Do you want to know one of the hardest parts about watching someone chop someone else’s body parts off? It’s knowing that the adrenaline coursing through your system is going to make it impossible to accurately place the experience on your ranked list of dismemberments that you’ve witnessed.
But that’s why you have us, a trained team of experts willing to sift through, for example, the Star Wars franchise and objectively grade the best times when someone got, as the kids say, cut up from the gut up. Do the kids say that? You work on getting the kids to say that, I’ll put together this list of the best violent dismemberments in a franchise about space wizards for kids. We’ll meet back up when we’re done.
10. That time C-3PO lost all his limbs in Cloud City
Somehow, despite getting more pieces of himself removed in one go than anyone else on this list, C-3PO never gets the respect he deserves. People talk about watching Luke’s hand fly off or the sickening thud of some severed Hayden Christensen legs flopping against volcanic rock, but nobody brings up the way that this brave protocol droid got rocked to his core by some off-screen nogoodnik. And why does he get this opprobrium from the Star Wars community? Because he’s annoying and he exploded like a Crash Test Dummies action figure? Because he went out begging for his life like a nobody, then got put back together without any consequences after enjoying a free piggyback ride from Chewbacca, the only character in Star Wars that everyone wants a piggyback ride from? Is that why we don’t feel sorry for him?
Yeah, fair enough. Bottom of the list.
9. That time Luke got his hand sliced off in Cloud City
While everybody was busy not worrying about C-3PO, Luke Skywalker was on a path that would lead him to Bespin for a family reunion.
Getting back in touch with an estranged parent is never easy, and things go as badly for Luke as they’ve ever gone for anyone being invited to join the family business. After some light roughhousing with his old man, our hero gets his mitt chopped clean off, then his dad tries to make up for it by offering him a job. That’s toxicity. That’s casual flaunting of an asymmetrical power dynamic. There’s an important lesson here: You can’t fix your parents. At best, you can get better at sword fighting and cut off their hand in a couple of years. If you’re lucky, you’ll even get to do it in front of their boss and make them look like a yutz, writhing around on the ground with their stump all cauterized. Ask any family therapist: That’s growth.
8. That time it happened to Anakin
Anakin was probably feeling like a pretty cool dude when he went after Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones. He’d just fought a bunch of giant bugs. A girl had given him a little kiss. He’d even lucked into the Jedi equivalent of loaner shorts, nabbing a free replacement lightsaber from a thoughtful coworker without getting chewed out. His rat tail was on fleek. Everything was coming up Little Annie.
Then, as so often happens when you’re feeling how it feels to chew Stride gum, Christopher Lee chopped his arm off with a white-hot plasma blade and threw him on the floor with his mind. Anakin had to lie there and watch while a syntax-challenged Grover from Sesame Street hobbled in and put a bow on things for him. “Oh well,” Anakin probably thought, arm meat smoldering. “At least that probably won’t happen again.”
7. That time it happened to Anakin
It was another banner day for Anakin as audiences reached the climax of Revenge of the Sith. He’d just been promoted at work, proved that he was better at sword fights than all of the kids at his old school, and he was about to be single again. It was the sort of day that would normally call for a night on the town with your best friends.
Only Anakin’s best friend didn’t want to do shots. He wanted to have a shouting match about the democratic process and be a real buzzkill about all those kids from before.
Anakin’s like “Hey man, I don’t need this negativity. I can jump over your head.” His buddy is all “Don’t you dare jump over my head.” Anakin jumps over his buddy’s head, and his buddy, who he thought was going to be cool, slices one of his legs off mid-air.
6. That time it happened to Anakin
Ask anyone who’s been in a car accident or attended a local theater production of The Wiz in a predominantly white community: There’s a funny thing that happens when everything’s going wrong all at once. The world sort of slows down in a moment of timeless hyper-awareness.
“Harsh,” Anakin probably thought as he felt his buddy’s lightsaber pass fully through his left thigh. “Still, I’ve got one good leg to hop out of here on. I’m sure my pal will give me a shoulder to lean on. After all, disagreements happen, but at the end of the day, he’s still my ride-or-d…”
And then, in a moment of cold, genuine horror, he realized that his buddy was still swinging his lightsaber. That the blade wasn’t going to stop. That it was already halfway through Anakin’s second of two legs.
“Well. Friggin’ fiddlesticks,” Anakin probably thought.
5. That time it happened to Anakin
“Okay,” Anakin probably thought some more as his buddy’s lightsaber passed through the last of his precious femoral arteries. “Okay, okay okay. Not perfect. Not the perfect day for Anakin.”
“But hey,” he probably continued. “Just because you turn to the dark side doesn’t mean you can’t focus on the bright side, that’s what I always say. I’ve still got a couple of arms. Sure, one’s metal from that other time when this happened, but it’s still mine. Worst comes to worst, I can pick myself up and knuckle-trudge my way back to the ship. It’ll be embarrassing, sure, but hey. Maybe I deserve it. I did kill a lot of kids today. This is just the wake-up call I needed. You know what? When we’re done here, I’m going to shake my buddy’s hand and thank him f…”
And that’s when, in a borderline unbelievable moment of swordsmanship, Anakin’s buddy re-adjusted the trajectory of his blade so specifically that it managed to remove Anakin’s arm as well. In one swing, he nailed three out of four limbs dangling swiftly overhead.
“Biscuits and gravy,” Anakin probably thought. “That is the last time I let this happen.”
4. That time it happened to Anakin
A few years go by. Anakin is thriving at work thanks to a supportive team and a boss who was willing to pay for his medical care after that last lightsaber tiff. His buddy is long-since dead, which is frankly okay, seeing how he used to get a real kick out of telling people “He’s more machine than man now” while leaving out the crucial second half of the sentence, “because I cut him up with a laser sword when he tried to show me a cool jump.”
Anakin’s been trying to get in touch with his now-adult son for a while. Things didn’t go great the last time they hung out, and in a real “hurt people hurt people” moment, he’d let his temper get the best of him and chopped the lad’s hand off. To be fair, he offered the kid a job right after, so it’s not like he wasn’t putting in the effort.
So the kid shows up again and Anakin’s like “are you sure you don’t want to work here?” and the kid’s like “nah,” so Anakin’s like “All right, well maybe I’ll offer your sister the job since you’re not interested” and the kid flips out. He screams and starts swinging his lightsaber around like he’s the special birthday boy and his old man’s the pinata. Needless to say, somebody’s going to get hurt.
“Yeah, that seems about right,” Anakin probably thinks as he stares at his smoking wrist stump. The two kind of bond over murdering Anakin’s boss, and then Anakin tells his kid “Help me take my mask off so I can look at you with my own eyes” and the kid’s like “but you’ll die” and Anakin probably thinks “Here’s hoping.”
3. That time Anakin happened to someone else
This one’s not special for any concrete cinematic reason. The fight choreography is fine, and the special effects are a little questionable. Emotionally, the whole scene falls a little flat. But going back and watching the part of Revenge of the Sith where Anakin cuts both of Dooku’s hands off, especially knowing what we know about what the next 25 years of the guy’s life are going to be like, it’s just nice to see him get a chance to be the hand chopper for a minute, especially when the hand choppee isn’t his kid or Nick Fury for once.
2. That hypothetical time when Chewbacca tore R2-D2’s arms off
A New Hope is a classic, not just for the scenes that it gave us, but for the ones that it didn’t. The scene where Han Solo nonsensically implies that, if R2 beats Chewbacca at video games, Chewbacca will tear R2’s arms out of his sockets? Arms that R2 doesn’t have? Chilling.
What would that have even looked like? Would Chewie have attached arms to R2 just so he could tear them off? The whole thing is a surreal masterpiece of narrative negative space. Science fiction jazz is all about the notes you don’t play, and I think George Lucas knew that.
1. That time in the cantina when Ponda Baba wouldn’t let Obi-Wan buy him a drink
First of all? “Ponda Baba?” Great name. That’s just a personal note, though. What made the cantina dismemberment scene from A New Hope really special was the way that it captured, in just a few seconds, the utter, pant-messing terror of living in the Star Wars universe.
Recap: Luke sidles up to the bar. Two drunk guys — one of them Ponda Baba — get up to some monkey business, playing it up like they’re cool and scary to make the kid feel like a chump. Mid-hazing, a gross old dude butts in and he’s like, “can I buy you fellas a round?”
Think about the nervousness that you feel in this — the real world — when a stranger offers to buy you a drink and you turn them down. There’s a lot that can go wrong, but one thing that you can pretty well guarantee is that he won’t cut off your arm with a laser sword and then hypnotize the cops into ignoring the whole thing before leaving the planet forever. Even if you just want to grab a beer and mess with the hayseeds at the local bar, this universe is a nightmare.
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