Obi Wan Kenobi

Is that a Lightsaber or are you Happy to See Me — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

While I was at Star Wars Cel­e­bra­tion VI, there were a lot of Slave Leia’s run­ning around. More than a lot. A plethora in vary­ing degrees of fit­ness to wear the cos­tume. There was even one with a Bat­man logo tat­too just below her belly­but­ton. So while I had many options to be Slave Leia in this photo, there was only one Obi Wan Kenobi there as “Old Ben.” Scott Klar was won­der­ful in his role as Obi Wan Kenobi.

A friend shot with him first on the Death Star set and told me about Klar. After we moved down to this Tat­tooine set, Klar showed up and went through a vari­ety of poses. I got some nice shots, but then our Slave Leia came along with her hus­band (Han Solo) and I got an idea. Both of these cos­tumes fit on Tat­tooine, but the char­ac­ters never got to meet dur­ing the Star Wars movies. I wanted to know what would hap­pen if Obi Wan Kenobi and Princess Leia hooked up. After all, he’s gotta look pretty good after spend­ing time with Jabba the Hutt. You know that’s gotta be a bad envi­ron­ment for a girl.

Not all of the photo back­drops were fab­ri­cated props. A num­ber of them, like this one, were back­drop rolls with a prop or two in front. Unfor­tu­nately, they had nei­ther a ceil­ing or floor com­po­nent to go with them, so the char­ac­ters are stand­ing on typ­i­cal con­ven­tion cen­ter con­crete floors and the ceil­ings have those ugly gas flood­lights. Add in some typ­i­cal trash thrown on the floor and you have a lim­ited point of view to make a shot.

No mat­ter, though. As you can see from the look on the face ob Obi Wan Kenobi, we had a fun time mak­ing this shot.