, and they go down without putting up a real fight.
  • The name "Guavian Death Gang" sounds like a bunch of tropical fruit lovers who kill people by drowning them in Guava juice. Their leader, Bala-Tik, has a thick Scottish accent which makes his opening line sound like "'an Solo! Yew'r eh DED MAHN!" His line "Tell that to Kanjiklub" became an instant meme.
• The Rathtars are horrifying beasts in appearance and behavior until they move by rolling.
• When Kylo Ren confronts Rey and Finn during the climax, he yells "Traitor!" at Finn like a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum that he didn't get his way.

The Last Jedi

• Kylo Ren's Shirtless Scene is supposed to be Mr. Fanservice and depict how the Force bond lets Rey and Kylo see each other, but it's undercut by how he's either wearing a black bandage on his belly or high-waisted his pants above his navel.

The Rise of Skywalker

• Kylo Ren's helmet is welded back together in what starts as an appropriately solemn, quiet moment until showing that the blacksmith is a chimpanzee-like alien with oversized ears and a distractingly comical appearance.
• After the arrival of Resistance reinforcements in the climax, a First Order officer says, "It's not a navy... It's people!" While a nice sentiment, it feels like a random and unnatural thing for that character to say in that moment.
  • In the European Spanish dub, "people" is whimsically translated as the Spanish word for "individuals"; the quote becomes, "They don't have a navy... They are individuals!" This could have passed as an abstract reference to the Final Order's fascism had it made some contextual sense.
• Palpatine raising his arms and shooting his Force lightning at the Resistance ships in the sky is meant to be a terrifying display of his power, but it starts off with what sounds like a bass drop as if Palpatine is giving a show at a huge rave.
• Palpatine boasts that he is "all the Sith," and Rey retorts, "And I... am all the Jedi!" The pause between words is meant to be dramatic, but instead sounds like she was genuinely trying to come up with an eloquent reply before giving up and mirroring his line.
• The seriousness of Ben Solo's death is undercut by how he literally drops dead, silently and without warning, while Rey looks more confused than saddened.

Rogue One

• Saw Gerrera's quote "Save the rebellion! Save the dream!" is pretty cheesy, and he even got a following for his Narm Charm.
• The Bor Gullet scene can cause unintended laughter in some audiences because of Forest Whitaker's hammy performance, and the fact that it comes straight out of nowhere, and is never mentioned again.
• Krennic's gets hammy when Tarkin discusses his future intentions.
  Krennic: You stand here among MY achievement, NACHOS!
• Darth Vader has a volcano lair castle tower. That bears repeating, for emphasis: Darth Vader lives in a jet black spire castle straddling a live volcano with a lava-fall flowing out of the front gate. For some, it comes across as... cliche. It gets worse when you know it's based on an early idea for Empire Strikes Back which was discarded as too silly.
• Jyn retorting to Cassian's passionate Rebel speech with an offended "you'll not convince me with words." It's the kind of Lame Comeback that almost requires pouting lips afterwards.
• "Rebellions are built on hope!" is a pretty Narm-y way for Jyn to convince the other rebels to fight back. Her speech is a little minimalist.
• The European Spanish Star Wars dubs are famous for having some excellent acting and making a good job of covering bad performances and plot holes in the franchise, but the one for Rogue One, while having a lot of good points too, seems to be the inevitable occasional exception (which was followed by some similar weak points in The Rise of Skywalker as said above).Felicity Jones's voice actress, Lourdes Fabrés, generally does it well, but every time Jyn speaks in the Rebel council, it gets botched by suddenly sounding incredibly childish in key moments.

Solo

• The Opening Scroll introduces crime lord Lady Proxima as if she'll be the Big Bad or another serious threat. When she appears, the characters are intimidated by a giant grub-like alien with a grandmotherly voice, and she exits the film within minutes.
• Han was never an Only One Name guy until signing on for the Imperial military; the Imperial officer names him "Solo" because Han happened to be alone when applying. This is treated like a Meaningful Rename, but it's cheesy since the audience didn't know Han Solo wasn't always Han Solo until seconds before and the random name lacks meaning.
• Dryden Voss' yacht is full of corruption and decadence, treated in all seriousness until showing that the baritone singer, Luleo Primoc, is a weird green creature in a formaldehyde flask who sings through the liquid like a drunk uncle.

Other media

Legends

• The infamous Callista Trilogy includes one of the oddest Star Wars books, Planet of Twilight, which introduces the character Beldorion. Beldorion is the first Hutt Jedi, and years ago he turned to the dark side and took over an entire planet. Hutts are massive slug-like creatures that move as slow as molasses and have stubby arms, yet Beldorion unironically engages Leia in a lightsaber duel. She quickly kills him. After the fact, Lucasfilm realized that the concept was so utterly ridiculous that they put a future embargo on any more Hutt Jedi and swept the whole incident under the rug.
• In the New Jedi Order, Supreme Commander Pellaeon talks to Leia Organa Solo about his garden and ends up using extremely heavy-handed garden metaphors to demonstrate the difference between Imperial and New Republic governing styles. Pellaeon is usually not this flowery.
  Gilad Pellaeon: From a garden one learns to cull the weak and unfit and to encourage the strong and vigorous. An inferior bud soon feels the strength of my pinch!
• Michael Stackpole's X-Wing Series novels:
  • The Rogues go to the prison planet Kessel to fetch some criminals that they can turn loose on the Empire. This includes one of Corran's personal enemies, crime lord Zekka Thyne, who had been taken down in part because his diamond-shaped Hellish Pupils gleamed in the dark. Corran tells Thyne that if he blows his chance and turns against the New Republic, he will be tracked down. Corran ruins the moment by saying:
    Corran Horn: No matter where you go, I'll find those double diamonds of yours. Count on it.
  • Zekka Thyne is also an alien with dark blotches across his skin. This earned him the less-than-threatening nickname "Patches".
  • The Rebels call Madam Director Ysanne Isard "Iceheart". She expresses interest in turning one of the Rogues to her side via brainwashing, and her subordinate says that it's a bad idea because playing with Corran Horn is playing with fire. Her response?
    Ysanne Isard: I am Iceheart, I do not burn.
  • In practically every book that features Kirtain Loor, he thinks about how people have said that he looks like a younger, taller Grand Moff Tarkin. In The Krytos Trap, he also puts on a hooded cloak and imagines himself to look like "a pale imitation of Darth Vader" while hoping to inspire Vaderian terror in someone. He does scare the intended person, but it's clear that this happens because his agents just violently broke into the man's house and threatened him.
  • Stackpole also gives us a few gems with his cheesy romantic dialogue, such as:
    Corran Horn: Losing you just ripped the emotional skeleton out of me.
• The constant references to "lube" in Shadows of the Empire get ridiculous, and in later works Ben Skywalker says "lubed" a lot.

• In the video game adaptation of The Phantom Menace, one of the shopkeepers on Tatooine is very enthusiastic about his trade.
  Important Merchant: Better stand back, mister, cause I'm about to slash... all my prices!