With all the Star Wars hype thanks to The Force Awakens releasing in December, it’s maybe time to revisit some of the forgotten corners of the great media empire that George Lucas spawned. There’s any number of places to begin, but if you’re really looking to bewilder yourself, perhaps there's no better start than the 2012 Xbox 360 video game Kinect Star Wars from LucasArts and Terminal Reality.
As the name implies, the game took advantage of the Kinect peripheral to monitor the motion of players to do stuff like, you know, use the Force and the like. It mostly gathered mixed to negative reviews, but it’s also responsible for perhaps the best use of the Star Wars license to date: a little thing called Galactic Dance Off. What is Galactic Dance Off and how does it relate to Star Wars? Well ...
Galactic Dance Off is one of five modes in Kinect Star Wars, but while everything else is pretty standard fare that one might expect from a Star Wars game, Dance Off pits players in dance battles similar to something from Dance Central but … Star Wars. This includes a song based on Jason Derulo's “Ridin' Solo,” with the lyrics changed to make Han Solo sing about being Han Solo. Yes, really.
Here’s a small sampling of the lyrics:
“I'm feeling like a star,
you can't stop my shine.
I'm lovin' Cloud City,
my head's in the sky.
I'm solo, I'm Han Solo.
I'm Han Solo.
I'm Han Solo, Solo.”
If it were just the Han Solo song, the bizarre dance and song would be just a weird blip on the radar. However, there’s a whole slew of these modified song and dance numbers, including one called “Hologram Girl” based on Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” and, perhaps strangest of all, a Wookiee-based song called “Kashyyyk” based on “Canned Heat” by Jamiroquai. The latter is funky, furry and entirely unnecessary. It also includes the truly regrettable line, “Got Kashyyyk in my heels tonight, baby!”
They even went so far as to rename the various dance moves so that they’re more aligned with the general Star Wars universe, which seems like a bit much considering that they’ve introduced all these characters dancing for no apparent reason other than the fact that Cloud City is always looking for new talent. In case you somehow missed this gem back in 2012, you’re welcome. Plus, there’s always the possibility that we’ll get a full Star Wars dancing game one of these days. Maybe Rey, Finn and Kylo Ren will dance their feelings out.
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