If you have read the last few posts on this blog then you know I have been building a bunch of Star Wars kits lately. In doing so I started to notice a trend; These kits both are and are not color accurate out of the box.
Let me give you an example. Take the classic Star Destroyer. Here is how it looks at the start of A New Hope:
Here is one in Empire Strikes Back:
Here is another from Rogue One:
Here is the bare plastic of my Star Destroyer model kit:
None of these colors are exactly alike. If we wanted to determine the official, canonical color of a Star Destroyer, we have our work cut out for us.
Here’s the thing though – while none of these colors look the same, none of them really look wrong either. Assuming you have seen all the Star Wars films, how many of you honestly looked at the Star Destroyers in any one of them and immediately thought “that’s not the right color”. Our brains register the fact that they are colored some shade of light grey, and we know that such a tone will reflect the light and other colors within its environment. This will, in turn, cause it to look a bit different depending on where it is. To try and determine a single canonical color for a Star Destroyer is difficult if not impossible, but more importantly, it is unnecessary. You can paint it in any of the above colors without issue. You can just say your bluish-grey model depicts a Star Destroyer from Empire. Or your whitish-grey one is from Rogue One.
The same thought process can be applied to the other kits. Take the AT-M6. Here is an image that makes it look dark grey, bordering on black:
The color guide, however, suggests a shade of grey that is much closer to the original AT-AT.
If we look online, we can indeed find depictions of the AT-M6 using this color:
Once again, nothing about this looks wrong.
Next we have the Death Star II. This is a tricky one, since it technically uses two colors, one for the inner shell, and one for the outer plating. Ultimately I suppose it does not matter, because the base plastic is completely wrong:
Lastly we have the Corellian Corvette. The kit is molded in cream colored plastic:
The color guide, however, suggests this mix:
That is much closer to the normal, drab grey we see in so many Star Wars ships.
So which one is right? Well, here is a photo that shows both colors next to each other:
Both look fine to me.
…. Okay, I’m not sure where to go with this anymore. I am not really sure this post has a point. Let search my feelings to figure out why I even wrote it in the first place, and I will get back to you.
*********** _ Hours Later _ ***********
I now have a point to this post!
The reason I wrote this in the first place is that I was driven subconsciously by my dislike of modern geekdom’s dual obsessions with worldbuilding and canonicity. Any time any sort of story arrives on the scene and is embraced by geeks, they will begin to worldbuild, even if the creator did not. And if the creator does start to engage with worldbuilding (usually by creating prequels and sequels), the fans insist on trying to connect every last little dot together. No discrepancies, retcons, or mistakes are allowed. If one thing is green in one story, and blue in the next, they will make sure there is an explanation beyond “artistic license”, since this is in fact a concept they are allergic to.
I find this behavior all a bit much, and I think Star Wars actually proves my point. Few if any Star Wars vehicles look identical from one story to the next, yet no one is really bothered by it. I found a fan forum in which its members were trying to determine the interior layout (and color) of the Tantive IV using scenes from the films, books, props, and photos taken during filming. I have rarely ever seen people get this deep, and use so much specific information, in order to come up with an answer.
After all their work, over the course of a year, they still could not come up with definitive answers. The kicker is that none of them really cared. The answer itself was not the point of the exercise. They were having fun simply analyzing, speculating on, and geeking out about their favorite films. By the end, they knew more about the ship than when they started, and that matters more than having a single, official answer. For some reason, Star Wars fans of a certain stripe seem to get this, and I cannot for the life of me understand why other fandoms cannot.
So if you find yourself building model kits like these, go ahead and color them however you like. There is no point in getting it “right”, because there is no such thing. As long as the final result makes you happy, that is all that matters.