day 25: podracer popsicles

I mentioned yesterday that I used to work at Lucas Learning. I started there in the fall of 1998 when everyone was in the thick of working on Episode One. I was the Lead Artist for the 4-6 year old podracing game that ended up being called Anakin's Speedway (working title was LLLCoolJ).

One of the things we did early on was a lot of kid testing. I made these puppets and we took them to a school to let the kids play with them. All the kids liked Anakin the best, mostly because he was the only human. They didn't love Ben Quadrinaros as much as I thought they would. They did like Sebulba as he was obviously a bad guy and cool. I thought they'd like Mawhonic. He was super friendly waving "Hi." But the kids all hated him. Like really really hated him. We finally worked it out that they found it super creepy that he had three eyes.

And since I know you're dying of curiosity, we picked Anakin, Sebulba, Gasgano and Ben Quadrinaros as the main characters for our game. I think Ratts Tyerell and Teemto Pagalies were runners up but cut for time. Btw, Boles Roor is a big fan of the karaoke. No lie.