Luke Skywalker bullseyes another womp rat

If you've seen the original Star Wars movie - you might remember the scene where the rebel pilots are being briefed for their attack on the Death Star. And you might even remember Luke mentioning that he "used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home".

Looking back it was a bit strange for Luke to have boasted about cruising around shooting animals. This was even parodied in the Family Guy Star Wars episode 'Blue Harvest'. Chris, who's playing Luke says: "Well, I guess I'll go bullseye some womp rats in my T-16". To which Quagmire, who's playing C-3PO retorts: "My God! You shoot small animals for fun? That's the first indicator of a serial killer, you freak!"...

So I thought - why not try to make the whole thing seem a bit more heroic and less borderline psychopathic. The name 'womp rat' implies a furry, harmless creature - but what if they're actually man-eating, spiky-skinned, pointy-teethed, nasty-smelling menaces!?

I wanted to add to Luke's whole mythology - and make the act of shooting a womp rat seem much more impressive. If they were creatures that regularly killed moisture farmers and were hard to spot because they only come out at dusk - Luke could rightly be proud of his boast!

There have been a lot of depictions of womp rats and they mostly look harmless. But if you've ever played the Super Nintendo (aka Super Famicom) version of Super Star Wars - you'll remember that womp rats were shown in the game as pretty fearsome and ugly. So I took that as an inspiration for my version here.

I added Luke's T-16 Skyhopper in the background to suggest that he's just jumped out to have a picture taken (by Biggs?) with his kill. I had to create some landing gear for the T-16 as I don't think they've ever been shown landing? The Hasbro/Kenner toy version uses 'skids' and has the wings fold up - so I kept the folding wing idea but thought the skids wouldn't look right. I also left out the huge gun that's shown in the model T-16 that Luke holds in the movie - although the Hasbro toy model had the ingenious idea of this folding back behind the body of the T-16 whenever it lands. Otherwise - this is based on Colin Cantwell's prototype model as used in the film.

This was drawn in Photoshop using a Wacom pad.

Star Wars and its characters are copyright of Disney. This is fan art and isn't for sale or reproduction.